Can’t raise fold-down rear seat on 2010 Ford Escape because of stuck middle seat belt retractor

Ok quick break from tech to report on a known car problem and the fix. I have a 2010 Ford Escape, and put the bigger side of the 40/60 split rear seat down to fit a table in the rear. When I went to raise it back up, it wouldn’t move more than an inch or two.

After some investigation I determined the problem was that the middle seat belt, which actually retracts into the top of the seat, had retracted completely and then locked up, stuck.

I spent some time trying various things to get it to let go. I even had half the material off the seat so I could see up to the area where the retractor was mounted. Nothing I tried did anything but make it tighter.

I turned to the Internet, and found out this is a known problem with these Fords and perhaps other models going back several years. Argh! For instance, http://www.venturerider.org/forum/showthread.php?t=60783 

Then I found a site that seemed to have some solid advice - http://www.fixya.com/cars/t6637034-ford_escape_middle_rear_seat . This turned out to be fix for me.

Basically take out the 6 bolts holding the seat backs down (2 on each side and 2 in the middle). Then you can get to the Torx bolt that bolts the seat belt to the floor. Then take out the 60 part of the seat back completely, turn it right side up, click in the latch on the side, and the seat belt should retract normally with a couple of pulls. Then just put everything back together the way it was.

Save yourself wasted time trying other methods. They are right when they say this is the only way that works. And once you figure it out, it’s not that hard. Good thing, because I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be doing this again and again.

Configuring Windows Updates. 0% Complete. Please do not power off or unplug your machine. Installing update 1 of 5.

I get this type of message all the time on shutting down and it hangs my laptop. Something in Windows Update gets stuck. A lot.

Here’s a couple of the fixes I’ve used semi- (temporarily) successfully:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949358
• http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/troubleshoot-problems-with-installing-updates

Ios7 Game Center won't go away

I play Scrabble on my iPad and iPhone, mostly with my family through Facebook, which is a blast. One day a year or so ago I somehow hooked Scrabble up to Apple's "Game Center". Almost instantly this turned into a pain in the neck with popups and logins and messages every time I tried to play Scrabble. What was worse is the dialog that would ask every time I opened Scrabble if I wanted to disable Scrabble from Game Center (something along those lines). I would answer yes yet it kept coming up every time. 

This continued into iOS 7. There are new ways to remove Scrabble from Game Center. But the changes somehow reverse themselves every restart. We'll I've finally figured out a way to at least stop it from bothering me, with the help of the following link:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19594549#19594549

Basically it's as simple as logging out of Game Center and then disabling all the possible options in Notification Center for Game Center. This of course affects a lot more than Scrabble. A price I'm willing to pay until Apple fixes Game Center. 

Feeding Twitter

I just noticed that my blog posts haven't been making their way from Blogger through Friendfeed to Twitter since October 2012. (It's now March 2013.) Bummer! All the setup looks good and the posts are making it to Friendfeed so the problem is somewhere between Friendfeed and Twitter. I went ahead and set up Twitterfeed (from the blog direct to Twitter). We'll see how that goes.

Migrated Outlook, blocked senders list gone

I just upgraded machines, and from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013. One quick tip for anyone else doing this - don't forget to export your blocked senders list BEFORE you move your .pst file from the old pc to new. It turns out, as best I can tell, that the lists are email account name specific. This means unless you name your new account the same (which I am guessing I did not), that the old list will be stranded and Outlook will start a new blank one (argh).

Dial Back The Crazy

I was about to give Paul Thurrott the crown for inventing this 4 word gem for his blog post http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/dialing-back-crazy-windows-8, but a quick Google search reveals it’s been around awhile… https://www.google.com/search?q=dial+back+the+crazy . Still, what a sound byte!

IOS Garageband tips

Here’s a couple of things I wish I had known earlier…

• Turn off velocity sensitity to fix snare drum volume issue.

• Turn the bar count to automatic for a section so that it doesn’t cut you off at 8 when recording with a mic.

• Shake to get the undo button to come up.

And an issue with my preferred guitar input, the iRig, and GarageBand on the iPad 3:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3836528?start=0&tstart=0

It doesn’t sound like there is a fix, so it may be necessary to abandon the iRig – here are some alternatives mentioned:

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MobileIn/
http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/stealthplug/

Microsoft shoots self in foot AGAIN

• http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/xbox-music-preview-144504
• http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/microsoft-itunes-xbox-music-144505
• http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/10/slick-xbox-music-coming-to-xbox-windows-8-but-windows-7-not-so-much
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/microsoft-xbox-music/
• http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/15/3502846/xbox-music-windows-7-windows-phone-support

“Hey I’ve got an idea, let’s release an amazing new music service, and completely shun our biggest user-base and our most popular product!” (not an actual quote, just a dramatization)

This is Microsoft’s idea of how to roll out a new music service – don’t offer it to the hundreds of millions of users of their current flagship consumer PC operating system, Windows (7).

Or here’s another great idea, make it first available on your game console (XBOX). Who listens to music while they are trying to play a game or watch TV (and I don’t mean watch TV through the XBOX)? Oh but there’s an additional $60 per year charge to listen to music on your game console versus other platforms.

How do they come up with this stuff? This is a clear case of management by committee. Straight stupid. When they force me off my Zune subscription with the 10 songs to keep per month, I’m going straight to Spotify with my money.

