Windows Network Location Awareness

A while back I was stuck in this strange world during two conferences. My Windows 7 laptop said there was no Wi-Fi connection (red marking through the network strength indicator) but things were working. That threw me off when things weren't actually working. A colleague mentioned Windows NLA (Network Location Awareness) which could get confused depending on the nature/quality of the network(s) you flip between.

Here are some people's thoughts on the matter: https://www.google.com/?q=windows%20%22network%20location%20awareness%22

Counting the number of times a word appears in a column in Excel

How do you count the number of times a thing appears in a column of text? For example, if you're the type of person who downloads your credit card information, how many purchases did you make at any particular vendor?

If you know the number of things you're counting is small and manageable, using count (if numeric) or counta (if non-numeric) at the bottom might be the way to go. But if you don't (or can't) know, there's an elegant, nifty use of countif that solves the problem instantly - without resorting to PivotTables or any fancy stuff.

(image property of KyleMit on StackOverflow)

You can then filter, group, etc.

COUNTIF(range, criteria) - set the range to the entire column, and just count the thing next to you.

Simple. Brilliant. Love it.

Full article at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18661016/how-many-times-do-each-value-appear-in-a-column.

Microsoft Word: Find and Replace characters within parentheses

This is something I have to occasionally do, and I'm always re-learning from scratch:

Thing (I want to find and replace) with more stuff (different item to find and replace) and other info (the only consistent thing is that these are in parentheses) in-between.

1. Open the Find-Replace dialog
2. If necessary, click the More button to display and enable Use wildcards
3. The ( is a special character, so you must escape it with \ i.e. \(
4. Use the asterisk * to indicate the anythingness in-between
5. Terminate with \)
1. Your search string looks like \(*\)

Problem: How do I replace the contents between parentheses? Haven't figured that out yet. You use parentheses to demarcate items in a search string - (thing)(item)(stuff) in the Find box are represented as \1\2\3 in the Replace box. But (\()(*)(\)) in the Find box just keeps failing on me.

The trick at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm doesn't quite seem to be the answer. Any ideas?

Getting Android media apps to ignore certain folders

Just learned this handy tip that I have yet to test out. On Android, you can prevent the media scanner from indexing a directory by placing a file entitled .nomedia in it.

http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/138470/how-to-make-my-car-realize-my-phones-system-sounds-arent-music

http://androidforums.com/threads/whats-a-nomedia-file.307529/