Failing to See WiFi Login Page [Captive Portal] / Solved

I have had some annoying problems in recent months with my work laptop refusing to connect to certain WiFi login pages (more technically known as Captive Portals), essentially locking me out of the WiFi in certain places. Here is how I solved it.

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Off-Topic: Microsoft Word styling of change tracking balloons & text

winwordI just got hit by a strange behavior in Microsoft word: the comment and format change “balloons” that pop up next to the text when using change tracking and viewing changes started to overflow their allocated balloons. The font used look very funny too. The issue was that a document contained a format specification for these balloons that used a font not present on my system, which in turn caused Word to use something like Courier to display it. Which did not look nice. However, it was easy to solve.

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Off-Topic: Analyzing Outlook Mailbox Size

Where I work, we use Exchange as our email server and Outlook as the primary client (at least I do). We also have an email quota that I keep bumping into, since I have a tendency to attract many emails with large attachments like image-happy PowerPoint files or binary code modules to patch things. I am also an extreme user of email folders. My main Outlook account contains some 650 folders, and my offline archive of all my old emails reaches towards 1300, with many 100s of thousands of emails for a total of almost 20 GB. So, pretty extreme.

My problem is: what do I do when the email system tells me (and it is serious, I can attest) that I am close to hitting my quota and that soon email will neither be received nor sent? I want to find the folders that are very large and candidates for some archiving. The answer has eluded me for a long time, until I stumbled upon a 2010 Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3skJOd4GIak, from “tech-informer.com” (which now looks pretty dead). With some modifications, this solved my problem.

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Travel Tip: Tokyo Trains

I am just back from my first ever trip to Tokyo, and it was a very interesting experience. I am very impressed by the Tokyo train system, and I cannot understand why some foreigners seem to avoid it and use taxis instead. All stations have signs in English (at least all that I visited in Tokyo), and the system is mostly very reliable and predictable. There are some things that I would have like to know before I came there, however, which were not entirely obvious.
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