Using Empower (Personal Capitol) to connect to SoFi difficulties

tl:dr... use the authenticator app even though it it says it sent you a text

I've been using Personal Capitol to track most of my money accounts for a few years. It's now called Empower but it hasn't changed. It easily connects to all my accounts and bring them all together in one view. The only price I pay are notifications about how I should have my stuff looked over by a pro, easy enough to ignore.

I recently started using SoFi for banking, and it integrated into Empower with no problem. SoFi is after all an internet-only bank. It worked great for a few months then started saying there was a problem and offered to fix it. Well the fix was to send me a text code, but the text never came, ever, after dozens of attempts. I searched the internet every week or so when I tried the fix button in vain. Then one day, Empower posted a note about this exact problem on their site. Great, they at least know about it, so they have to fix it soon, right? Well months later it still didn't work and they removed the post. 

Alright, I'm getting to the point. After one random time trying to log into SoFi's site directly and it prompted me to use my authenticator, a moment of clarity rush over me. Empower was telling me to be on the lookout for a text, but what it really was looking for was the authenticator code. It just asked for that code one time and never since.

Leave a comment if you've run into this problem. Even better if this post helped you out, although I think I'm the only one that didn't pick up on it.

Jim

Update: In Google style, the instructions above no longer work. Use this link instead and you find the desktop version there, https://www.google.com/earth/about/versions/

Enable Query Builder in Outlook

 So, every time I get a computer upgrade at work, or start a new job, I need to enable the query builder in Outlook. It essentially adds a third tab to the Advanced Find window. I like it because I can create nested AND/OR conditions for detailed filtering. The problem is, I do it so infrequently that I need to search for how to do it. The instructions that are out there are becoming scarce but following this will work. 

Link --> https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/using-query-builder/

Essentially: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\xx.0\Outlook\QueryBuilder
where xx.0 equals your Outlook version number. 

The rub; if you launch regedit as a different elevated user, HKEY_CURRENT_USER won't be for the profile that's using Outlook. My workaround is add the regular account to local admins, edit the registry, and if your company is strict, remove the account from local admins.

Also, if you alternatively edit the appropriate USER hive instead of elevating the user, changes will not take effect until you reboot, and even then it's ify

Wires-X Busy Error

I had an interesting problem as a first-time user of the Yaesu Wires-X software along with the SCU-20 (from the SCU-40 kit) on an FTM-300DR. Whenever I tried to connect to certain rooms, I would get a "BUSY ERROR" on the radio display, or "Canceled call to Analog Node or Analog & Digital Room" if I connected from the software. This happened with a majority of rooms but not all. I started the radio holding the [DX] (Wires-X) button while powering on the radio. These instructions are found early on in the manual and starts the radio in PDN mode. Sounded good to me.

It wasn't until page 50 of the manual that I found I should be turning the radio on while holding both the [DX] and [GM] keys. Now the radio starts in WIRES-X NODE mode and pressing A/B puts it in Direct. I can only control the radio from the Wires-X software in this mode, but it's a start

Successfully Backing-up Whatsapp but failing to restore

I got a new Samsung Galaxy S21 FE and transferred most apps from my S9 to it but I came across a problem with Whatsapp. It was a simple mistake on my part but there's not a lot of troubleshooting information about this. Well, there is, it says to make sure you're using the right phone number but I was sure that I was, and it didn't tell me I wasn't. There's also nowhere in Whatsapp that tells you the registered phone number.

Anyway, I tried the Google drive method and had tons of successful backups but that led to messages on the new phone saying it couldn't find the backup. I placed the backup under multiple Google accounts that I could access from the new phone but no backups were found.

Then I tried copying the local backups in the Whatsapp folder to the same location on the new phone after clearing data. Some folks will tell you you need to uninstall and reinstall Whatsapp but clearing data (long-press the icon) is good enough. That looked very promising since it found the backups and asked if I wanted to restore them, but it flashed "0 messages restored" when it was done and carried on like a new user.

In the end, after using the phone's 'real' number up until now, I tried my Google voice number instead and that worked, after all these weeks. Well, I forgot that Whatsapp works with virtual numbers so I never tried it. Wouldn't it be nice if the restore process said something like 'the backup you're trying to restore is from a different number.' As if obscurity is protecting the backups. Like 'if we don't tell the bad guys what's wrong, they'll just give up and go away', not likely. 

If you're having troubles restoring your Whatsapp backups, is it possible you could've originally used a number different than the one you're trying to recover with? Something to think about.

