Author: Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

Dell Venue Pro 8

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[sc:hardware-category ]A while ago I picked up an Acer W3, which apparently didn’t like the 3 foot plus drop from my nightstand 😉

The big crack from side to side of the screen pretty much made it necessary for me to find a new tablet.  fortunately Dell released their Venue Pro 8.

The W3 was pretty chunky, but work reasonably well.  The Dell is light and runs circles around the W3.

Highlights include:

  • Lighter.
  • Faster.
  • Brilliant display.
  • Standard USB charging.
  • A nice textured back for an easy grip.

Two little things of note:

  • The auto brightness is far too dim, you have to disable it.
  • The Windows button is in a little bit of a weird place, so if you join a domain and need to do a W+Power combo, it’s a contorted one-handed affair.

 

Windows Phone Exchange Sync Error 80C805E2

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]Usually during the day my phone sits on my desk until lunch hour with a few quick checks of the lock screen to see if I’ve received any messages.  This was the case the other day but when I went to lunch and took the phone with me to read up on some news and other items I noticed that my Exchange mailbox wasn’t syncing.

In fact Windows Phone was reporting a 80C805E2error message.

Doing a quick search of the net didn’t turn up anything too specific, instead just some suggestions about turning off txt message backups and deleting the trash folder.

After reboot and a couple of more sync attempts I noticed that one of the folders was being updated.  I receive most of my news and website feeds in to my mailbox with a RSS feed aggregator and the majority of those items all get put in to a single folder called ‘News’.  The folder can get quite big if I leave it for a few hours and in this case it was at about 110 messages.  This has never been a problem before but I used OWA to read and delete all the messages and suddenly syncing started again.

My guess is that there was a corrupt message in the folder and the Windows Phone ActiveSync client was choking on it.

Weird but an easy fix at least.

PlayStation 4

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[sc:entertainment-category ]Now that November is upon us, the serious question of if I’m going to pick up a new game console must be addressed.

I’ve been waffling between the PS4 and Xbox One, or perhaps none at all.  However the decision just go a lot easier as Sony has released their FAQ on the PS4 and it has some major gotcha’s in it.

  • No MP3 Playback
  • No Audio CD Playback
  • No DLNA support

While many criticized Microsoft for focusing too much on entertainment in the Xbox One release, Sony had gone the completely opposite direction and hobbled their console to the point of being useless for entertainment.  Well unless you want to use Sony’s pay services to listen to music and watch movies of course 😉

IE11 in Windows 8.1

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[sc:windows-category ]IE 11 came with Windows 8.1 and being a major update (it’s not IE 10.1 after all) has a lot of changes.  But they’re not for the better.

I’m not talking about the user interface here, it’s mostly unchanged from IE10, but at the low level Microsoft has made a major move towards standards compliance which hasn’t quite worked out as well as it might have.

In particular, as IE no longer sends a browser string that gets identified as IE, MANY web applications are now broken.  Including some of Microsoft’s own like Outlook Web Access.

Many other like WordPress and many of Google’s apps are severely hampered as well.

Of course as the sites update this should go away and I suspect Microsoft didn’t have much choice at this point but to take this painful step, but perhaps they should have been yelling at the top of their lungs that the change was coming and to update your code appropriately.

At the moment, most of the major web apps I use are so broken that I have to use another browser to get to them.

I had to use FireFox to login to my work e-mail’s OWA the other day and I guess I will continue to have to until either Microsoft issues a patch for IE or Exchange to resolve the issue.