Category: Documentation

The Endnote Cite While Your Write (CWYW) Toolbar does seem to cause trouble every once in a while. It may be disabled, not visible or simply gone. Endote has a FAQs that list a couple of solutions for the problem. But none of them brought my toolbar back. In the end I found the solution: Continue reading “Endnote Toolbar Not Visible in Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac”

I wasted a whole week on a Filemaker problem when trying to re-import images. In my database, I had several thousand images as links to the original files. The images were in JPG and now I wanted to replace them with PSD versions that were located at the exact same location on the hard disk. For each image I had meta information that I did not want to loose. I created a new field called “path_correct” in which I substituted “jpg” with “psd” from the image path field to get an accurate match with the PSD files. You can also get the path by using the GetAsText function on the image container.

In theory, you could import the folder that contains all the PSD images and select “import matching records” and use the path_correct field as the matching field. What happened during the import was very confusing at first. If, for example, I had four images in a sub folder, then all those four images would receive data from only the last image in the folder.

The problem is that although the field “path” or my “path_corrected” shows that whole path, including the file name,

file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/minifigure-01165-01.psd

the matching worked only up to the folder level, excluding the image  file name, in this case minifigure-01165-01.psd. During the import, Filemaker found several matches in the database for

file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/

and imported the data into all matching records. This is a true bug with Filemaker. The path field shows the path including the file name, but during import only the path excluding the file name is being considered. This is also not documented at all.

The solution is to use both the path and the filename field as matching fields for the import. Then each image in the database has a unique identifier that matches the images on the hard disk. I hope that this post helps others to avoid the same problem.

I had some trouble getting my account verified in Google Wallet, or Checkout for that matter. Google claimed that the test transaction had been refused by my bank. Kiwibank did not have a clue what the problem could be and even started to give me misleading information. The call center guy thought that the SWIFT number should be put into the routing field, which was just utterly wrong. Contacting Google is also a hopeless endeavor. Their customer support does not exist.

After some internet research I found out that the problem was with the suffix. Kiwibank, and many other banks in New Zealand, only use a two digit suffix. Google does, however, expect three digits. A leading zero was the solution. After I put a three digit suffix in, the test payment went right through.

My iPhoto library was corrupted and even the Apple’s build in tools for repairing the database and rebuilding thumbnails did not longer work. Any attempt to use these tools lead to a crash. Working with the photos was also increasingly difficult, since iPhoto would frequently crash. The library contains more than 33.000 photos spanning 12 years. I was not prepared to give them up.

I have been using iPhoto Library Manager for some time for quickly moving between libraries but today it became my true champion. The software has a tool to recover corrupted libraries. But it works differently from Apple’s approach. It starts with a fresh clean library and imports all the photos, including their meta data, such as location, faces, date. It also manages to rebuild albums and folders. After nearly 20 hours of processing, my new library was fully functional. No more crashes or missing thumbs.

The culprit turned out to be the QuickTime plugin Perian. Once I uninstalled it, iPhoto worked without crashing. It is a pity, since Perian is so useful.