Intuit has just launched their iPhone app TurboTax SnapTax that allows Canadians to file their tax returns using their iPhone cameras. The app is free to download but when it comes to file your tax return it'll cost you $9.99. The convenience factor of filing via your iPhone is pretty cool.
The app works for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S and takes advantage of optical character recognition to transfer info from your T4 to the tax return. The app is limited, as it's meant for people who need to file a simple tax return. Future updates will include options for RRSP contributions and charitable donations.
…the app is designed to appeal to 18- to 34-year-olds, a group that spends at least two hours a day on their smartphones. While technologically savvy, they may be new to filing taxes and somewhat intimidated by the process. If all they have is a T-4, there's little point in spending $50 to $100 at the nearest tax preparation service at the local mall.
So if you're a student or someone who has a simple return, this could be a viable alternative. Check out the video demo below:
iTunes description below:
Magically do your taxes on your iPhone with the snap of a photo!
IT'S SO SIMPLE:
1 – Snap a photo of your T4 2 – Answer a few simple questions 3 – Review, pay, and NETFILE securely
START FOR FREE – PAY WHEN YOU'RE DONE: * Only $9.99 per return
FOR CANADIANS WHO: * Have just a T4 slip * Don't have children or dependants * Are under the age of 65 * Reside in AB, BC, MB, NB, NL, NS, ON, PE, SK
Click here to download TurboTax Snaptax. It's free. Let me know how your return goes if you decide to try it out!
If you're the type of person who makes lists and forgets them (i.e. a human being), you need OneNote Mobile. You can create notes and lists to your heart's content — and never lose them. Plus, it's a free download for Android, iPad and iPhone.
It's easy to create notes on the go. Use text photos, bullets, checklists — or all of the above.
•
It's easy to find what you need. You can store and access multiple notebooks within the app.
•
It's free. Just download and start using it. Available at the Android Marketplace or the iTunes App Store. Windows Phone users already have it installed.
Microsoft Canada Co. 1950 Meadowvale Blvd Mississauga, Ontario L5N 8L9
I just finished downloading and installing the new fling from VMware Labs called vBenchmark.
“vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group.”
As you can see from the screenshot, vBenchmark gives you basic information about your infrastructure and compares it to other companies in your “Peer Group” (this is compared against All / All / Worldwide)
The ability to see how we are utilizing our environment against others so we can decide if we are over / under utilizing our pools is the main draw of this fling.
It will be interesting to see how this grows as more people start using it and what the comparison will look like at the end of each month. From the data it looks like we are defiantly under utilizing our vRAM and have over utilized the VMs per CPU (or at least to the comparison data) which is exactly what we are trying to achieve with our environment.
I encourage everyone to go out and try vBenchmark (http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vbenchmark), there is a pile more Benchmarks to compare against that may or may not be useful to you.
We've seen a number of accessories aimed at iOS gamers hit the market over the last 12 months. But they've all been game controllers, in one form or another. We've never seen anything like this before.
Introducing Physical Apps' new iPhone and iPod touch accessory, TheO. The soft-foam ball, which features a cushioned slot at its core that holds a wide range of devices, promises to take iOS gaming to the next level…(...) Read the rest of This foam ball promises to take iOS gaming to the next level
Sometimes I just can't pick up a phone call. There are countless scenarios where answering my phone is not an option, like when I'm in a meeting, at the movies, have my hands full of groceries or when my friend is in the middle of recounting a really important story that requires my full, undivided attention. Once you miss a call, you can't always call into your voicemail mailbox right away to see what the person had to say, even if you're extremely eager to find out.
Today Rogers launched Visual Voicemail Plus, included in new Rogers Value Packs. It's another first from Rogers and it's available for most phones. What's great about Visual Voicemail Plus is that not only do you get the audio file pushed to your phone but the message is transcribed to text and sent with the audio file as an attachment in a single message. This means you no longer need to dial into your voicemail inbox, enter your password, and listen to all the prompts – your audio message and transcription is just a click away. One of the other key benefits is that you see the list of your voice messages and can directly access the one you want, rather than having to listen to each one in order they were left.