Ubuntu fails

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/shuttleworth_comes_out_swinging_defense_ubuntu_1210_amazon_integration

I *was* a big fan of Ubuntu for years, until I read this article. But as far as I'm concerned, this is about as close to a living definition of sell-out as you can get.

And because Ubuntu was the closest thing Linux and open source had to a success, I'm declaring Linux and open source failed too, at least in terms of a business model. When you have to pimp your customers, you need an intervention. Yikes! This isn't free as in beer, this is free as in train wreck.

Sync Nirvana has been achieved

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a focus on, and a personal interest in, PIM (personal information management). And while I've made a lot of progress the last couple of years in getting my PIM solution defined, the one missing piece has always been that I was unable to create new calendar entries that had alerts (reminders), using my preferred alerting method (which is a series of emails from Google Calendar), except by using the "full" (desktop) version of the Google Calendar web page.

I couldn't (get entries with preferred reminders) in the iPhone calendar app. I couldn't in Microsoft Outlook on the Windows desktop. I couldn't in the mobile Google calendar page.

But let me summarize my PIM solution so that you have the context. It's a triangle with 3 corners.

First corner: Outlook runs on the desktop for calendar, contacts, and email when I am there. It also provides another key component - backup of the cloud. Many folks are learning the rashness of not keeping a local copy of what is in the cloud. The company goes under, or the servers go down, or your account is compromised or deleted or locked out, and you are done. But not if you have a local backup.

Second corner: Google is my current cloud PIM solution for calendar, contacts, and email. They have highly functional and efficient web-based clients to fill every gap. They have mature API's and robust standards support.

Third corner: iPhone/iPad is my mobile client of choice. Apple has a unique focus on the user. They understand the toaster paradigm (people don't want to configure drivers, manage updates, and reboot their toaster, they just want to push a button and make toast). Apple's products, for the most part, strive to get out of the way and let you do what you came to do.

I should note here that I do not try to add iCloud as another cloud provider. It might be possible, but it doesn't make sense to make things more complicated than necessary. I do think the interesting thing with iCloud is it is vertical integration (it's for Apple products) and thus will always tend to lead to insularity rather than homogeneity, which goes against the whole point of the cloud in my opinion. Very interesting to me.

The coolest part of the triangle is getting them all syncing back and forth. That means a change on any one is replicated on both the other corners. And this has to be "non-rickety" - adding a phone number to a contact on one platform can't cause the email address to go away on another.

I actually bought a product to take care of syncing Google to Outlook, after a long period of research and trial and error. I'd prefer something from Google or Microsoft, but alas. The product I bought is gSyncit  (http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/software/gsyncit3 ).

I use a host of connections on the iPhone to sync back and forth with Google. In fact I use a different one for each of mail, calendar, and contacts. I use "Exchange” account for contacts, “Other” (Pop/Smtp) for email, and the “Gmail” account for Calendars. Actually it was moving to that last one that is part of the final fix. More on that in a minute.

Note in my diagram that the last connecting line (between Outlook and the iPhone) is grayed out. I am not syncing these two because Google takes care of that. I could do a sync with either iTunes or with iCloud directly between them, but I don’t see the benefit at this point.

 

Some other miscellaneous parts of my PIM solution follow:

TYPE	SOLUTION	COMMENTS
Notes	Evernote	The notes are in their cloud, and Evernote has desktop, iOS, and web clients which all sync with their cloud.
Notes	OneNote	Second choice, but I'm evaluating it because it is more accepted in business and now has an iOS client and can sync to the MS cloud Skydrive.
Tasks	Toodledo	Tasks on their website, and there is a web client and iOS clients. Prefer the organization over Remember The Milk. I'm not currently syncing tasks back to the desktop, but I just read that gSyncIt has expanded to Toodledo (and Evernote and a mess of others).
Passwords/Bookmarks	eWallet	No cloud yet, but they have wifi sync between the desktop and iOS clients, very secure, supports many types of information.
Passwords/Bookmarks	Lastpass/Xmarks	For bookmarks and passwords associated with websites, this can be more easy to use on the desktop, because they integrate with the desktop browser. Not as easy to use on iOS, but they do have apps.
Music	Zune	I have Zunes still and use Zune software and the subscription service.
Podcasts	Zune
TV/Movies	misc	I use Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and iTunes for TV and Movies. There’s still a lot of innovation to come in this category.
Pictures/Videos	na	I keep all of these local, and back them up. I use explorer to get them off the iPhone. I don’t sync them around.
Backup	iDrive	offsite file backup

 

Ok, finally on to the topic in the title. How did I finally discover a way to create calendar entries with my preferred email reminders on something other than the desktop version of Google calendar?

Like I said above, the first key is switch from whatever iPhone account you are using for Google calendars (probably Exchange) and use Google Sync (listed as “GMAIL!” in add accounts). Google Sync will use your default reminders set in Google calendar if you don’t add them in iPhone. This was a revelation. I found out about it here - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile/sxF0iQs7bR4 . As noted in that forum though, this breaks multiple calendars, which is a problem as that is how I follow the rest of the family. They point you to the following URL http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ with some instructions - http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendars-with.html but that didn’t work for me, my other calendars never showed up. Then finally I found - http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674&topic=13950&ctx=topic which lead me to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect . I was able to successfully add my other calendars there, and have them show up on my iPhone.

So finally, after literally years, my PIM search is done. Only remaining question is, how long with this fragile peace last?