Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 August 4

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August 4

e-mail Clients and Mobile Phones

I should start by saying that I'm not particularly familiar with the technicalities of e-mail; please bear this in mind in your responses!

I have registered a web domain (URL?), because I needed an e-mail address. The domain registrar provides a web-based interface that allows me to send and pick up e-mails and generally manage several inboxes for the domain. This interface also provides various other supporting functionality, including a contact list and a calendar. Separately, I have a Windows mobile phone, which includes an app that allows me to read and send e-mails from the various domain inboxes. My Windows phone also allows me to read and send e-mails from various g-mail accounts, each of which also has a contact list and calendar.

The g-mail accounts all seem to synchronise contact lists and calendars with the apps on my Windows phone. I have spoken to the domain registrar, and have been told that they don't have any way to synchronise a contact list or calendar on their web-based interface with my mobile phone. My question is, would this be possible if I set up an e-mail client on my PC? I know that there are e-mail clients that have contact list and calendar functionality, but I don't know what is going on in the "plumbing" of the system.

What I really want is to maintain a master contact list and calendar from my PC, whilst being able to read and send e-mails from my phone, using the contact list and calendar as necessary. I'd appreciate any suggestions or guidance you can give. Thank you. RomanSpa (talk) 00:05, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

I actually support email in an enterprise environment and I use a gmail account to sync everything, i have an iphone and I also use my own domain for my personal email address. If you have a windows phone, it'll probably be easier to use an outlook/live account. This way you aren't tied to your registrar. For receiving email you should easily be able to configure your "personal" email account to just forward everything to your outlook/live account. For sending, in the client email configuration (on your phone), just configure your "custom" address and your registrar's smtp server as the sending server. I "think" you might even be able to even use outlook/live smtp servers to 'spoof' your custom account address, but I'm not 100% sure. It might be an extra step but I think it's safer to use your registrar's smtp (if you are paying for it anyway) as there's a strong move away from email address spoofing, because it's the cause of a lot of spam and phising. Vespine (talk) 06:49, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

A "translation" of that answer (maybe it is useless, but RomanSpa did mention that they are new to this) and some comments. What Vespine is recommending is to use purely Gmail functionalities to do the synchro, but configure your email client so that Gmail passes all mails through your other mail (let's call it account@otherserver.com), i.e. when you want to send a mail, you send it from account@gmail.com, which sends it to account@otherserver.com along with the necessary information to reach the final destination; you configure otherserver.com so that it does what you want (i.e. bounce everything that comes from account@gmail.com to their rightful destination, and reversely forward everything that comes from anywhere else to account@gmail.com).

The other suggestion (if I understand correctly) is to configure the gmail account so that the mails sent from there claim to originate from otherserver.com. That is a poor idea for multiple reasons. First of all Gmail may refuse to do that; it involves Gmail claiming to have received the email from otherserver.com and passing it along, but I do not think they act as mail relays for non-Google addresses (that is a guess, but why would they?). Secondly, that is a famous spammer technique (v1agra.com claims that they merely forwarded a mail from respectablesite.com to trick the end server into accepting it, and reporting respectablesite.com, not them, for spam), so there are a lot of countermeasures around that will classify your mail as spam; for instance, the relaying email will still need otherserver.com's credentials or DKIM will fail. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 14:18, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

• Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client with an agenda and a contact list that can manage multiple accounts (with very little configuration headaches), so it might do the trick. Now the question is (1) does it install on Windows phone (not sure of the OS), and (2) can it (easily) synchronise with the Gmail account agenda (I think so, but I have never tried it myself). If so, just set up your agenda with the Google account (assuming you have no privacy issues with that) and you can still access it while sending messages from another addresses via Thunderbird. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 14:18, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

memory fault dealt with like hard disk fault?

It seems another of my memory modules has developed a fault. They are over six years old. Is it not possible to simply mark down somewhere the bad part of the ram and just not use it like with hard disks? --Seans Potato Business 00:17, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

I have no experience doing this, but Windows apparently supports it through the {badmemory} parameter in the boot database ([1]) and Linux supports it through the memmap kernel parameter ([2]). It's risky, though, because memory testers won't necessarily identify all of the flaky addresses. -- BenRG (talk) 00:52, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

CANON PRINTER DRIVER.

