Fix: Temporary or Local roaming profile message after Windows login

  Researching how to solve a “You have been logged on with a temporary profile” message on a system set up to use a roaming profile (and after I had first checked/fixed the filesystem for errors which is the classic cause for that when using local profiles) I came across this article:

http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2011/07/how-to-reset-a-roaming-profile-in-windows-7

Near the end of the article they mentioned a registry trick from

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5ec0b949-effa-4e30-ba09-dc948a4c7a8b/windows-7-starting-with-a-temporary-profile?forum=w7itprogeneral

So I tried just the registry trick without even logging into an other admin account (it was an admin account that had the problem, although I know people suggest to avoid roaming for those), that is I renamed the account’s profile key under HKLM\Windows NT\Current Version\ProfileList with an appended .bak extension (instead of backing it up externally and then deleting it) and then did log off and log on again.

To find the correct child key to rename, just check each one there and see which one has the ProfileImagePath value for the profile you’re interested in. If for the login you’re using a Microsoft account instead of a local or ActiveDirectory based one and you’re not sure which name it uses underneath, then you can type the text %userprofile% at Search on the taskbar and press ENTER to see which folder path it opens.

  All was then fine on that machine, but then the rest of the computers that were fine before started complaining that due to some problem with loading the roaming profile they loaded a local copy of it instead.

The fix I devised for that issue was to log into those computers with the problematic account, rename the key for the profile again there (adding the .bak extension), log off and log on again, then rename the key back to normal and log off and log on again. That stopped the complaining (simple log off/log on without that renaming wouldn’t fix it).

Guess what that did was to not load the roaming profile, but keep referencing it while using the local copy instead and the log off after the renaming of the key to correct value again uploaded the correct profile (from the local copy) to the server.

Note that to open regedit and restore that key’s name after logging in the 2nd time (start menu and taskbar’s search wasn’t working anymore) I had to use CTRL+SHIFT+ESC (was on a remote desktop session) and at the task manager select to see more details, then use its File/Run… menu and give regedit as the command to execute.

  Btw, I’ve also seen the Reprofiler tool being mentioned, probably it can copy the roaming profile over a local copy or vice-versa if needed – https://iwrconsultancy.co.uk/reprofiler – https://sourceforge.net/projects/reprofiler/ without having to resort to registry hacks to trick the respective service into copying in the direction one wants.

HowTo: Copy effective-computed CSS style for specific HTML paragraph

I’m in the process of setting up a temporary landing page for the trafilm project, where I need apart from showing the trafilm logo to also show some text description about the project, till I set up an instance of MonoX Social CMS for it, like the one in ClipFlair’s Community website (ClipFlair Social).

Since ClipFlair Social has some nice text styling, I decided to borrow the style of one of its home page paragraphs, using Firefox web browser’s developer tools (accessible via F12 key).

Being at the Inspector tab of the dev tools (which is the default when they first open), using the “Pick element” tool (first one on the dev tools pane’s toolbar on the left), I select the paragraph that looks nicely styled and I go to the Computed tab at the Style view, then press CTR+A to select all computed style CSS declarations for that paragraph element and press CTRL+C or right click and select Copy to copy them to the clipboard.

If pasted (CTRL+V) in some text editor like Window’s Notepad that looks like a big ugly line, since they contain Unix-style line-endings, that is LF (linefeed) and not Windows-style ones (CRLF, Carriage Return + Line Feed), but editors like Wordpad or Notepad++ can show them nicely and even convert line endings from Unix to Windows and vice-versa if you wish so (e.g. in Notepad++ the respective actions are at Edit / EOL Conversion menu).

