Instapaper Auto-send to Kindle not working

This is a current, unresolved problem: Instapaper does not automatically send new articles to my Kindle every day. This, despite the fact that my Instapaper account is correctly set up to auto-send new articles to my Kindle, and my Kindle account is properly set up to receive them.

Here’s the scenario:

1. There are new unread articles in my Instapaper account that are more than a day old.
2. My Instapaper account is configured to email new articles to my Kindle every day (see above). I have a Kindle 3 wifi-only.
3. I never receive any emails from Instapaper unless I click the Send Now button. Then, the new Instapaper issue is sent and arrives on my Kindle exactly as expected.

The manual sends arrive just fine; ergo: the Kindle email address is properly configured, and the Kindle account is properly set up to receive the emails.

The status just above the Send Now button commonly reads “Your last compilation was sent 4 days ago” even when there are new unread articles sitting in the account.

I conclude that Instapaper simply is not sending the emails for some reason. Any guesses as to why?

Update: Apparently this is a known issue; Wired published an article which says “Unfortunately, for reasons I’m not smart enough to understand, Instapaper can’t automate delivery to your @free.kindle.com address.” This tells us nothing about what causes the problem, only that it’s a known issue and, for whatever reason, nothing has been done about it.

Second Update: — Marco seems to have been working on the problem. On May 25, @Instapaper tweeted: “Sending tomorrow morning’s Kindle auto-deliveries early, now. I think I finally found the bug that prevented so many from being delivered.” Then on May 26: “@jeremyisweary Have you changed your Instapaper username since setting it up, possibly when I moved to requiring emails-as-usernames?” The problem has not yet been solved for me personally, or for others, as seen in the comments to this blog post. Will keep you posted.

Third Update: — I’ve been receiving my unread articles from Instapaper on my Kindle, and it seems the problem has been fixed. On October 5th 2011 (the day Steve Jobs died), @Instapaper tweeted that Marco believed he had fixed the problem. The same day, he said, “By a few hours from now, all deliveries should be made. If you’re one of those who haven’t been getting them, let me know whether you do.” I’ve been getting my deliveries ever since, and so have others.

If you’re still having problems, let us know in the comments!

Windows 7 updates keep installing, restarting and failing

Over the past week and a half, my Win 7 laptop has been trying to automatically install the same set of updates and failing over and over again. Sometimes the automatic install/restart cycle would happen in the middle of the night when the dumb thing was supposed to be sleeping. It would restart, say “Configuring Windows Updates”, then “Updates Failed, Reverting Changes” (or something like that).

The update history showed they mostly failed with error 80071A90. The help file on that error recommended running Windows Update manually after starting Windows in safe mode with networking, but the Windows Update service will not run in safe mode.

I found the solution in this Microsoft Answers article:

Assuming the updates-in-question include KB2515325, KB2492386, KB2506928, KB2512715 and/or KB982018 & all is well with your computer otherwise:

1. Run a manual check for updates per http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/How-can-I-tell-if-my-computer-is-up-to-date
2. Select (check) only KB2515325, KB2492386, KB2506928 and/or KB2512715 & install them; follow all prompts.
3. Now run another manual check for updates, if necessary, and install KB982018 by itself; again, follow all prompts.

Delicious Linkrolls Not Working

I wanted to create a linkroll on my website, an embedded list of my delicious.com links. Problem was, the linkroll code they generated resulted in…nothing. No links appeared on my website using their code.

I tried manually opening the URL in the script tag, which refers to a feeds.www.delicious.com address, and the browser told me it couldn’t find the site!

On a whim I tried removing the “www” from the address, and voila. The script worked. So when you add the code to your site, change feeds.www.delicious.com to feeds.delicious.com.

I have sent a support request to Delicious about this and will update the post when I hear back from them.

Update, June 2011: I don’t know if they've fixed it yet, but after recent developments threw the future of delicious into doubt, many of us have switched to Pinboard. Their linkroll code also happens to work perfectly, you can find the javascrip widget on their resources page.

