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Missing shared Google Calendars on iPhone/iPad and how to sync them

When someone shares a calendar with you on Google, those calendars often aren’t available to you on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Follow the next steps in order to get those calendars viewable on your devices.

  1. Go to google.com or gmail.com and sign into the Google account you typically use.
  2. Next, visit: https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect
  3. Check or uncheck any calendars you’d like to see on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac’s calendar application.
  4. Press save.
  5. Now go to your calendar app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and refresh the calendar — the devices will automatically refresh periodically for you but if you want to force it to refresh follow these steps:
    On Mac: Open the Calendar app, then on your keyboard hold Command and press the letter R. Let go of the keys and shortly you’ll start getting the new calendar showing up.
    On iPhone/iPad: Open the Calendar app, then click the Calendars option at the bottom. Look to see if the new calendars you chose to sync are there from Step 3 – if not, take your finger and pull down to refresh. Click Done in the upper right after you see the new calendar appear.

Google Calendar Sync Settings, Shared Calendars

By |2023-06-15T14:54:53-07:00June 15, 2023|Tech Tips|0 Comments
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Fixing WinMail.dat attachments in Office 365

Every once in a while Outlook will send out an attachment called “winmail.dat”. This attachment contains the contents of the email, attachments, and other formatting information that the original sender intended. If you or someone else is using an application besides Outlook such as an iPhone/iPad or Mac to check your email, the Winmail.dat attachment issue can cause a lot of trouble.

Many articles I’ve read and attempted have various workarounds for the issue, however these steps work on the back end to make sure Outlook can’t send out an email with a “strange” attachment.

Have your IT administrator who handles your email follow the steps below or send them to this page.

1) On a Windows 10 or Windows 11 system, click start menu and search for “Windows PowerShell” – right click and choose run as Administrator

PowerShell, run as administrator

2) Follow each command mentioned below with a return to submit it. Type in the PowerShell window:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

PowerShell, Set-ExecutionPolicy

3) Type y to accept the Execution Policy Change

PowerShell, press Y

4) Type these additional items – change the [email protected] email address to your own administrative email account:
Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName [email protected]

5) A window asking you to sign in will pop up. Type in your Office365 credentials that has Administrative privileges in the window the pops up

Username Dialog Box

6) Continue typing these next commands in the PowerShell application:

Set-RemoteDomain Default -TNEFEnabled $false

Set-RemoteDomain Default -TNEFEnabled $false

7) To check if it was done right, type:

Get-RemoteDomain | fl *

Get-RemoteDomain | fl *

8) Look down the list for “TNEFEnabled” and it should read “False”

TNEFEnabled false

8) Now to disconnect, type:

Disconnect-ExchangeOnline

TNEFEnabled false

9) Close the Windows PowerShell application

By |2023-06-15T13:33:55-07:00January 27, 2023|Tech Tips|0 Comments
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RingCentral tips – creating a holiday or vacation greeting

Perhaps you’re hoping to change your greeting during the holidays or add a special greeting for when you’re away, you can follow these steps to create one that gives the message you want to say and then sends people to voicemail.

1) Go to Ringcentral.com and click Login in the upper right, then select Admin Portal

2) Click Phone System at the top, then choose Auto-Receptionist on the left. Choose General Settings. Select “Company Call Handling” to expand it out.
Choose Edit Custom Rule.

3) Turn on an existing Rule if it is there, or choose “Add Rule”
Note: You can also click any of the blue link areas to edit things – like the Time. For example you can change last year’s Winter Holiday message to the new dates by clicking the “Time” section, making your changes, then saving your changes.
If you recorded a message that included the date a prior year, you’ll want to re-record a new message with the new dates, or simply re-record without a date. Skip to step 10 “Record the Message you want to Play” in these directions.

4) Enter a name for the rule, like Thanksgiving, or Vacation, then click Next.

5) Now select Date and/or Time and choose Specific Date Range, then enter the dates you want to have this greeting apply — for example 11/23/2022 to 11/28/2022. Click next.

6) Now you choose what happens – select Voicemail, then click Select extension under the “Message-only extension” option.

7) Select an existing extension if you’ve done this in prior years or want to reuse one – like an extension called “Vacation” — otherwise click + New Message-Only Extension in the upper right.

8) Give the extension a name, like Thanksgiving (or Vacation), give it an extension number away from others you might use – like 46, then enter an email address where these voicemails would deliver to. Click Save when you’re done.

9) Select your extension from the choices and click “Done” on the right. Then press the “Save” option in the lower right. The next steps will be to record what the greeting says.

Recording the message you want to play

10) On the left side you’ll see a section called “Groups” – click on that, then click on “Message-Only Extensions”

11) Click on the name of the extension you just created – for example “Thanksgiving.”

