Salient Soft

I was looking for a good way to do this immediately following the issues I hit changing the username domain on Office 365.

After experimenting with doing large zip downloads to back up locally, which was intermittent with large downloads, I found this post here and I did the following, do force all OneDrive files to be synched locally all the time:-

• I unlinked OneDrive by visiting Account under settings and clicking “unlink this PC”. I then visited the OneDrive local folder root, which was under c:\Users\SteveW\OneDrive (for my free hotmail OneDrive) and  “c:\Users\SteveW\OneDrive – Salient Soft” for my Office 365 business account, and moved them along with all the files, to the correspponding directory on the D Drive. I then visited One Drive again in the system tray and re-added the account/username, picking the link to browse for a different folder, and browsed for the new folder. When I did this it warned that files were already present, which was fine as I had just moved them, so I told it to continue. This allowed me to move from the default drive to my preferred non-system drive which had more disk space.
• I again visited OneDrive in the system tray, and opened Settings, then selected Sync and backup on the left menu, and picked advanced settings
• I then visited Files on-demand (noting the help link which is the above post), and selected “Download all files”. Once I allowed this to synchronise fully, after a few hours, all the files were downloaded locally.
• I then just needed to do local backups as normal, as my local copies of the cloud would be fully up to date.

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As I was no longer trading via a limited company, I wanted to remove the “Ltd” references to my organisation and URLs in Office 365.

One key point was that the login username was SteveWoodley@SalientSoftLtd.onmicrosoft.com, and I wanted to remove the Ltd. Office 365 support advised on this and I did the following:

• I added a new domain as above without the Ltd. To do this, I visited the admin centre, clicked “Show All” on the left menu, and then dropped down the settings menu, again on the left. I added the new domain, and also clicked the button to make it the fallback domain.
• I then selected users under the active users menu, selected my user, and then clicked the link for “manage username and email”. I then clicked the pencil to edit the primary username and email, and selected the new domain that I had just entered above.
• I did this again for all the usernames.
• I noted that when I visited onedrive, the URL root showed as “https://salientsoftltd-my.sharepoint.com/”, i.e. it still had the “Ltd” in it. After searching online, this post here states that you cannot change this as it is the tenant domain name. It would mean creating a new tenant/Office 365 subscription and moving all the data, settings etc. from the old to the new. As this was not a big deal, and as the support staff did not see this as a problem, I left it alone, and was happy that at least the username was corrected.

After this was done, I found that onedrive could not see all the files and was concerned about lost files. I did note that under the user settings, there is a OneDrive menu which allows you to create a link. This in fact created a working link, but the main OneDrive link from the admin etc. continued not to work.

Support advised just waiting a day to allow the changes to be resynchronised correctly at the server end. I did this, and it did indeed work out fine with everything working.

I had also initially had issues with OneDrive for Windows 11 immediately after the change, regarding use of the modified username/domain, and could not see the files. Again, this all sorted itself out after a day or so and everything was fine.

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We have had this issue a number of times, where the cover keyboard just won’t work, even after rebooting several times.

This appears to be a common problem which is griped about online, and the solutions are varied, not that clear/consistent, and do not always work. I even replaced the cover keyboard, which did fix the problem at the time, but I then later found that the original one still worked!

IMO this looks like some kind of underlying bios problem.

After trying a number of ideas which did not work, including removing the keyboard driver, and disabling/re-enabling the keyboard in the UEFI bios, I found that booting into the UEFI bios (hold +volume button whilst pressing on button), and then rebooting again, seemed to work.

This site here appeared to have some helpful ideas, including running the keyboard troubleshooter, which I had not seen previously. As the troubleshooter initially said that there were no problems (!), I had to run additional troubleshooters and then select keyboard, as per the post, for it to work. In my case, the troubleshooter ran fine, but the keyboard was already working, so I’ll have to wait until next time to see if this helps to solve the problem, should it occur again.

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Having got CouchDB working under Windows 11 with the legacy places data as per this post here, I then wanted to run the legacy places angular and ionic apps if possible, just for reference and to consider my options going forward.

The angular app was in v6.1.7 which I did not want to revisit and upgrade. Similarly, the ionic app was an earlier legacy version which could be tricky to reinstate under windows 11.

However, I did have already built distributions for both apps, and both were able to run successfully under Windows 11 via http-server without having to install anything else. For angular I used the existing build under the dist subdirectory, and for Ionic I the build is under the www subdirectory. Note that whilst the index.html for the Ionic version did specify that cordova.js was required, and caused a load error in the web console, this was not an issue when using from a browser as it was not needed.

