These steps work for KOrganizer 4.8.3.

Symptoms:

• To-do List is empty.
• Adding a to-do item does not display it on the To-Do List.

Steps to solve:

1. Go to Settings, Configure KOrganizer.
2. In the setters, go to General, Calendars.
3. If there isn’t a calendar resource listed here, add on. I like to use ~/Documents/Calendar with each calendar item in a separate file, using “KDE Calendar (traditional)” set to “Calendar in Local Directory”.
4. Go to the Month View.
5. In the bottom left pane should be the name of the calendar resource just added, with an unchecked checkbox beside it. Click on the checkbox to add a checkmark to it.
6. Any calendar items on the resource will now appear on the calendar. Return to the to-do list, and any existing to-do list items should appear. Any newly added to-do list items will appear as they are added.

<fills count="2">
  <fill>
    <patternFill patternType="none"/>
  </fill>
  <fill>
    <patternFill patternType="gray125"/>
  </fill>
</fills>

If you create three custom fills, and do not include the “none” and “gray125″ as the first two fills, Excel 2007 will ignore the first two fills and treat them as “none” and “gray125″.

It only took me about two and a half hours and playing with why my two custom styles were either coming out with a no background or a gray125 background before I added a third style and that one worked. I should have been clued in when documents saved by Excel 2007 always inserted the “none” and “gray125″ fills.

I don’t know if it’s bad reporting, or miscommunication from those involved, or weird thinking by those involved, but this story leaves be a bit confused.

The stated problems are 1) third graders are not at the proper reading level, and 2) students are not scoring well on tests (with the implication being that kindergarten students are the ones scoring poorly).

The solution: an iPad for each of the school’s 250 kindergarten students. Clearly this will not help those third graders, but maybe those third graders have been deemed a lost cause? I’m not suggesting the kindgarten students shouldn’t received potentially better schooling methods. Whether the iPad will improve things, however, the school won’t know until they get test results.

One teacher says the iPads “give her 19 students more immediate feedback and individual attention than she ever could.” I’m guessing this is because if they do assignments on the iPad, the iPad can let them know what answers they got correct and incorrect. I do believe there is a place for software in the classroom for this reason, if the software is done right. I’d also like to see free, open source software, but I’m expecting they’ll be using expensive learning software.

I wonder, do the iPads follow the kindergarteners to first grade?

With computers, the Internet and the Web, people on the spectrum are able to start telling their experiences in life. I find it interesting to read the experiences of others on the spectrum and see just how similar their experiences are to my own. Within the past few years, I’ve gone from seeing myself as someone abnormal in a world of normal people, to seeing that there are plenty of people out there just like me.

Today at work was a good example of where my mindset operates differently from the neurotypical mindset.

Background

To give a bit of background, I had to call a company to have some electronic files be recreated on their server, so I can download them. Downloads have to be done over modem, and the hosting server will delete a file after it has been downloaded. However, we get random disconnects, with the server sometimes deleting a file we haven’t finished downloading.

I’ve had to call in about having a file regenerated before. Sometimes I need two or more files regenerated, with each file being for one of our four hospitals. When you call, you have to provide information related to your hospital. This means after giving the information on getting one file regenerated, I have to say, “By the way, we have another hospital that needs a file regenerated.” I’ve tried different methods, such as mentioning early in the call that I need files for multiple hospitals, but it’s never easy for me.

Due to an error with the company testing an upgrade, we didn’t get files for a week. This meant I needed to call and request they regenerate a week’s worth of files. For each of the four hospitals. We needed seven days worth for one hospital, and five days for the other three. That alone can make things confusing. It’s hard enough sometimes getting the right day’s file regenerated, so what if the different dates cause even more confusion? That would mean having to call again!