12) Click Voicemail & Notifications.
Optional – to deliver these holiday or vacation messages to your main extension: Look for “Send voicemail to” and select Another Extension. Select your main company extension (often the extension 0).
Required – Next click the Edit option on the left – this is where you’ll be recording your holiday or vacation greeting so get what you’re going to say ready!

13) Under the “Set Greeting” option click Default and instead choose “Custom.”

14) Follow the prompts to record a greeting – you can have the system call your phone number by entering your phone number under Call Me At. Or you can have it record using your computer’s microphone. Or if you’ve already crafted an audio file with your greeting/recording you can choose the “Importing” option. Once you’ve followed through the steps, click done.

15) Click Save so your changes save. You’re all set!

By |2022-11-17T13:45:12-08:00November 17, 2022|PAHS, Power Speaking, Tech Tips, Tech Walkthrough Guides|0 Comments
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Mac OS Ventura changes the System Preferences – Here’s how it used to look.

The latest system software, Mac OS Ventura (Mac OS 13) brings with it a new System Preferences, now referred to as System Settings. The changes are attempting to align with the Settings app on the iPhone and iPad. For those of us who lead people through settings this can be a big challenge if we don’t have a system to visually reference. Below I’ll place the most common system preference windows from Monterey (Mac OS 12) that I use so we have some visual reference to refer to in the future for those choosing not to upgrade to Ventura.

Main System Preferences window
Security & Privacy –> Privacy tab, Accessibility option
Security & Privacy –> Privacy tab, Screen Recording option
Apple ID
Battery (Energy Saver)–> Battery settings
Battery (Energy Saver)–> Power Adapter settings
Network–> Location dropdown. Feature is no longer present on Ventura in 13.0?
Network–> WiFi main settings
Network–> WiFi Preferred Network settings
Network–> WiFi DNS tab
Sharing System Preference
Trackpad System Preference
Sound–> Input
Sound–> Output
By |2022-11-02T12:01:40-07:00November 2, 2022|Tech Tips|0 Comments
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Watch out for Email Scams!

Over the past year I have been seeing an enormous increase in scams coming into my own inbox and those of my clients. Many people I know have already been scammed for upwards of thousands of dollars. Spam filtering helps a bit but every once in a while scam emails do come through. Be extra careful these days.

The goal of these emails is to get you to call the phone number or click a link – once they get you on the phone they can pretend to be anyone they want and trick you into following any directions they want. Don’t call the phone number, open an email attachment, or click a link in these emails!

The only antivirus/anti-malware product I tend to recommend is MalwareBytes.

A few tips you can follow:

  1. Investigate the sender of the email. Move your mouse over the sender of the email or click the icon to the right of the email sender to see what their email address is – if their email address is related to the actual company it could be legitimate, but if it is a random email account then it is definitely a scam.
For example in the scam email you’ll see below, the sender came from a random @gmail.com email address.
  1. Look over the email for poor spelling, bad design, and things that don’t make much sense. Scammers are getting much better though, and sometimes copy legitimate emails in their entirety, however if the email looks a little off then trust your gut — it’s a scam. 

    For example in the scam email you’ll see below, there are many clues – “hello user”, “Dear User”, awkward language use, extra spacing and capitalization where there shouldn’t be, and a strange subject line. Additionally in the example below, the sender didn’t even pretend to come from McAfee and is instead “Pilgrim King.”
  2. Consider if you’ve ever done business with the company, if not then it’s almost certainly a scam.
  3. If you have done business with the company, then you can open a new web browser window and sign into your account to look over any prior purchases or see if they mention your credit card having expired.
  4. Don’t feel bad about ignoring an email or trashing it if you’re not sure — the next time you try to order something online or work with that company they will make extra sure you know that you owe them money on their website itself.

You’re also welcome to send me the email in question and I can advise further. If you don’t hear back from me within a day or two then you know it was a scam as I likely won’t see your email due to the filters I have in place.

Scam Example:
By |2022-08-03T12:09:10-07:00August 3, 2022|Tech Tips|0 Comments
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How to shrink a PDF when you crafted a doc in Word or PowerPoint

Sometimes you need to save a smaller version of your file or presentation in order to get it over to someone else. Email messages often only allow you to send emails with attachments of a certain size, like 5MB.

Follow the steps below to use the Reduce File Size feature in the newer versions of Word and PowerPoint so you can get smaller PDF files and also smaller word and powerpoint documents as well.

  1. With your document open in Word or PowerPoint, click the File menu in the upper left and select “Reduce File Size“
  • 2. On the dialog box that comes up, select an appropriate setting for what the other person will be using the document for – most often using “On Screen (150 ppi)” will be appropriate for most uses. Also keep the checkbox on “Delete cropped areas of pictures” — doing this will remove all the extra information from parts of the picture that you may not be displaying in your document.
  • 3. Choose File–> Save As, then select the File Format “PDF.” Give your file a name and save it somewhere you can find it.
  • 4. That’s it! You now have a smaller PDF file without any need for using Acrobat Professional or other tools.