Visual Voicemail Plus is available for select BlackBerry and Android devices and is managed via an application, as well as available on other smartphones and mobile phones that support MMS (picture/video) messages with messages delivered via MMS.
How to get Visual Voicemail Plus
Contact Rogers to subscribe to the service. BlackBerry and Android users can download the Visual Voicemail Plus app from Rogers Mobile Internet Portal or the Android Market. For these apps, everything is synchronized between your device and traditional voicemail mailbox. This means that if you delete or view a message in the app, it will be deleted or marked as Saved in your voicemail mailbox. For mobile phones that support MMS, you just need to set up your voicemail to get started and messages will be saved on your traditional voicemail mailbox once they have been delivered to your phone via MMS.
Get your home phone voicemail sent to you your mobile
Visual Voicemail Plus also allows voicemail messages to be forwarded as MMS messages from your Rogers Home Phone. Just log into the voicemail online portal and click on the "message to MMS" tab.
Get your voicemail on your computer
If you're already using the recently launched Rogers One Number service, you'll be glad to hear that you can now integrate Visual Voicemail Plus via MMS on your computer too.
Do you have a memorable voice message that you continue to keep saved? Care to share?
How to assess the security of your virtualized data center with Metasploit
March 21, 2012 – 2:00 – 3:00 EDT
Security assessments often treat virtual machines in the same way as physical machines since they share the same weaknesses. However, virtualization technology can also introduce new security risks if not properly deployed that leave organization open to attacks.
In this webcast for IT security professionals and network engineers, David Maloney shows gives some background on new techniques, including a live demo. Participants will learn how to:
• Identify potential security risks in virtual environments • Scan and discover virtual hosts and guests • Take screenshots of guest operating systems • Uncover weak passwords of virtualization technology services • Bring virtual machines online to compromise a network • Secure a virtual environment against cyber attacks
Microsoft is confirmed to be working on a version of its wildly popular Office productivity suite for Apple's iPad, and The Daily managed to get some hands on time with the highly anticipated software ahead of its release. Microsoft Office for iPad will bring Word, Excel and PowerPoint functionality to Apple's tablet — presuming the app is approved by Apple — and it is unclear if Microsoft has plans to add additional Office applications in the future. The app has a similar look to Microsoft's OneNote app for iOS, which borrows largely from the Metro-themed Office software on the Windows Phone platform. The Daily's report states that Microsoft plans to submit Office for iPad to Apple for approval in the coming weeks, though a firm time frame was not provided.
Anonymous (@TheAnonIRC) 2/15/12 9:03 PM Wearing a Guy Fawkes mask could get you up to 5 years in jail in Canada, under new proposed bill C-309 goo.gl/g2Ekz
Everything you need to know about using your iPhone Camera to take great, memorable photos
With the new iPhone photography — or iPhoneography — series we're running on iMore, we have a lot of new iPhones users, and burgeoning photographers joining us. So, Leanna and I thought it would be a good idea to team up, take a moment, and go over the basics so that everyone gets up to speed just as quickly as possible. If you're new to the iPhone or new to taking pictures, here's everything you need to know to get started. Bookmark it. If you're already an expert, save the link for a friend, and jump right into our iPhoneography Forum and share your work!
The iPhone 4S camera
The iPhone 4S has an 8 megapixel camera. A megapixel is 1 million pixels, so that means the iPhone 4S camera captures images that are 3264×2448 pixels in size. That's enough to print an 8×10 picture at 300 dots per inch (dpi), or fairly high quality. (Low quality color images print at 150-300dpi, high quality at 300-600+ dpi)
The aperture on the iPhone 4S camera is f/2.4. The f stands for "focal ratio". The lower the aperture, the more light can be let in so you can get better pictures in a wider range of settings, and the better depth-of-field can be obtained (where the subject is in focus, and elements in front of and behind the subject are blurred). The iPhone 4S also has 5 elements in the lens, helping to keep photos sharp.