I knew the background would be longer and more wordy than I’d like…

Placing the call

Placing a call isn’t a simple matter of picking up the phone and dialing the number. It requires mental preparation. It can take as long as 45 minutes of mental preparation before picking up the phone. (This time is spent working on other things.) The less certain I am of how the phone call will go, the longer it takes to prepare. And each call to this company seems to require I give different information, or I always need the one thing I forgot to include during preparation of writing down all the information I’ll be asked for.

I decided that since one hospital needed seven days of files regenerated, and the others needed five, I’d split it up into two calls. (How fun!)

I placed the first call, knowing that because it’s afternoon, there would be a wait before someone answered the phone. Waiting at this point is always difficult for me. I’ll put the phone on speaker so I can hear when someone picks up, but I can’t work very well in the meantime, because I’m expecting at any moment to have to pick up the receiver. And whenever the automated message thanking me for waiting comes on, I think someone has answered the phone. It plays once every minute or two.

There was actually no wait time, which caught me off guard. That was a strike right there. I didn’t expect someone to answer right away in the afternoon. Thankfully she asked for information I had right in front of me.

The call went well enough. The seven files for the one hospital were queued to be regenerated, and I ended that call. Then the horror struck: What if I get the same person when I call back later? Panic. What if she asks why I didn’t just ask for the other hospitals’ files to be queued while on the phone the first time around? Panic. I don’t think I’ve ever talked with the same person twice when calling there, but I’ve probably never called twice in one day before. There might be a very good chance I’ll get the same person. Panic!

The second call

It wasn’t going to be a simple 45 minute preparation for the second call. Not with this in mind. It would be at least an hour, with heavy breathing, and an empty feeling in my chest. Thankfully, in that hour, I managed to think of a story I could tell in case it’s the same person. Essentially, “It turns out we have three more hospitals that need files queued.” And that much is true enough. Regardless of whether I knew about them when I placed the first call, there were three more. I was about ready to make that second call.

Okay, just a few more breaths. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. And out. Reach for that phone, and—

In the next cubicle over, a co-worker’s cell phone rang. I froze up as she answered the phone. It was a past co-worker calling, so the conversation went on a little.

One of the difficulties I have is in picking out one person speaking when two are speaking. With that co-worker talking on the phone, I would be unable to distinguish the words of the person I would be talking with. In a flash, I had reverted back to heavy breath, empty chest, unable to make a call. The co-worker’s conversation went on for a while, and when it finally ended, I was back to needing to relax my mind before I could even consider placing that call.

Eventually, I was ready to make that call (or as ready as I would be). I placed the call, and there was no wait time. The person who answered the phone was–who else?–the same person as earlier! That was enough to get my mental capabilities going haywire for a moment.

Somehow I made it through the call. I felt I fell flat on my face a couple of times, but I seemed to manage. I was “ma’am” at one point, but I get that all the time on the phone. Even when I give my name as “Christopher” rather than “Chris”, I’ll still be “ma’am”. (I went with “Chris” on these two calls.)

This whole phone thing: does it ever get any easier?

The problem with the latter is that it renders files such as robots.txt as a wiki page at http://example.com/Robots.txt. This can be avoided by using MediaWiki’s extensions capability.

To get around this issue, I wrote an extension.

Note: This license is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

<?php

if( !defined( 'MEDIAWIKI' ) ){
    die( "This is not a valid entry point.\n" );
}

#################################
## ADD FILES TO PASS THRU HERE ##
#################################

// A list of files MediaWiki should load from file.  These must be in the same
// folder as MediaWiki executes from.
$passThroughFiles = array(
    'robots.txt',
    'favicon.ico'
);

#################################
## DO NOT EDIT ANYTHING BELOW  ##
#################################

$wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array(
    'path' => __FILE__,
    'name' => "Pass File Through",
    'description' => "Passes specified files through, rather than trying to render an article.",
    'version' => 1.1,
    'author' => "Christopher Fritz",
    'url' => "http://kurifuri.com/mediawiki-passthroughfile-extention",
);

$wgHooks['BeforeInitialize'][] = 'passFileThrough';

function passFileThrough( &$title, &$article, &$output, &$user, $request, $mediaWiki ) {

    global $passThroughFiles;
    define( 'NonPassReturnValue', false ); // should this be true or false?