I did want to be able to run them remotely as well, from other PCs and mobiles. I tried installing the distributions under Zen hosting, with remote access to CouchDB running on the local PC. However, this would not run under HTTPS as it meant having mixed content – the access to CouchDB was not HTTPS and I did not want to go to the trouble of installing a self signed cert locally to get it all to work – this excercise was not worth the effort. I could not find an easy way under Zen cpanel of allowing just this app to be HTTP only, with everything else defaulting to HTTPS. If I turned off forced defaulting to HTTPS in cpanel, the app worked fine under HTTP but other access was also allowed to be HTTP only which I did not like, so I dumped the idea of hosting under Zen directly. I did hit a spate of nasty looking cpanel issues when I did this and for a while thought I had broken the domain/ssl/cpanel access entirely whilst messing with domain/alias/redirect settings in cpanel, but in the end it all worked fine again.

I therefore continued to run/host locally via http-server. I did want to be able to potentially remote boot my local PC via Fritz and access the app from anywhere, which would mean auto running the http-servers at boot time. The easiest way to do this turned out to be to use the windows task scheduler, which unlike services can run batch files without any other tools such as srvany which is commonly used to do this for services. Whilst the scheduler is often used with time based triggers, it is perfectly possible to specify a trigger as ‘run at boot time’. I also specified that it should run without any user logged in, therefore with local access only/no user authentication. This worked fine and I could boot the PC and then immediately access the places apps from a mobile without logging in.

Another trick needed was to add some remote port sharing in the Fritz box for both apps, via my static IP addresses. When doing this I also had to add a port share for the CouchDB access, otherwise CouchDB also complained about mixing private CORS stuff with the remote access. Once I did this, and changed the app config to use the remote URL for CouchDB access, it all worked fine. Fortunately, I could also continue to access the same apps locally on the hosting PC even though they were still using the remote URL for CouchDB access – it all worked fine.

I then set up redirects under cpanel from Zen to make the app access look a bit more friendly with salient soft urls, and this all ran fine.

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I had some of these image files from some legacy clip art photos from an older version of Corel Draw.

Ideally I wanted to be able to preview them in windows explorer, as happens automatically with JPG files, however this would not work. I tried IrfanView, which is a separate image viewer, but this failed to view the files, as it could not locate jpeg2000.dll. I tried to locate and install the dll online, but was unable to prevent the error, so IrfanView would not work.

I tried another package, the FastStone Image Viewer, and this worked successfully. You can select folders in the left column in an explorer like fashion, and the jp2 images are shown as large icons on the right. Whilst I still could not preview them in explorer, FastStone worked perfectly well in being able to preview these legacy images. It can also view a number of other graphics formats such as WMF which I had used previously for the company logo.

An install kit for FastStone can be downloaded here.

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This is straightforward. If you have a collection of font file to preview and install manually, this can all be done from Windows Explorer.

Just view the folder and select a view of medium, large, or extra large icons, and the actual font appearance is shown in the icons. Extra large gives the clearest and largest view of the fonts. The same view choices are available when viewing control panel/fonts.

To install, just select the fonts you wish to install in explorer, and the right click context menu gives you install options – either install for current user, or install for all users (the latter is my preference).

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I had trouble opening an old presentation which used the Futura font – I wanted to reuse the theme and layout for a new presentation. The presentation opened in read only mode but refused to save or edit without removing this font which it had embedded. I mistakenly thought this font came with an older version of office, but having reinstalled an older version on an old PC and searching around I found this was not the case. I also tried Mutools to extract the fonts from an old PDF saved from the presentation, but this failed with an indirection error.

In the end I recalled that I actually installed this from Coreldraw 3, which comes with a clipart CD containing a large number of fonts and clipart pieces – the above font was one of them. I used Coreldraw to create the original Salient Soft logo, which was originally used for my previous company, Digital Agility, and then kept and reused for the new company. Sadly I was unable to locate my original CDs for Coreldraw – they would not be compatible with the latest windows, but the clipart CD would have been useful.

Fortunately, I searched around and found I had archived all the font TTF files with the letterhead/logo files in a Salient Soft forms directory. Installing them in Windows 11 was trivial – I just selected them all, right clicked, and picked install for all users. My presentation then opened, except for a second font, AmerType DB. However, I had not actually used this font, so was able to strip it out and save a new copy of the presentation which was editable, to allow getting the theme and layout.

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I created a simple batch file to run a number of npm build commands in succession.

However, the file exited after running the first npm command. This appears to be a side effect of the way npm runs – when you run npm, you actually end up running npm.cmd, which exits after completing. This is detailed on StackOverflow here.

A simple workaround as per the post is to prefix the npm commands with call – I did this and everything worked fine and all the builds were executed.

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I had issues with this – the method proposed everywhere online was to hold the volume up key down whilst booting from cold with the power button, but I could not make this work at all, and could not enter the bios/UEFI either.

In the end I used the method detailed here fff. Right click on start, pick settings, then Update and Security, then select Recovery. Then click Restart Now from under Advanced Startup.

This worked fine, and gave a number of options which I did not explore, but the one I used was boot from usb device which gave the option of booting from a flash drive, which worked fine.

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I needed a shortcut for this as my new keyboard did not have its own sleep key like the old one.

There are various shortcuts for this which are discussed here.

My favourite one in the end has been Windows+X, then U, then S all on the keyboard, as this does not need any mouse involvement and is quick.

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