An infrared (IR) filter helps produce more accurate color, and combines with software that optimizes dynamic range and white balance. So, you basically have a camera that could previously only be found on a dedicated point-and-shoot, built right into your phone.
Quickly launch your iPhone camera by double clicking home then tapping the camera button
With iOS 5, Apple's made it easier and faster than ever to access your camera when you need it, even when your iPhone is locked, and even if you have a passcode set.
Double click the Home button
Tap the Camera button
That's it. Two clicks and a tap and you're in the Camera App and ready to shoot.
Tap the Camera icon on your iPhone Home screen to launch the Camera app. The Camera app is the built-in, default way to take photos on your iPhone. Even in other apps, like Messages, if you tap the camera button to take a photo, you'll be taken into the Camera app.
The Camera app opens to a live-view screen, similar to the LCD display you see on a point-and-shoot or DSLR camera. Controls are available right on the screen to take a photo, set the flash, access advanced options, and switch to the front-facing camera. Other controls are also available, including a hardware shutter and digital zoom. We'll walk you through all of them.
Geo-tagging
When you first launch the Camera, you'll be asked for permission to use your current Location for geotagging
The first time you launch the Camera app, it will ask for your permission to use your current Location. That's because, if you let it, your iPhone will store the GPS coordinates of every photo you take, so you can always easily refer back to it later. This can be great for keeping track of vacation shots, but not so great if you're posting pictures online and don't want the entire internet to know your address.
Whether you choose to enable geo-tagging for now or not, you can always change your mind later.
To take a photo, either tap the Camera button or click the volume up control
There are two ways to take a photo with the Camera app. Both of them will fire the shutter and save a picture to your Camera Roll library.
Tap the Camera button on the live view screen
Click the volume up hardware button on the side of your iPhone
Bonus tip: If your iPhone headset has a volume up button, you can use it to take pictures remotely!
Pinch to Zoom
Pinch to zoom activates the digital zoom, and shows you the zoom slider
The iPhone has a mediocre digital zoom but if you absolutely have to zoom in, it can be very slightly better than nothing.
Touch your thumb and forefinger to the screen and pinch them together to zoom in.
Spread them apart to zoom back out.
Once you've activated the zoom feature, a slider will appear giving you linear control, if you prefer it.
Macro
You can automatically take macro shots by getting in close... though the focus seems glitchy on close ups
The iPhone will automatically adjust for macro photos. Just bring the camera close to the object you want to shoot and take the picture.
Note: There appears to be a glitch in iOS 5 that causes problems focusing extremely close for macro photos. It locks for a moment, then blurs again. Hopefully Apple is fixing this for the next update.
Changing auto-focus and auto-exposure
To focus and set exposure on an object, just tap on it. The square indicates the current target.
The iPhone camera has automatic focus, exposure, and facial recognition. It will always try to take the best possible photo it can, but it may not always know which area of the photo you want to target.
Changing the target is simple.
Tap the screen
That's it. Any area you tap will be surrounded by a white square and your iPhone will automatically refocus and re-balance the exposure for that area.
If your iPhone detects a face — or up to 10 faces — it will put a green square around it and automatically refocus and optimize the image around the face.
Locking auto-focus/auto-exposure
Sometimes the auto-focus and auto-exposure on the iPhone is more blessing than curse. For example, when there's a lot of movement, or when the center of the photo you want to take is exceptionally bright or dark. When that happens, you can lock both the auto-focus and auto-white balance so that, when you move the camera around, they no longer change.
Place your camera one the area that has the focus and exposure you want to lock onto to
Tap the square to make sure the focus and white balance are set.
Hold the square with your finger until it turns blue and pulsates.
The words AE/AF Lock will appear at the bottom the screen to confirm you've done it correctly. Move the camera and take your photos without worrying about the auto-focus or auto-exposure balance any more.
To remove the AR/AF Lock, just tap the screen outside the square.
To toggle the LED flash between On, Auto, and Off, tap the current setting at the top left of the live screen
Your iPhone has an LED Flash that can be set to off, auto, and on. It's not a great flash and as will any point-and-shoot camera, light is your friend — especially lot of daylight. If you're in a really dark place, however, and really want or need a picture, it's easy to turn the flash on.
