i summon one kim

For whatever reason my Windows desktop profile is not reflected to my Citrix apps. So I get to figure out the settings that I’ve changed over the years all over again.

In Skype for Business I want a fixed width font and no emoji.

• Click the Settings menu in the main Skype window (the cog icon).
• Select IM on the left.
• Uncheck the box for Show emoticons in messages.
• Click the Change Font button and choose Consolas.

This morning Alexa was an hour behind — she hadn’t moved to DST. A quick search on Google showed that last year DST switching had worked.

The top hit, however, was a fresh Reddit thread with Alexa users reporting the same issue. After keeping an eye on it, I saw a user come up with the solution that worked for me (and it is the only solution on the thread so far).

Launch the Alex app and go to Settings, select a device, and change the timezone

• from America/Eastern Standard Time
• to US/Eastern Standard Time

The fix takes immediately: just ask “Alexa, what time is it?” — no power cycling needed.

Since switching to the iCloud Photo Library, the Photos app on my laptop has kept telling me that

• 1 Item on This Mac Only
• Unable to Upload 9 Items

To identify the oddball photos, I created the following smart folders respectively:

• [Photo] [is] [referenced]
• [Photo] [is] [unable to upload to iCloud Photo Library]

Referenced photos can be consolidated into the library and would then be uploaded to iCloud — mine was a duplicate, so I just deleted it. The photos that could not be uploaded were photos that had been deleted, but somehow a reference had been kept or imported.

References:

• Items on This Mac Only
• Photos for Mac says “Unable to upload 222 items”

If you have already upgraded to jessie and have systemd as init, you can switch back with these commands:

apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
reboot
apt-get purge -y systemd

Running with sysvinit works better on my servers, as daemons have a chance of doing their own graceful shutdown before the network is brought down.

Before upgrading to jessie, create /etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit:

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

See also: How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie by Petter Reinholdtsen

Windows Update has been getting stuck checking for new updates for the past several months. The automatic update somehow manages to complete, at least sometimes, but running a check manually doesn’t complete within a couple of days. It should be more like minutes, shouldn’t it? (more…)

I should have noted this Outlook tip with the fixed font one earlier:

• File > Options > Mail
• Scroll way down to the Message Format section
• Uncheck Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages

What are “extra line breaks” anyway? Removing them does bad things to code.