    $file = $title->mUserCaseDBKey;

    // Skip this page if we didn't specify to load a file for it.
    if ( !in_array($file, $passThroughFiles) ) {
        return NonPassReturnValue;
    }

    // Don't try loading this file if it doesn't exist.
    if ( !file_exists($file) ) {
        return NonPassReturnValue;
    }

    include($file);
    exit;
}

?>

Copy this text and save it in the extensions folder as pass_file_through.php.

Add the following to the bottom of LocalSettings.php:

require_once( “$IP/extensions/pass_file_through.php” );

By default, the extension only supports robots.txt and favicon.ico, but others can be added.

My PHP is rusty, and I’m not read up on MediaWiki’s programming guidelines for whitespace and layout. If you see anywhere that this extension can improve, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

The e-mail was still on in my ~/Mail folder, but not in KMail. I was able to find it again by going into “Settings” > “Configure KMail”, and to the “Accounts” section.

Here, under “Receiving”, I had “Gmail” with all three “Retrieval Options” checked, but “Local Folders” had only “Include in Manual Mail Check” and “KMail Folders” had nothing checked. I checked “Include in Manual Mail Check” on the latter, and “Check Mail on Startup” on both, then closed and re-opened KMail. All my missing e-mails are back!

I’m sure I could have just clicked on “Check Mail” rather than restarting KMail, and I might want to uncheck some of those options I checked (for better performance), but for now I’m glad to just have my missing e-mails accessible again.

Besides the obvious reason (my Boox cannot view DRM-encumbered files), notice this passage from a scene involving Marie, Clara (Clärchen), and Nutcracker. Fritz is asleep in bed, and does not appear in this scene. I’ve added red and blue colors to highlight what I’m referring to.

Thankfully I can unzip the file, correct this error, re-zip it, and continue. Some people might say to just pretend it says “Nutcracker”, and move on, but I’m weird in that I couldn’t continue reading these past two weeks until I took the time to fix it.

Did you know Linux (as far as I can tell) has no program to create MPO files, storing JPEGs in as MPF? After a weekend of learning about JPEG and Exif and such, I put together a C++ program to take two JPEG images from my Nikon D40 and combine them into an MPO. Below is the result.

These photos appear in 2D on a computer screen, but save them to an SD card in the folder “DCIM/100NIN03/” (the “100NIN03″ may potentially us different numbers from one Nintendo 3DS to the next; I haven’t looked into this), and you’ll be able to view them in 3D on the 3DS.

You can also view and download these photos in various formats on my 3D Porch page.

Just right-click a photo and save it. (Make certain it’s saved with an MPO extension, such as “346_0001.MPO”.)

How did I go so long without watching a Tinker Bell movie? I figured they would be dumbed-down movies for little kids.

I bought Mulan on DVD (at least, I think this is the one I was watching at the time), and saw their little segment about “pirating” (why do they put those anti-pirating messages on the DVD that I bought and paid for?) I really liked the animation, but figured they just went all out making an anti-pirating commercial for people who buy Disney’s expensive DVDs.

At one point, I decided to check out the trailers, and saw one for the second Tinker Bell movie. Seeing Tink suit up (in the outfit shown above) and head toward a broken down pirate ship made me think, “Wow. Maybe I should give this movie a try…”

About a month prior to this, I had seen a co-worker’s desktop wallpaper on her work computer with Tinker Bell and other fairies. I had wondered where those fairies were from, and now I know.

I picked up the first Tinker Bell movie, and enjoyed it. I’ve now seen the second, and enjoyed it even more. I have the third waiting to be watched, and will definitely be picking up the fourth when it comes out.

Screen capture © Disney. Screen capture is used for illustrative purposes.