I have a perfectly good Canon laser printer (LBP5200) which I have had for many years and it was working well on Windows 7 until I upgraded to Windows 10. Now nothing. Contacted Canon and they sent me a driver to install after removing the old driver. Still no good. In the troubleshooting data it is suggested to open Notepad, type something and then print it. It printed OK which indicates that the printer is alright. I have an old laptop which is running XP. I loaded the program from the original LBP5200 installation disk but it still will not print. Perhaps my 20 kilogram printer is destined to become an anchor for my boat.05:05, 4 August 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.166.226.87 (talk)

I can't help you with your specific problem, however you might try manually installing the Windows 7 driver for your printer. I recently upgraded my work PC to W10 and the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics card didn't work properly; it insisted it only had one monitor. I went into device manager, and got to the point where is says "Have Disk", pointed it at the driver files I had extracted from a download and presto - both monitors work perfectly. --TrogWoolley (talk) 08:57, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Unless you really need the nightmare that is Windows 10, here are the instructions for reverting to Windows 7. Takes only a few seconds.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:21, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Or switch to Debian because it is much better.

Maybe it is true that W7 is better than W10, but the OP's request to have a printer driver for W10 is entirely reasonable. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 14:37, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

If your Windows is 32-bit, the driver is available. If your Windows is 64-bit, the situation is tricky. You can read here. Ruslik_Zero 19:49, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't think you have to go to the Japanese site now, if you ever did. It seems to be recommending a LBP5000 driver on the Japanese site. But [3] [4] is the LBP5000 driver on two different English site which claims to support Windows 10 x64. Admitedly the version seems to be slightly lower than the one on the Japanese site currently however from my experience with Canon inkjet printers it's the sort of thing which can randomly change and no site is guaranteed always have the newest version. Nil Einne (talk) 06:27, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Well I don't think either of the comments are that helpful, but to be fair if it did work on Windows 7, switching back is an option which at least is a solution to the particular problem. I don't see that telling someone to swtich to Debian "because it is much better" is helpful at all, when it's probably not going to easily help them with the problem they're having [5] [6] [7] [8]. (I'm sure you can get it work somehow, but it doesn't sounds like it's going to be easier than Windows 10 x64.)

Anyway, it sounds like this problem is mostly because Canon never released a x64 driver on Windows for the LBP5200 for whatever reason. So unless you want to be stuck on x32 for ever, which doesn't make much sense if you ever plan to get a new computer with more than 2 GB of RAM, sticking with Windows 7 isn't a long term solution even for the support period of Windows 7.

The advice by Ruslik0 and me above will probably help. Alternatively Windows 10 x64 seems to have drivers for a number of Canon printers. It's possible one of these will work with the 5200 but I can't say which one. You'd want to look for one which uses Canon CAPT [9] [10]. Failing all that, these printers seem to be CAPT and with Windows 10 x64 drivers [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] although I would strongly recommend you try the 5000 one first. You could also run Windows XP or something in a VM although I can't help with licencing issues for that.

Nil Einne (talk) 06:27, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Removal of downloads from dock (Mac)

(Macmini4,1; OS X Yosemite 10.10.5)

For some reason, just today, my dock is showing an icon for downloads. I have not made any changes that I know of, though of course there could have been an automatic update.

Anyway, I want to remove it. For most items in the dock, I can remove them simply by dragging them to the desktop--they then show a little animated puff of smoke and disappear from the dock. Another way is to click on them and hold down--I get a small menu with options, and in the option dropdown I can choose "remove from dock".

When I do the former for downloads (drag to the desktop) it does nothing. When I do the latter (click and hold down for a menu), I don't get any menu but rather the downloads "expand" to show what's in my downloads. I also tried going to system preferences → dock. There's no option in there to manage them (just size options and like matters).

Any Ideas? Thanks in advance--108.54.152.77 (talk) 17:46, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

"Secondary click" the download thing. That will give you the context menu with "remove from dock". --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 05:32, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Doesn't the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs need some updating? Would a computer science student benefit from it in the same way as the original readers back then when it was published for the first time? --Hofhof (talk) 18:47, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

I think it's fine. It covers functional and object-oriented programming and basic algorithms. Nothing about those subjects has fundamentally changed. -- BenRG (talk) 19:33, 4 August 2016 (UTC)