Friday 21 January 2011

Seeing XP machine from Windows 7 machine

I renamed one of my XP machines on my home network and ever since the Windows 7 box has failed to see it.. An unidentified error occurs in windows explorer when trying to access the XP machine (as it is listed) but a different situation arises in command line;

In command line
net view
returns the XP machine along with all other machines.. good.
net view \\xpmachine
fails with system error 53 message.

I've tried checking netbios is enabled, firewalls off, ip6 turned off, and a heap load of other things that i've googled on.

Weirdly NET USE M: \\xpmachine\myfolder /user:myUserName myPassword works and I get a mapped network drive. Once done new view \\xpmachine works.

But I don't want mapped network drives. I want to access drives by \\xpmachine\myfolder. But I've found that if i enter \\xpmachine into the address bar of windows 7 explorer window it will prompt for user and password. And once done it seems to have stuck and net view \\xpmachine returns the available resources.

-----------------------------------------

Well it happened again. I can't believe that what I wrote last time actually worked. If it did then lucky me. This time it took me a while to work out that the clock on both machines must be in sync (to some degree I guess) for windows 7 to be happy. I was doing some work that required me to set the year back to 2010 (#cough) so correcting that back to normal fixed it.

Honestly, you think network diagnostics were explain that's the reason why the shared folder access fails.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

How to convert epub to mobi correctly

- Convert epub to epub in Calibre, removing the spacing and margins in the "look and feel" section
- Open the resulting file in Sigil
- edit the stylesheet in Sigil to make sure that all references to "leftmargin" are set to "0"
- save the file in Sigil then open it in Calibre again
- use Calibre to convert to mobi

Takes about 5 minutes per book. Not a major deal unless you're converting a lot of stuff

- courtesy of TeleFunken @ EG