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

Daily Battles: Task Scheduler Error - The specified account name is not valid

Microsoft Windows systems have a built in utility called Task Scheduler that can be actually quite handy when you need to schedule things to run on a fixed schedule with some flexibility in conditions. It is probably used more by system admins on the Windows Server family of products to schedule maintenance work or kick off certain routine jobs.

I use Task Scheduler mainly for scheduling routine work for Philip Jane, my home-brewed Smart Home Assistant, such as reminding my kids that they are going to be late for school, or it is time to go to bed. By the way, the name Philip comes from the book The Outcast by Maoni and Jane comes from the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, both I highly recommend. I used to write my own scheduler, until one day I realized that I could just use this existing utility and save myself a bunch of work. So I incorporated this as part of the Philip Jane microservice ecosystem. It has been working great for many years, until this morning.

School season has just started, so I was turning some expired tasks back on, so Philip Jane can dutifully provide friendly reminders to my kids (so I don't have to). As I was saving the changes, I got an error message saying The specified account name is not valid.

Mind you that the system has been working for years and I had never ran into this problem. As an expert in Windows system (I used to make a living as a system admin), I sincerely rebooted the physical machine (one of Philip's many existences) that hosted Philip's scheduler functionalities, hoping that would resolve the problem, which it didn't. Now the research began. Sure enough, I am not the only one who suffered.

Turned out once again (and again and again and again), the culprit is a recent Windows Update. The update now requires local user name to explicitly include the server name. Even though I am not running a Windows server, the same restriction applies to all Windows 10 systems that had the latest update. So instead of using Lanny as the login name, now I have to explicitly use Philip\Lanny as the login name.

If this is what Microsoft wants, then why still default to the local user name when task scheduler prompts for a login is beyond me. But at least this allowed me to proceed.

Here's a discussion of the exact problem on TechNet, under Windows Server 2019 support. TechNet is the big knowledge repo for all Microsoft related support docs.

TechNet Discussion

But I want to go back to the real culprit again. This is a Windows 10 update forced upon me by Microsoft. And every time when I install Windows Update, I am always under the fear that something used to work will break. That is just not a great user experience. But hey, I am not the only one complaining, and I don't think complaining works when it comes to Microsoft.

For those of you that also ran into this problem, hope this blog post helps!


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

Daily Battles: Google Hangouts Sending Messages To Yourself

Google Hangouts (used to be called Google Talk) is a free chat app provided by Google that supports WiFi calls, video conferencing in addition to the basic text messaging capabilities. It is the main way of communication between my teenage daughter and me when she is at school and I am at work, because I am a GOOD parent and held my ground firm and still refuse to give her a smart phone (which makes her kind of unique in her social groups).

Recently, whenever I send her a Google Hangout message, I would also get the notification on my phone for that message I just sent her. And this is becoming really annoying!!

Searched online but couldn't find much useful info. Then it just dawned on me. In my recent troubleshooting with Google Home setup, I had to add my daughter's Google account to my Google Home set up in order to properly grant permissions for different users. Could this be the problem?

By the way, if you don't already know, Google Home is a Google-made smart speaker/voice assistant like Amazon's Echo, which can be used to control smart home devices, translate, perform knowledge look up, play music, and used as a timer.

Upon removing my daughter's Google Account from within the Google Home app, sure enough, the notification stopped when I messaged her once gain in Google Hangouts app. Mystery solved! The underline problem is that Google Hangouts and Google Home apps both use the Android underneath Google Account(s) set up to determine what's the proper action to take. But since Google is NOTORIOUS for one project group not caring about another project group's work, end users ended up having a bad experience and had to troubleshoot by themselves.

This reminds me of the fight I had with Google Home Mini not working with Google Mesh WiFi, and the fight I had with Google Home multiple account/owner issues earlier. But those would be the contents of another Daily Battles blog post.

Happy Fighting!

Video of the Day:

This video of Kangaroos Hopping in Snow somehow 
is really bringing peace to my mind!!

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

A great summary article on what happened inside Google for the last three years

Sharing a good read, an article on WIRED summarizing all the events happened inside Google for the last three years. WIRED talked with 47 current and former Google employees and then produced a great story explaining the bumpy road Google had to take in the last three years. The article was written by NITASHA TIKU, a senior writer at WIRED.

THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE GOOGLE, THE HAPPIEST COMPANY IN TECH

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