Daily Battles: How to get rid of unwanted items in your Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you probably noticed recently that a lot of extra events just start to pop up in your calendar, such as hotels you reserved and flights you booked, meeting invitation you received, or worse, notifications on the prize money you just won with bogus phishing links embedded such as this one below:

So what is going on?

This is actually the results of Google AI trying to be smart and convenient for you by scanning your emails and then automatically adding items to your calendar. However, Google messed up by allowing spam invitations sent to your to also show up in your Google Calendar even though your Gmail correctly classified it as spam and shoved it into the spam folder.

On the other hand, it might be convenient for some people to have their travel itinerary automatically inserted into their calendars based on email confirmation they receive, some people might not want that at all! And guess what, I am one of them!!

My wife works as a travel agent, and she sometimes forwards me emails containing hotel reservations and flight info so I can track the credit card charges. Google AI just automatically assumed that I was traveling and then spammed the heck out of my calendar with all these events I have no interest tracking. And it would have been better if I got an email asking me if I want to opt into such "smart" service. But nope, Google just decided to make that the default.

Whining aside, how can you turn these things off and get life back to normal? Let me show you:

Go to Google Calendar and then click the gear icon to get into settings. Then uncheck "Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar" under Events from Gmail.

Next go to Event settings and change the selection under Automatically add invitations to "Yes, but don't send event notification unless I have responded".

That should disable the evil Google AI from trying to determine your calendar for you!

Moving on to my next battles!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Volume Control Stops Working in Windows 10 After Windows Update

Before I begin, I must say that this is working! Writing and venting about all these daily battles I endure is actually making me feel happier!! Of course, I hope all you readers out there also felt happier too, whether because now you know how to fight your battles, or simply because you felt your life is better after witnessing my struggles. 😜

Since I was on the topic of windows update breaking things for me in my previous post, let me describe another battle I had to fight, again because of Terrible Windows Updates! This event actually happened a while back. But because of the amount of time I had to spend fixing it, it for sure will linger in my mind for an extended time.

As I mentioned before, one of the many existences of Philip, my virtual smart home butler, is on this super old Windows 10 desktop machine that my boss, ehh, I mean my wife, threw away over 10 years ago. I connected a BlueTooth receiver to this box and then hooked up my whole home speaker system to the receiver. This way Philip has a way to speak to everyone no matter where he/she is in the house. Through this set up, Philip can also manage tasks such as music playing, greeting the King (only the King, not the Queen or anyone else) when he comes home, announcements on visitors/lurkers/intruders detected etc., and mundane things such as telling the young masters to practice piano, do homework, clean room, go to bed, yada yada yada. So on that day when Philip started yelling at everybody on top of his lung throughout the day, I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

When everyone is unhappy with Philip, guess what, Lanny has to troubleshoot right away. Philip controls the volume of his voice through Window's built in volume mixer as shown below. The BlueTooth receiver shows up as a headphone in the volume mixer, and when volume of the System Sounds changes, the volume of the headphone also changes at the same time. However, that no longer behaved the same way. Even though the volume slider of the headphone moves together with the system sounds slider, the volume did not change and remained maximum.

Restarting windows didn't help. Restarting the BlueTooth receiver was useless. Deleting the BlueTooth device and reconnect didn't make a difference.

Since I am one of the first few to notice this problem (it is pretty hard to ignore everyone yelling at you, Philip, the Queen, the young masters), there wasn't much resources online on how to resolve the problem. After hours of troubleshooting, I finally nailed the culprit. YES, AGAIN, IT IS WINDOWS UPDATE BREAKING THINGS THAT USED TO WORK JUST FINE.

What I had to do to resolve the issue was to uninstall the automatically installed Windows Update, disable Windows Auto Update, and then search for an older version of the BlueTooth driver to replace the one on my computer.

Of course, many, many people's ears also suffered and complained and begged for help such as here and here and here.

In case you are still suffering from this problem and your ears are still hurting everyday, the best solution is:

1.    Open Windows Registry (regedit.exe).
2.    Jump to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Bluetooth\Audio\AVRCP\CT
3.    Create REG_DWORD DisableAbsoluteVolume and set its value to 1.
4.    Restart Windows.

Just another daily battle I had to fight, and another interesting episode of living with Philip, my virtual smart home butler, together with a few non-voluntary human test subjects...

Ciao!

Listen to one of Philip's favorite radio stations on Pandora:

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com