I’m surprised to see an established manufacturer use plastic gears to drive the opening and closing of a garage door. In time, the plastic gears wear and the garage door opener cannot perform its duty. You can see the worn threads around the rim of the gear, and even worse, which is the cause for slippage, is the worn and cracked area around where the shaft goes. The square shaft no longer is secure inside of the gear and thus it slips while trying to open the garage door. Fortunately, this is easily (and cheaply) fixed.

For my garage door opener, Genie model GCG350, the outer housing is removed with a single screw in the middle of the case. With the housing removed, there are three screws that need to be removed from a plastic, black enclosure that houses the gear. With the gear housing removed, the gear is easily removed, along with the square, metal shaft. Be careful when removing the gear housing as there are two metal washers around the shaft and laying on top of the gear housing that can easily fall off. If the gear does not come off with very little effort, pull the cord on the chain drive and adjust the garage door such that there is no more tension on the gear. Replace the gear with a new one; I ordered mine from garagedooropeners on eBay, Genie 27096A Garage Opener Drive Gear, for $2.71 + $3.75 shipping (order more than one as this repair only lasts a few years). Add everything back in reverse and it should work fine. It is a bit tricky to get the gear casing on as it is difficult to line up the shaft and keep the washers in place – it just takes a bit of patience and very little effort.

With the introduction of Microsoft’s Social Connector for Outlook, it becomes even more imperative to separate your personal identity from your business identity. In a nutshell, every working professional should have at least two email addresses – one used for work purposes and one for personal use. Never, I repeat, never let the two intertwine.

Recently, I sent an email to a manager at a spa dealership to inquire about the status of an order. It was quite a shock to see a picture of the him giving me the middle finger in my email window! This picture happened to be his Facebook profile picture. I can tell you it left a less than favorable impression on me and made me much less inclined to do business there again.

The Outlook Social Connector will go to Facebook and download your profile picture and display it right in the email window if it can link up the email address being used. Also, if there are any wall postings that are public, they will appear there, too. If you have this plug-in installed, you do not need to visit facebook.com to get information related to an email address, it will appear in your message window as soon as you type in an email address in your To or CC/Bcc field.

Currently, there are not many social connector providers, but with the API for the Social Connector published, I predict most, if not all, major social networking sites having a connector. Current providers are Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live Messenger, and MySpace.

What this means is that if you have created an account at one of these sites using a work-related email address, change it immediately! If you don’t have another email address, go to https://mail.google.com and create an account, now and then change your email address on the social networking site, removing your work email address.

Beware that if someone possesses both your personal and professional email addresses and has them attached to an Outlook contact, the Outlook Social Connector can triangulate between the addresses and still display your personal information even when using the business address. Make certain that only the people you want to see your personal information have your personal email address.

If you purchased a map within the past 24 hours from TomTom then you are likely to see an error message when trying to select the map: “You cannot use this map on this device.” Turns out there is a problem with the certificate on the map and you will need to call TomTom support (US: +1.866.486.6866) to have them generate a new certificate, unless you downloaded it prior to 2010/8/18 3:19pm EDT then you will need to delete the map from your device and the cached downloaded files for the map. Updating your TomTom from the Home program should install a fresh (and fixed) copy of the map.

On a Mac OS X system, the following steps are necessary to remove the map:

1. Connect the TomTom to the computer
2. Open the Internal drive
3. Delete the folder containing the maps – mine was titled North_America_2GB
4. On the Mac, in your Documents folder, remove the contents of the folder TomTom/Downloads.
5. Using the TomTom Home program, update the device and install the map.

While troubleshooting an error dialog stating “the trial period for this product has expired” that started appearing, I uncovered a potential solution is to re-run the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard. Unfortunately, that just ended with it being stuck at 10% on configuration task 10 of 11, displaying “Upgrading SharePoint Products… The farm is being upgraded in the timer service process. The task is 10.00% completed.” The additional task the result of the installed Office Web Apps 2010.

I then opted for the best solution – uninstall followed by a reinstall of SharePoint Server 2010. I uninstalled both SharePoint Server 2010 and Office Web Apps. They appeared to uninstall successfully, but when trying to reinstall, the following error dialog appeared: “The install in progress conflicts with a previous installed MS Office 2010 Server Product.” Turns out that this error has to do with the Office Web Apps not completely uninstalling.

To fix the uninstall, the recommended solution is the now defunct “Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.” Microsoft has expired this product as it may cause damage to the system. This has been replaced with a Microsoft Fix it utility to uninstall Office.

