How To Sync Facebook Birthdays To Android Calendar

Most of us rely on Facebook for reminding our friend’s birthdays. But you don’t always have to open Facebook to see whose birthday is today. You can sync all your birthdays (and other events) from Facebook to calendar in your Android phone. Lets see how can we do that.

Step 1 – Open your Facebook account and click on ‘Events’ in the left toolbar.

Step 2 – Right click on ‘Birthdays’, below the list of events in right side.

Step 3 – Click on ‘Copy Link Location’ from the menu. Now open your Google Calendar account in web browser.

Step 4 – Click on the down arrow corresponding to ‘Other Calendars’ and  choose ‘Add by URL’ form the menu that opens.

Step 5 – In the dialog box that opens paste the link that you copied form Facebook’s events page and click ‘Add calendar’.

That’s it, now your Facebook’s birthdays will appear in Google Calendar in a few minutes and will also sync to your Android phone. You can also manually refresh calendar in phone by choosing the refresh option in calendar.

How To Install Multiple MSU Windows Update Files With PowerShell Script

Keeping Windows up to date is critical from security point of view. Each month on second Tuesday (aka ‘patch Tuesday’) Microsoft issues critical and recommended security updates and bug fixes which everyone should install. But if you are on a low-bandwidth Internet connection (or none at all), you may grab the updates from Microsoft Download Center and install the msu files manually. However, depending on the number of updates released or for how long you haven’t been installing updates, the number of files to install may grow above 30. To install all these files in a seamless way without any intervention you can harness the power of PowerShell – Windows’ own shell, just like Bash in Linux.

For this you need a small script which you need to run from an elevated PowerShell instance. Here is the script –

$dir = (Get-Item -Path ".\" -Verbose).FullName
 Foreach($item in (ls $dir *.msu -Name))
 {
	echo $item
	$item = $dir + "\" + $item
	wusa $item /quiet /norestart | Out-Null
 }
 

Create a file named “install.ps1” (or any other name with .ps1 as extension) in the directory where all your msu files are present and paste this script into it. Open an elevated (run as Administrator) instance of PowerShell and navigate to the directory where the msu files are located (using cd command). Type “.\install.ps1” (this may change depending on what you named your file as) and press enter. It will now install one file at a time and display the name of file currently being installed.

If you get an error like this – “… cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system”;

run this command and try running the script again –

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

This will enable running of scripts on your computer and you can continue with installing Windows updates.