Mac Does Stuff

Month: November 2016

  • Visio Stencil Shapes Wrong

    This has been driving me slightly bonkers – on a few of my machines my Visio has not been able to display stencils properly. In effect I get some random filled in shapes like this:

    Visio being wrong

    When of course it should look something like this:

    Visio being wrong

    Anyway, you know it’s going to be something simple, right? It was – themes.

    On the design tab, make sure you have ‘No theme’ selected when you import/open your stencil. That way it won’t try and apply the theme to those stencils.

    Visio Theme

    Things like this are enough to drive you to coffee.

  • NO! We do not sell your data! (Working title – Email Aliases)

    If you read my blog you’ll know I have a certain healthy paranoia about security. I encrypt everything, and am at a loss why people don’t use Password Managers more often. From a finance point of view I go as far as having a separate cash account with low amounts of money in, and a separate credit card with a low limit. They’re the only ones I let near the Internet. Perhaps too paranoid.

    Anyway, I’ve a current little spat going on with a certain electricity provider who insists they don’t send on my details from when I’ve registered with their website. I find this hard to believe, as since I’ve registered with them I’ve been getting a ton of spam – not crappy ‘you’ve won a million dollars’ ones, but proper targeted advertising. How do I know it’s them? Well, it’s the email addresses I use for services.

    The email address for this account is similar to:

    RoadNOenergysupplier@mydomain.com

    …where ‘road’ is three digit abbreviation of the property address, NO is the house number, and supplier is the supplier – mydomain.com of course being my personal email address.

    NOTE: @Simon_kiteless mentioned over on that there Twitter that you can do this very simply with GMail, using the ‘+’. So you could enter ‘yourEmail+supplier@gmail.com’ and filter your email on that address. Very cool, thanks Simon. You can read more about this method on Gizmodo. 

    I do this for pretty much most key websites. This is for a few reasons:

    • It’s more secure. Somebody getting one email/password combo won’t automatically get access to every other site where you’ve used that combination.
    • It means I can track who’s doing what with my information.

    The primary purpose was the first one – the second one was a curiosity…and it’s the first time I’ve had a major provider swearing blind they don’t sell on my data, and yet…….

    For what it’s worth, does anyone else have a hotmail/outlook.com address they give to people they don’t want to really talk to? No? No, me neither.

    Anyway, this is pretty easy to do with most email providers. I use Office365 for example, which allows up to 200 email aliases. As I use a password manager I don’t have to remember them all. I also of course have a generic one that I use on sites I don’t really care about – and email for that address goes to a dump account that I check now and again.

    Anyways, I’m curious to see how this one plays out.

  • Access Edge Static Routes

    An age ago I wrote about dual-homing Windows servers, and what you need to do with static routing:

    It’s interesting that even today I still run in to sites that have issues due to incorrectly configured routing on their Access Edge units. The Edge server plays an important role in Lync & Skype for Business – and not just always for the obvious stuff like remote access and federation. It also can get involved in media calls for internal subnets.

    Jeff Schertz has a great article explaining why, linked below. Rather than me make a hash of it, have a read, it’s good stuff:

    Lync Edge STUN versus TURN

    In certain scenarios your internal clients will need to talk to your Access Edge for media – for example if peer to peer communication isn’t possible.

    This brings me on to the point of static routes on the Access Edge – they’re very important! Get them wrong and some subnets may not be able to communicate with the Access Edge, and that’ll lead to all kinds of issues. Of course the obvious ones like remote access etc. but also –  more confusingly – ones like not being able to make a VoIP call between two clients.

    Hopefully your internal network only uses RFC1918 compliant addresses – that is your internal networks are on:

    • 10.0.0.0/8
    • 172.16.0.0/12
    • 192.168.0.0/16

    I usually define static routes on the internal interface for all of the private ranges. It’s easy to do with the following commands:

    netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.0.0.0/8 “InternalNW” 10.100.0.1

    netsh interface ipv4 add route 172.16.0.0/12 “InternalNW” 10.100.0.1

    netsh interface ipv4 add route 192.168.0.0/16 “InternalNW” 10.100.0.1

    You need to replace the ‘InternalNW’ with the name of your internal NIC, and of course 10.100.0.1 with your internal next hop gateway, but it’s pretty straight forward.

    The subnet mask is particularly important – a few sites I’ve seen configure 172.16.0.0 in the wrong way – they’ll use the wrong subnet mask such as 172.16.0.0/255.255.0.0 (172.16.0.0./16)…which is of course wrong, and will miss out a chunk of the private ranges.

    Anyway, that’s my random musing for the day.

  • Outlook 2016 – Cannot delete reminders

    I’ve been running into an issue recently where my Outlook 2016 for Mac would constantly bring up reminders that I had already dismissed. I noticed it seemed to be related to using Outlook on another Mac for the same Exchange account – I.e. As soon as I did it on another Mac, then boom all the reminders were back on *all* machines.

    It’s irritating, but not catastrophically so I guess.

    Anyway, after doing some research there’s a fix that seems to sort it.  Firstly, shut down the Outlook 2016 for Mac client on all of your Macs. 

    Go to the user’s library folder – you can do this by selecting the ‘Go’ menu in Finder, selecting ‘Go to Folder’ and entering ‘~/Library’:

    Go to folder

    Under the home user’s library, navigate to:

    /~Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Events

    …then just delete all the folders/contents of that directory. Do that on all of your Macs.

    Once done, fire up Outlook and they should stop popping up in such an annoying fashion.