Wednesday 27 November 2013

Setting the Default Search Provider to Google in IE

I’ll forever struggle to remember how to configure Internet Explorer 11/10/9/etc to use Google and not Bing when searching from the address bar. Sure you can add providers from the Manage Add-ons menu but it never seems to work for me as the list of search providers that appears on the IE Gallery site—when clicking through from IE itself—doesn’t seem to include Google.

Instead I follow this URL in IE, click the button and tick all the boxes on the popup:

http://www.iegallery.com/en-us/Addons/Details/813

Google Search Provider

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Monday 18 November 2013

Convert old .mdi files

I finally decided to bite the bullet and have a go at converting all of my old .mdi files ("printed" when the Microsoft Office suite included the .mdi virtual printer, before it was deprecated). Microsoft kindly supplies a command line utility to help out called MDI to TIFF Converter, which--as the name suggests--converts .mdi files to .tif files.

The tool only has a command line interface but the arguments it accepts are simple. The tool will also recurse through a directory hierarchy.

I did have trouble with one document and the tool just bombed while running but it was simply enough to track down the offending file and start afresh after deleting it (deletion was appropriate in my case).

You can download MDI to TIFF Converter here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=30328