When trying to run the Fix it utility for Office 2010 suites I ran into yet another error – “The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.” This occurs because it is not run with administrative privileges. The easiest solution is to run a command shell as administrator and run the MicrosoftFixit50450.msi installer program in the command shell. This ran successfully and enabled the successful re-installation of SharePoint Server 2010.

When setting up your OpenDNS dashboard, if you are a home user on a Internet provider that gives you a dynamic IP address, you need to tell OpenDNS your IP address has changed or there will not be any relevant stats for your domain. In fact, it may report erroneously that a BotNet or Malware has been detected on your IP when, in fact, it is another OpenDNS user that happened to get your stale IP address.

Unfortunately, it is a bit confusing on the easiest way to set this up on a Linux machine. The confusion is elevated when the machine that can update OpenDNS is behind a NAT firewall and the software cannot run on that machine/box. The solution is to use a correctly configured version of ddclient. I have done this on both Ubuntu and Fedora with much success.

For Ubuntu, issue the following command to install ddclient:

sudo apt-get install ddclient

When installing ddclient on Ubuntu, it will present a nice configuration wizard. You can answer the questions however you want; you can alway go and edit the configuration files after the install. Here are my responses; you can follow along during the installation:

Dynamic DNS service provider: other

Dynamic DNS server: updates.opendns.com

Dynamic DNS update protocol: dyndns2

Username for dynamic DNS service: <username you use to log into OpenDNS>

Password for dynamic DNS service: <password you use to log into OpenDNS>

Network interface used for dynamic DNS service: <just press return as you will need to enter this later>

DynDNS fully qualified domain names: <Your OpenDNS Network name; substitute ‘+’ for ‘ ‘>

For Fedora, issue the following command to install ddclient:

sudo yum install ddclient

This will not lead you through the nice installation wizard, although there a few adjustments necessary.

With each Operating System, adjustments are necessary before this will work. Edit the configuration file,

/etc/ddclient.conf

as the superuser. Ensure it reads as follows. If on Ubuntu, it will be a short file filled with the values used in the wizard. If done in Fedora, there will be a number of lines that are commented, just append the following to the bottom of the file. the entries in bold need to be adjusted for your configuration. Note the OpenDNS network name is the friendly name you defined for you network in OpenDNS. If it contains spaces in the name, make sure to substitute each space with a plus (+).

If you are using Fedora, you will not need the ssl=yes line as it appears early in the configuration file, although there should be no harm in leaving it there.

The most important line in the configuration is the use=web: it tells OpenDNS to use the publically available IP address for your machine that live behind the NAT router.

##
## OpenDNS.com account-configuration
##

ssl=yes # use ssl-support
use=web
server=updates.opendns.com
protocol=dyndns2          
login=<username you use to log into OpenDNS>    
password=<password you use to log into OpenDNS>
<Your OpenDNS Network name; substitute '+' for ' '>

Now that it is configured, it is helpful to test to ensure all the settings are correct. To test, issue the following command after saving the configuration files:

ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -noquiet

If you prefer lots of output add the -verbose switch.

If it is configured correctly you will see output similar to the following:

DEBUG:    proxy  =
DEBUG:    url    = http://checkip.dyndns.org/
DEBUG:    server = checkip.dyndns.org
DEBUG:    get_ip: using web, http://checkip.dyndns.org/ reports 1.2.3.4
DEBUG:   
DEBUG:     nic_dyndns2_update -------------------
DEBUG:    proxy  =
DEBUG:    url    = http://updates.opendns.com/nic/update?system=dyndns&hostname=Home&myip=1.2.3.4
DEBUG:    server = updates.opendns.com

Note that I used Home as my OpenDNS network name and the public IP address is 1.2.3.4 – YMMV. Also note the hostname is case sensitive.

If you issue this command too often, you will get a warning to “Wait at least 5 minutes between update attempts.”. If you see this, don’t worry, just wait.

You can also attempt to enter the URL in your browser to check the status. If it comes back with nohost then something is wrong. If it comes back as good <IP Address> then the configuration is correct.

Finally, once the configuration is correct, enable ddclient to run as a daemon. This is done by editing /etc/default/ddclientand ensuring run_ipup = “false” and run_daemon = “true”.

You may need to manually start ddclient by issuing:

sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient start

This should keep OpenDNS happy and maintaining statistics for your network.