If you’d like to try and shrink the PDF even further, you can follow my guide on compressing a PDF using PDFCompress located here: https://wizdomonwheels.com/how-to-shrink-a-pdf-file-on-a-mac-without-needing-to-purchase-adobe-acrobat-professional/

By |2022-03-09T12:32:36-08:00March 9, 2022|Power Speaking, Tech Tips, Tech Walkthrough Guides, WOW Cast|0 Comments
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Formatting a drive for Time Machine use

Occasionally you may purchase a drive that comes pre-formatted for use on Windows and will need to erase it to use properly on the Mac. Follow these directions to get your drive formatted for the Mac.

If you already know how to use Disk Utility, the format information to choose is APFS or APFS (encrypted) and the scheme should be set to GUID Partition Map. Optionally for a traditional portable hard drive you can also select the format Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Once you have connected the new drive to your computer, follow these steps below.

  1. Search your computer for Disk Utility — the easiest way is to click the magnifying glass (Spotlight) icon in the upper right of your computer and type Disk Utility. Once you’ve found it you can press the return key on your keyboard or double click on Disk Utility from the list of results.
  • 2. Click the View menu at the top of the screen and select “Show All Devices” or look in the screenshot below for this icon and click it, then select the same option.
  • 3. Select the Drive you want to erase on the left side under the headline “External.” In the case of the Samsung T7 portable SSD drive you can choose the option that reads “Samsung PSSD T7 Media” at the top of the list of External.
  • 4. Click the Erase option near the upper right of the window, give the drive a name like “Backup” and then choose APFS as the format, and GUID Partition Map as the Scheme.
  • 5. After the drive erases you can close the Disk Utility window. Next click the Apple Menu in the upper left and select “System Preferences”
  • 6. Click Time Machine from the options — if you don’t see the option you can click the Back arrow in the upper left or the series of boxes in the upper left, then select Time Machine.
  • 7. Choose “Select Disk”
  • 8. Select the drive you erased from the list of choices. It should be named whatever you named the drive in Step 4. Click “Use Disk” if you don’t plan to encrypt the drive, and if you do — click the “Encrypt” option in the lower left and enter a password of your choice when it asks. Encryption can help protect your information if the drive ever falls into malicious hands.
By |2022-03-06T20:45:35-08:00March 6, 2022|Power Speaking, Tech Tips, Tech Walkthrough Guides|0 Comments
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UniFi Dream Machine setup issues and potential resolution

During the setup of various UniFi/Ubiquiti Dream Machines, I occasionally run into setup issues where the device is unable to get an internet connection during the setup phase. Often these are units that have sat on the shelf for a little while and have old firmware loaded onto them. In order to get them fully operational you’ll need to go through some pretty advanced steps to load the firmware onto the units manually.

One method to tell ahead of time if you will have issues with this is if the Dream Machine has a Test Date of 5/17/2021 or earlier.

  1. Get a computer with an ethernet cable connection either through a USB to Ethernet adapter or a direct ethernet connection. The next steps will be written using a Mac for setup purposes – adjust steps as needed for a PC/Linux.
  2. Download the latest firmware update available for the Dream Machine and rename the file to simply dreammachine.bin for simplicity of Terminal commands yet to come.
    Details on this step: Go to https://www.ui.com/download/unifi Or browse ui.com then click Support at the top right. Click Downloads. Scroll to bottom of the page and choose “View full file list.” Click UniFi at the top bar then look for UniFi OS – Dream Machine (currently 1.11.0 as of 2/28/2022) then click download. Accept the terms and click Download File. Look in your downloads folder and rename the recent .bin file as dreammachine.bin
  3. Connect the Dream Machine to your internet connection with the WAN port at the bottom of the Dream Machine, then connect an ethernet cable from any of the 4 ports into your ethernet enabled computer.
  4. Open the Terminal application on your computer (you can search for it using Spotlight magnifying glass in the upper right or browse to the Terminal in your Applications folder Utilities.
  5. In the terminal window paste this command and press return: 
    scp ~/Downloads/dreammachine.bin [email protected]:~/dreammachine.bin
  6. Type yes and press return when it says the RSA key fingerprint.. are you sure you want to continue. *If there is an error about the fingerprint not matching, see troubleshooting below these steps. This likely occurred because you’ve tried these steps multiple times on multiple Dream Machines and need to erase the old SSH key.
  7. For the root password type in: ubnt
  8. Wait for the transfer to complete – you’ll see a percentage going up to 100% and then you’ll return to the terminal prompt after it’s done.
  9. Next we’ll want to ssh into the device and apply the update. To do this use the command: ssh [email protected]
  10. Password as a reminder is: ubnt
    Then paste or type this command: ubnt-upgrade ~/dreammachine.bin
  11. Wait for a few minutes as the Dream Machine upgrades itself – after the startup chime you can go back to your iPhone or Android phone and set up the Dream Machine as you would normally do.