Tap the Flash button at the top left of the live view screen.
Tap the On button to turn the flash on, or the **Auto button* to put it into automatic mode.
Taking HDR photos
To enable High Dynamic Range, tap Options, then toggle HDR to On.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and involves taking a series of pictures, one right after the other, both slightly overexposed and slightly underexposed, and combining them together to reveal more light and shadow information than a standard single-exposure photo would allow. So basically, you can see detail in the bright sky and in the shadow under the tree, rather than having one blown out or the other lost to black.
Tap the Options button at the top center of the live view screen.
Slide the HDR toggle to On.
The bottom of the screen will show HDR so you'll know it's enabled.
Note: The multiple exposures take a short amount of time to combine, so after you take an HDR photo you'll see a your iPhone say "Saving HDR". If you need to take a lot of photos quickly, you'll want to make sure HDR is set to Off.
An example of a regular vs. HDR photo, with the HDR photo on the right revealing far greater detail in the sky
Displaying the grid
The grid allows you to use the "rule of thirds" to better compose your photos
The grid is useful to help you align your photographs and achieve better compositions. For example, by using the "rule of thirds".
Tap the Options button at the top center of the live view screen.
Slide the Grid toggle to On.
Two sets of vertical crossed by two sets of horizontal lines will divide your screen, and you'll be ready to compose your shot.
You can manage your photos, including emailing, tweeting, iMessaging, deleting, creating and filing into folders, and even basic editing like red-eye removal, rotation, cropping, and auto-ehance, right in the built-in Photos app. There are also several excellent photo editing apps in the App Store.
We'll cover more on that in a future article. For now, we just want you to focus on taking photos.
Other Camera apps
A sampling of Martin Reisch's (@safesolvent) awe-inspiring Instagram gallery.
While the basic, built-in iPhone Camera app is all you really need to get started, there are several other well regarded Camera apps in the App Store. They typically provide more or better features than the built in app.
Instagram is a popular, free iPhone app for applying distinctive filters to your photos, squaring them, and quickly sharing them to the Instagram network, as well as via Twitter and Facebook. You can also see some amazing examples of other people's iPhoneography. Read more – Download now
Camera+ has a lot of great features, including separate focus and exposure settings, image stabilization, enhanced zoom, scene modes, and a bevy of sharing options. – Read more – Download now
What's next
Now that you have a basic idea how the iPhone camera works, go shoot some photos. Shoot tons of photos. Still life, portraits, landscapes, wild life, sports, anything and everything that catches your fancy. The secret to success here is definitely practice!
This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of RU1. See KB 2645995: Description of Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2' for more details.
Note: If some of the following KB articles do not work yet, please try again later.
We would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:
New updates for Dec DST - Exchange 2010 - SP2 RU1 - Display name for OWA.
2616230 Exchange 2010 CAS server treats UTF-7 encoding NAMESPACE string from CHS Exchange 2003 BE server as ASCII, caused IMAP client fails to login.
2599663 RCA crashes when recipient data is stored in bad format.
2492082 Freebusy publish to Public Folders fails with 8207 event.
2666233 Manage hybrid configuration wizard won't accept domains starting with a numeral for FOPE outbound connector FQDN.
2557323 "UseLocalReplicaForFreeBusy" functionality needed in Exchange 2010.
2621266 Exchange 2010 Mailbox Databases not reclaiming space.
2543850 Exchange 2010 GAL based Outlook rule not filtering emails correctly.
Note for Forefront Protection for Exchange users For those of you running Forefront Protection for Exchange, be sure you perform these important steps from the command line in the Forefront directory before and after this rollup's installation process. Without these steps, Exchange services for Information Store and Transport will not start after you apply this update. Before installing the update, disable ForeFront by using this command: fscutility /disable. After installing the update, re-enable ForeFront by running fscutility /enable.
