I looked up the error message and was directed to this Microsoft article which I followed to the letter.  Unfortunately, it did little but blow my existing email profiles out of the water.  After setting up a new profile, I still continue getting the error.

After a bit more searching I came across the fix on a personal blog site (sorry, I no longer have the link).  The fix is to start Outlook from the run box by typing:

outlook.exe /resetnavpane

I have no idea what causes this issue and still experience it from time to time.  Fortunately, this fix seems to repair it every time.

This time around the install went much smoother and everything seemed to be detected and operational. I’m really digging the new interface including the taskbar, which I wasn’t too sure about at first.

All was chugging along well until my laptop went into standby. When it woke up, I discovered there was no sound. The systray speaker icon had a red X and an error message “No Audio Output Device is Installed” appeared when I hovered the cursor over it.

A reboot “fixes” the issue until the laptop goes into standby again. A few Google searches have turned up similar issues on other versions of Windows, but no solid fixes.

I tried a few different things, including updating the bios and installing the latest Realtek Windows 7 drivers. Both upgrades went well, but ultimately did not correct the problem.

At this point I’m at a loss. It’s almost as if the audio is shut down at standby, and Windows “forgets” to turn it back on during the wake up process. Misery loves company, so feel free to post in the comments if you’ve experienced similiar issues, or better yet, if you have a fix.

UPDATE:  Toshiba has released a number of BIOS updates to correct this issue (I’ve confirmed the fix works on my laptop).   Kudos to Toshiba for releasing a fix for this problem!

Core ran Gentoo on a retired HP Vectra VL420 desktop which I salvaged from one of my previous employers.  The PIII 800 was sufficient to run all the necessary services and apps I needed like email, web server, and general file storage.  It ran cool and quiet and only drew about 44kw of power while running, but after 4+ years of silently serving the family, I felt it was time to upgrade to a newer server.

[core]

The new server needed to be quiet and power efficient.  I ended up going with an Intel e5200 cpu with 4GB ram running on an ECS board.   A 1TB Western Digital Green hard drive dedicated to storage (system is on it’s own drive) and a Seasonic 300watt power supply (80plus certified) rounded out the parts list.  Total cost was about $300 including the basic case from CompUSA.

It took 2 hours to build the server from scratch and about 2 days to install an instance of 64bit Gentoo.  I contemplated installing a different Linux distribution on the new server, but at the last minute I just couldn’t give up the control I have with Gentoo.

‘Serenity’ was born.  A week later, I had finished migrating all our, email and other data over to Serenity so Core officially went into retirement.

[serenity]

Performance-wise, Serenity kicks Core to the curb.  I don’t have any formal benchmarks between the two to post, but I certainly saw a huge performance gain while compiling operating system.  As per the power efficiency, I’m right where I wanted to be.  Core was pulling a pretty stable 44w, while Serenity is pulling anywhere between 41w and 44w.  Not bad for a much more powerful server!

You see, in an attempt to squeeze every last dollar from the consuming public, Apple has handicapped the iPhone so it cannot handle synchronization from multiple calendars. To make matters worse, Apple has chosen not to release the calendar APIs to third party developers, which destroys any hope of a third party solution to calendar synchronization.
Apple’s attempts to justify this is nothing more than eyewash as it’s plainly clear to see this is nothing more than a marketing initiative, not a technical problem. Apple’s MobileMe service promises to synchronize all your calendars for a $99 annual fee. In other words, out of box iPhone calendar synchronization is possible, but it will cost you $99 to activate. How the consuming public puts up with this type of behavior still gets me. No thanks, Apple. I’ll figure out a way to do this on my own.

My work calendar is natively synchronized to the iPhone via its exchange synchronization. But I also have a personal calendar I use at home that I’d like to merge with my iPhone calendar.  Googling “iPhone multiple calendar synchronization “ returns a myriad of links regarding the problem, with very few solutions. The solutions I was able to find were rather hoaky or required syncing from a web service, such as Plaxo or Funambol. We’ll talk more about Funambol in a bit.

I realized fairly quickly that I needed to evaluate this problem from a different angle and then it hit me! Because the iPhone was already syncing with my work’s Exchange server, the simplest solution was to sync my work exchange calendar with my personal calendar. After a lot of reading and research I finally stumbled onto the underlying answer: SyncML. SyncML is a standard to sync PIM information between devices.

Here’s what you need to get it to work – or at least what I did:

• A home server with Internet access – I used my existing Gentoo Linux server.
• A groupware solution that supports SyncML – Since it had an existing package for my Linux distro,  I chose eGroupware as my server solution. Funambol is another good option since they make their server software available to download for free.
• A client that supports SyncML – I used the free Funambol client plug-in for Outlook.

After installing the Funambol client to all my outlook clients (work, home computer, personal laptop) I configured them to sync to my Gentoo server on a regular schedule over an encrypted SSL channel. End result? No matter which computer I’m using, my Outlook calendars are synced… and as an added bonus, so is my iPhone.