Unable to eject or dismount USB and Secure Digital (SD) cards

When you consider that ejecting removable media from the Windows systray has been a thing since Windows 95, you would figure that Windows would offer a better way of telling us why it can't eject a USB/SD/Image device today. There have been times that the dialog window will tell me what program is causing the issue, but more often it gives no clue. One not-so-convenient trick is to use Sysinternals Process Explorer to search for the removable drive letter in use to see the culprit. What do you do if the culprit is explore.exe? It would've been quicker to reboot the computer than to go through the time of searching for the process.
If you keep a few Remote Desktop sessions open, it may be worth it to disconnect them all before attempting to eject media. Turns out that the default behavior of RD is to connect to these devices and they don't release then when the host OS tried to eject. Again, how long has Microsoft been at this! We all know that RD does this, but it isn't always apparent that's the reason it won't eject when you need to.
Since I've been burned by this so many times, it's the first thing I do when my eject is blocked. I'm not at the point yet that I'll remember to do this before I eject but I no longer hit dead-ends when I get the message.

Securely wipe a file, folder, or entire drive with Microsoft's sdelete

I recently wanted to wipe a 1TB drive before donating. I just wanted to make sure my bits were not easily regained from this thing. I know a format would do the trick but who knows who's out there buying up used HHD to try to recover old data. My initial search turned up shareware as well as costly apps. Since this was a passing curiosity, I wasn't going to spend money so the first free one that caught my eye was from diskwipe.org. Running it requires admin rights, so I let it. Fist thing I noticed is it doesn't let you chose a physical drive, only drive letters were available. Not impressed so far, I decided not to give up and I chose the drive letter and clicked Wipe Disk. The next disappointment was it wanted me to select a file system and format options. Wait a second, is this just a format utility? Still in a curious mood, I used NTFS and clicked next. Okay, finally some promise; I'm asked for the erasing pattern I want to use. Options are
One Pass Zeros (quick)
One Pass Random (quick)
Russian GOST P50739-95 (2 passes - quick)
British HMG IS5 (3 passes - slow)
US Department of Defense DoD 5220.22-M(E) (3 passes - slow)
US Department of Defense DoD 5220.22-M(ECE) (7 passes - very slow)
Peter Guttman (35 passes - extremely slow)

Impressive, right? I choose a simple one; "One Pass Random (quick)" and let it go. It fails but I notice Windows Defender interfering. Let's take a look, what! FORMAT.COM wants to access my K: drive. Is FORMAT.COM still a thing? So this app is using a built-in utility to do this? Confidence level hits the floor and I'm no longer interested in this utility from 2012. Lesson learned.

All of that takes me to Mark Russinovich's Sdelete which was already on my system (because it's included in Microsoft's Sysinternals Suite.) It can wipe files, folders, and, to my surprise, whole disks right down to low-level. I've used it in the past to securely delete folders using delete -p 2 -s E:\VirtualMachines\VirtualMachine01. These parameters are for 2 passes (-p 2) and subdirectories -s. Okay, finally a utility I know how to use. It can at very least wipe files, folders, and free space on the volume but what else can it do? Well, the help contents usage showed a third option with no explanation...

sdelete [-p passes] [-z|-c] <physical disk number>

THAT'S IT! I fed it the disk number found in Disk Manager and it took off. 

PS D:\Perm\SysinternalsSuite> .\sdelete.exe -z -c 6

SDelete v2.01 - Secure file delete

Copyright (C) 1999-2018 Mark Russinovich

Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

SDelete is set for 1 pass.

Cleaning disk 6:

Pass 0 progress: 20% (41.47 MB/s)

Looking at the drive in disk manager I could see volumes disappearing from the disk. This is what I've been looking for and from someone I trust.

So in short, if you're looking to wipe a drive before giving it to someone else, Sysinternals Sdelete, with the options above, is your answer.

Looking for a full installer of Google Earth Pro?...

The default way of getting Google earth is to download the Installer stub file. Once this file is launched, it goes out to the Google servers and directly pulls the most recent version, no matter what version of the stub installer you use. This is great, unless it doesn't work. One such case is when a firewall or proxy gets in the way.
Google provides a full, Direct installer but it's not intuitive to get to. Follow this path...
From https://www.google.com/earth/ , click Earth Version. Click "Google Earth Pro on desktop" in upper right of screen (not in banner) as of this writing. After page scroll click Download Earth Pro on desktop. In the pop-over window click the Direct Installers page link in the text. Drop down the Download a Google Earth Pro direct installer menu and choose the appropriate installer in the top version group.