* If the RSA key fingerprint “doesn’t match” during step 6, you’ll want to go into your user folder on the computer, show invisible files if you don’t have them visible yet (shortcut command is Command, Shift, period). Look for a folder named .ssh and open it. Delete the known_hosts file, then try step 6 again.

By |2022-02-28T16:34:58-08:00February 28, 2022|Power Speaking, Tech Tips, Tech Walkthrough Guides|0 Comments
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Webcam comparison between the Aoboco Stream Webcam, the Logitech C922 Pro HD Stream Webcam and the LG 5k Display

As we work from home, the need for a good webcam becomes more and more necessary. I’ve recommended the Logitech C922 webcam to many people when they ask which product to get, however I really wanted to understand the quality difference between the various options.


Today we have a comparison between the Aoboco Stream Webcam:
Purchase from: Amazon

Logitech C922 Pro HD Stream Webcam:
Purchase from: Amazon, BestBuy, B&H Photo




The LG Ultrafine 5k display:
Purchase from: Apple, Amazon, BestBuy, B&H Photo

My general thoughts are: For around $50, the Aoboco Stream Webcam is a great deal. The only downside is the audio is not as good as on the LG or the Logitech to my ears.
The image quality on all three was quite good, with the Logitech and the Aoboco looking more cool (blueish) than the LG warm (yellowish). Personal preference will likely matter on whether you prefer the warmer tones or the cooler tones.
Audio quality was pretty similar on the LG and the Logitech and quite good. All three would certainly sound decent in a group Zoom call or one-on-one virtual meeting.
The Logitech had nice LED illumination that lit up when the camera was active. The Aoboco offered a much brighter and adjustable ring light that could be enabled at any time.

By |2021-05-21T10:50:57-07:00May 20, 2021|Recommended Equipment, Tech Tips|0 Comments
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Extra security when you travel – using a VPN (Virtual Private Network)

Man sitting in front of computer

One major tip security advisors recommend is to use a VPN when you’re connecting to a WiFi network that you have no control over. An example might be a coffee shop, hotel, rental home, or airport.

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way to connect to another network from your phone or computer and then send all the internet traffic in a secure way (encrypted). By encrypting the traffic going back and forth your information is unable to be intercepted by a malicious actor who may be on the same WiFi network as you are using.

Many years ago in Palo Alto one of the Starbucks wifi networks was maliciously spoofed. One of my clients had all the information they sent over the internet monitored as they used the Starbucks network. They had to change a lot of their passwords as they were compromised. Thankfully their computer itself wasn’t hacked, however that was a likelier possibility these days than it was back then. Had they been using a VPN when connecting over the malicious network, they would have prevented a lot of this mischief from occurring.

iOS Connected Window

Besides the security of connecting to a VPN when traveling, you also have the benefit of greater privacy. If you’re browsing various websites and reading things you would prefer others to not know publicly it is best to be connected to a VPN.

There are quite a lot of options out there for VPN services, however one major thing to avoid is any VPN offered for free. One main reason you are choosing to use a VPN is for privacy, and a free VPN service will use your browsing traffic to sell you additional products and resell your browsing history. As with many things in life, free is never quite free, there is often a catch.

My favorite VPN service is called NordVPN. The reason I like them is they are reasonably priced, really fast, allow access to Netflix/Hulu and other video resources, and keep no logs of your internet activity.

Once you’ve chosen a VPN service, you can then sign up for an account and download the software to your computer and/or phone. Once the software is installed you will simply open it, sign in, and then connect.

Many of the products have various unique features like automatically connecting you. NordVPN offers an interesting feature in the settings of the app that will auto connect you when you’re not on your “trusted” or home wifi. To get to that feature, open the application, click on the Preferences, Open main window (if it asks), and click the Auto-connect option on the left of the Preferences window. From there you can choose to trust your current Wifi network and then enable the “When using untrusted network” option. After that the program will auto connect you to the VPN if you’re not on your home wifi or other “trusted” network — pretty cool!

If you would like to support me and want to also get a VPN provider I trust, just use the affiliate link below for NordVPN:

https://go.nordvpn.net/aff_c?offer_id=15&aff_id=53161

My second choice is the lower cost – AtlasVPN, affiliate link below:

https://atlasvpn.com/deals?offering=2yrs_exclusive_2&utm_source=1549&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=69&utm_term=&utm_content=&transaction_id=102be2ad852cd639ee99c7b85781e3&offer_id=69

By |2023-06-15T13:36:08-07:00March 4, 2021|Recommended Equipment, Tech Tips|0 Comments
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