So, this is the copied Computed CSS style for that paragraph:

border-bottom-color: #333;
border-bottom-style: none;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-image-outset: 0 0 0 0;
border-image-repeat: stretch stretch;
border-image-slice: 100% 100% 100% 100%;
border-image-source: none;
border-image-width: 1 1 1 1;
border-left-color: #333;
border-left-style: none;
border-left-width: 0px;
border-right-color: #333;
border-right-style: none;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-top-color: #333;
border-top-style: none;
border-top-width: 0px;
color: #333;
cursor: default;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
-moz-border-bottom-colors: none;
-moz-border-left-colors: none;
-moz-border-right-colors: none;
-moz-border-top-colors: none;

As you can see, it has lots of stuff that isn’t needed, unless you want to be sure your style doesn’t get affected by style of parent elements. In my case I decided to trim it down a bit:

color: #333;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;

Adding around the text above (which is represented by the CSS comment /* … */ below) a CSS selector to wrap those declarations in order to make a proper CSS rule-set:

p {

/* … */

}

and passing to CSS LINT tool to help us clean up the CSS we get no errors, but several warnings:

For example, as explained at W3Schools.com, in CSS one can use shorthand margin and padding properties:

The margin property is a shorthand property for the following individual margin properties:

• margin-top
• margin-right
• margin-bottom
• margin-left

CSS has properties for specifying the padding for each side of an element:

• padding-top
• padding-right
• padding-bottom
• padding-left

…so one wonders why Firefox Dev Tools don’t spit those out with that order and give them in bottom, left, right and top order instead.

Also instead of 0px, one is suggested to always write 0 instead, since zero will always be zero irrespective of the CSS units used for it (at least for the currently available CSS unit systems that is). This is merely to save in bandwidth I think, since 0px is better, suggesting to anyone modifying this value in the future they’d better use “px” [pixels] instead of say “pt” [points]).

So we clean up this CSS into (pay attention to the order of values in margin and padding shorthand declarations, which is top, right, bottom, left, that is clockwise starting from the top side of the HTML elements targeted via the CSS rule selector, which is a paragram – p – in our case):

p {

   color: #333;
  font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
  font-size: 14px;
  font-weight: 400;
  letter-spacing: 0;
  line-height: 24px;
  margin: 0 0 20px 0;
  padding: 0 0 10px 0;

}

Pasting at CSS LINT online tool again we get no warnings anymore (apart from no errors):

One might also remove the redundant space chars at the end of each line that Firefox places when copy-pasting the style declarations. Notepad++ can do it via Edit / Blank Operations / Trim Trailing Space menu command:

Fix: Keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-A not working in Word

For some time now, I was getting very annoyed while copy-pasting content from other software into Microsoft Word 2010. I would press CTRL+C at some other software and then would press ALT+TAB to go into an open Word document and press CTRL+V to paste, but it would not. So I had to move my fingers far away to SHIFT+INSERT to paste.

Today had enough so after some Google search on it, found the best fix by Moshe Eschel at:

http://superuser.com/questions/215595/keyboard-shortcuts-such-as-ctrl-c-ctrl-v-and-ctrl-z-not-working-in-word-2010-on

To "restore" word to the way you remember, you need to go to, File->Options->Customize Ribbon On the bottom there is a label "Keyboard Shortcuts" and a button "Customize…" – click it

On the Categories box, scroll until you find "All Commands" and select it. Now, from the right box select the following Command: EditCopy Look at the "Current Keys" Box you will see "Ctrl+Insert" which is the NEW mapping now put your cursor in the "Press new shortcut key" and Press Ctrl+C, a button on the bottom named Assign will light up, and you click on it.

Do the same for all the shortcuts you like, such as EditPaste, EditUndo, EditRedo, EditCut, SelectAll etc.

Wonder why Microsoft didn’t add both the old and new shortcuts there, since it seems the dialog does support it. What a huge oversight, having Microsoft Word try to impose a shortcut from Macs (as it seems) to longtime Windows users (especially when other software the user works with use other set of shortcuts for copy-paste).

Moreover, the option to reassign the shortcut keys was very deeply hidden, hard for the average user to find it by themselves (couldn’t find it either and I don’t consider myself an average user).

Even more pathetic was the default shortcut key for Select All (usually Ctrl+A). It was Ctrl+5 and Ctrl+Clear (Numeric keyboard 5). What the heck Microsoft?