Quickly apply “Inherit Zoom” to all bookmarks in a PDF file

I often compile PDF reports totaling 1,000 to 2,000 pages, and am always creating hierarchical bookmarks for these files. One of my beefs is that often, clicking a bookmark will change the magnification setting to “fit width” from whatever you had it set at. Ideally, clicking a bookmark should default to just leaving the zoom level at whatever the reader is currently set to use (“Inherit zoom”). I’ve found no way in Acrobat to set the default behaviour for newly-created bookmarks, and changing these links one at a time in Acrobat is extremely tedious.

Thankfully, there is a solution provided by Martin Backschat:

To modify this annoyance you can directly modify the PDF document in your Text editor.

With UltraEdit, for example, I load the PDF document and open the “Search and Replace” box, enable “Regular Expressions” and replace all occurrences of “R/XYZ*]” with “R/XYZ]”, and then also all occurrences of “R/Fit*]” with “R/XYZ]”. Now safe the document.

With the Perl scripting language, this hack is applied with

perl -pe 's#R/(XYZ.*?|Fit.*?)\]#R/XYZ\]#g#' in.pdf >out.pdf

The next time you open the modified document with Acrobat you will get a message that the document is being repaired. Just safe it again with Acrobat and everything is fine.

I don’t have UltraEdit but I was able to make this work using Notepad++. The exact search/replace text was slightly different for my PDF files (note the added space) but the principle is the same:

1. In Notead++, click the TextFX menu, then TextFX Quick → Find/Replace (the standard find/replace tool will not help you here). Make sure you check the “Regular Expr” check box on the right.
2. Use "R /XYZ(.*)]" (without quotes) as your search string and "R XYZ]" as your replace string and replace all instances.
3. Do it again using "R /Fit(.*)]" as your search string and the same replace string as above.

Vector Theme not available for current version of MediaWiki

You may have noticed Wikipedia has a new interface these days. If you run your own MediaWiki website, the obvious question in your mind is, how can I get these improvements on my site too?

This information is surprisingly hard to find, but the short answer is: you can’t yet.

How can I use Wikipedia’s new skin (Vector) on my wiki?

Vector is not available in MediaWiki versions prior to 1.16, and will be made default skin in 1.17.

— buried in the MediaWiki FAQ

As of the time of this writing (June 2010), 1.16 is still in beta, and 1.17 has no planned release date. Check the MediaWiki version lifecycle for current information.

Opening the Temporary Internet Files folder for Outlook attachments (OLK5A, for example)

One of our employees opened up a PowerPoint attachment (ugh, I know) from an email in Outlook. He then edited it extensively and saved it using the File → Save As menu command. Unfortunately he did not bother changing the folder he was saving it to, with the result that it was saved in whatever temporary folder Outlook uses for holding email file attachments. The problem is that this folder is hidden and very hard to find. Even typing in the path directly in Windows Explorer does not work. So when he closed out of PowerPoint he realized he was in danger of losing all the work he had done unless he could find and open that folder.

I found the solution here after some searching, but even that page only explains how to learn where this temporary folder is located; it does not make it clear how to actually open the file. I found how to do it though.

Open Registry Editor (Click Start → Run, type regedit and hit Enter). Browse to the following location in the registry structure, depending on the version of Outlook you use:

Outlook 97	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 98	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.5\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2000	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2002/XP	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2003	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2007	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Double click the OutlookSecureTempFolder value, and copy that value to the clipboard (i.e., select all the text, right-click and hit Copy on the popup menu).

Then go to Start → Run and paste the value in, and hit enter. An Explorer window will open showing the folder, containing probably every attachment you’ve ever opened.

BBM Messenger Log Cleanup Script

As mentioned previously, the CSV files produced by Blackberry Messenger 5.0+ need some cleaning up before they can be properly used. I finally wrote a short script for doing just that.

You can download the VBScript here: bbmcleaner-1.1.zip. This code is released to the public domain.

Once you have the BBM log file on your computer (email it there from your phone, again, see the last post on this subject), just drag and drop it onto this VBS file, and a “clean” version will be produced as a separate file in the same directory. The new file will have human-readable dates and the message will be properly escaped – in short, it will be something you can just open and use in Excel (e.g.).

Change Log

Version 1.1 (Feb 20, 2010)

• Added GMTOffset constant to allow timestamps to be properly adjusted for time zones.