I love this e-mail we got from Encore today, nothing like using the fear of Anonymous to drive sales :)
Subject: From The Desk Of...
Hey ....,
Please forward this urgent message to the person responsible for your information systems security.
The hacker group Anonymous has been in many news stories lately. As some of you may have already heard through Symantec, their program PCAnywhere has been compromised. Back in 2006, the group hacked into Symantec’s internal systems and now has posted the source code on many sites. As a response, Symantec has alerted its customers and advised them to disable the software or to uninstall it while they worked to issue patches, which it has done. However, that was not the only code that was reportedly stolen. Symantec indicates:
"Symantec can confirm that the source code is legitimate," the company said. "Be advised, we also anticipate Anonymous to post the rest of the code they have claimed have in their possession. So far, they have posted code for the 2006 version of Norton Internet Security and PCAnywhere. We also anticipate that at some point, they will post the code for Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition and Norton Systemworks."
As this is old code from 2006, currently updated customers “should not be at risk” according to Symantec. However, if you have been thinking of changing antivirus vendors or exploring other options, please do not hesitate to contact me. Encore Business Solutions has been using TrendMicro since 2001 and has recently moved to their hosted service. We no longer need a server onsite and we can easily manage all of our remote staff who are dispersed throughout Canada. All they need is an internet connection.
Regards,
PIERRE MANAIGRE,MCTS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance
Halliburton, based out of Houston, Texas, is one of the largest energy services companies in the world. It has operations in more than 70 countries and employs over 60,000 people.
Given that information, you can see why it's such a big deal that the company has recently announced its intentions to ditch RIM's BlackBerry platform in favor of the iPhone and iOS…
AppleInsider has learned that Halliburton plans to phase out thousands of employee BlackBerrys in favor of Apple's popular handset. The news comes from an internal company newsletter that was sent out earlier this month.
"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone…"
…The move comes after "significant research" into both Apple's mobile platform and Google's Android operating system led Halliburton to "determine that the iOS platform offered the best capabilities, controls and security for application development."
RIM, who at one time dominated the market, has seen much of its enterprise business slip away over the past 12 months. Many companies, like Halliburton, have dropped their BlackBerry devices for ones running Apple's iOS.
With a new CEO at the helm, it'll be interesting to see if RIM can make any kind of comeback. But one thing is for sure, it can't afford to lose many more big name clients.
This two-part blog series will outline some of the recovery options available to administrators in the event that one or more public folders are accidentally deleted from the environment. The first part will explain the options, while the second part will outline the architectural aspects of public folders that drive the options.
Introduction
In older versions of Exchange, mailbox and mailbox database recovery was a long, complicated process involving backups, recovery servers, and changes to Active Directory. Successive versions of the product have introduced more and more functionality around recovery (recovery storage groups/databases, database replication, etc.), and we're now at the point where restoring a mailbox is a seemingly trivial operation, and restoring a mailbox database is almost unheard of. But mailboxes aren't the only data stored on Mailbox servers in Exchange Server 2010, and the procedure for restoring public folders and public folder databases differs greatly from the mailbox procedure.
Review of Recovery Options
The first two recovery options are detailed either in TechNet or elsewhere on the Exchange team blog site, so I'll simply list them here and then move on to the real purpose of this blog. The recovery options for public folders and public folder databases in Exchange Server 2010 are as follows, from the easiest to the most complex:
Note: Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 fixes an issue where users were unable to use Outlook to recover deleted public folders. This is another reason to upgrade your Exchange Server 2010 systems to SP2 at the earliest opportunity.
Recover folders via public folder database restore.
The first option is the easiest and most obvious - if an end user accidentally deletes a folder, he or she should be able to undelete that folder using Outlook. Failing that, an administrator should be able to use ExFolders to recover that folder. But what if these options won't work in your situation? What if the end user didn't realize he or she deleted the folder, and a month has passed? Or what if your organization has changed the retention settings for deleted public folders, and essentially eliminated the dumpster? How do you recover public folders in this case?
Recovery Options
At the heart of public folder recovery is a painful truth: you can't delete a public folder from the organization and recover it by simply restoring an older version of a public folder database. If you restore a public folder database from backup and place it back into production, you'll see the public folders only until the server receives replication messages. Because the public folder hierarchy – the list of all folders in the environment – no longer includes the folders which were deleted, the target server has copies of folders which, from Exchange's perspective, don't exist. As soon as that public folder database receives a hierarchy update, it will see that those public folders aren't present in the hierarchy, and the store will delete the public folder again. Since you can't edit the hierarchy via the Public Folder Management Console (or even via adsiedit.msc), you can't manually add that public folder back in. So, given this limitation, how do we recover that public folder?
Consider the following points:
If you don't replicate every folder to every database, you would need to delete all current databases and then recover from backup any database that contains unique content. This only works if you have recent backups, of course, and would also require that you export any content generated since that backup, since you're going to delete all of the existing databases. The deletion is necessary because if a restored public folder store receives hierarchy replication from one of the existing public folder stores, the whole exercise is for naught.
If you do replicate all folders to all stores in the environment, you can delete all stores and just restore one database, then replicate the content from that database out to the other servers. Again, this depends on all databases having duplicate content, and you must delete all existing databases before restoring the one from backup.
You can restore a backup of the public folder database to an isolated Exchange environment, connect to the public folder database with Outlook, export all content to a series of PSTs, create new folders in the production environment with the same names as the deleted folders, and then import all of the content. This is obviously a somewhat manual process, and most administrators aren't going to want to do this.
Recommended Recovery Procedure
Thankfully there is a much easier process which can be performed in-place and with a minimum of fuss.
Select one of the existing public folder servers in the environment. [Using an existing server simplifies the process a bit.] You will isolate this system from its replication partners, so choose a system that doesn't serve as the source for a lot of content which needs to be replicated.
Using Registry Editor, set the value of the Replication registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<servername>\Public- <GUID of Public Store>) to 0 (zero).
Note: You may need to create this DWORD key if it doesn't already exist. Further information on the Replication registry key is available in the article, "Replication does not occur for one Exchange server in the organization" (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812294). This registry key also applies to Exchange Server 2007 and 2010.
Restore the public folder database in place using your normal restoration procedure.
Using an Outlook client, log onto a mailbox which uses the restored public folder database as its default public folder store (this is necessary in order to see the restored folders). If you don't have a mailbox database which uses that public folder database as its default, either create a new mailbox database (recommended) or change an existing mailbox database to use the newly-restored public folder database.
If necessary, click the Folders icon at bottom left of the Navigation screen, and then expand the public folders node.
Copy each of the folders you wish to restore to another location within the public folder hierarchy. If you're restoring an entire hierarchy, you can simply Ctrl-click and drag the root folder to make new copies of all subfolders. Although the new folders will have similar names to the originals, the underlying folder IDs (FIDs) are different.
Once you've created copies of all of the folders, verify that the replica lists include all desired targets (and reconfigure as appropriate).
At this point, it's now safe to reintroduce that server into the production environment. To do so, dismount the public folder database, delete the Replication registry key (or set it to 1), and then remount the database.
As soon as hierarchy is replicated to the server, the original folders will once again disappear, but the copies of the folders will be replicated to all replication partners.
You may need to add mail-enabled public folders back into distribution groups, as their SMTP addresses will likely be different from those on the original folders. End users will also need to recreate public folder favorites in Outlook.
Summary
Recovering from accidental public folder deletion can be difficult, especially if you don't take hierarchy replication into account. By restoring into an isolated environment, and then cloning the folders to be restored, you can work around this limitation and restore the missing content. In the next blog entry, I'll explain the underlying architecture of public folders (including replication, change numbers, and the replication state table) to show why these steps are so necessary.
John Rodriguez Principal Premier Field Engineer Microsoft Premier Support
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Tap the Camera icon on your iPhone Home screen to launch the Camera app. The Camera app is the built-in, default way to take photos on your iPhone. Even in other apps, like Messages, if you tap the camera button to take a photo, you'll be taken into the Camera app.
