Short: Hide Twitter’s “Who To Follow” ‘Feature’
One of the reasons I deleted my Facebook account
was because of all of the useless 'features' they threw in, one of which was a box suggesting who to be friends with. Well, Twitter recently added a similar feature called 'Who To Follow" that suggest people you should follow based on people that are followed by the people you follow. Right.
Well, fortunately this 'feature' is easy to disable if you use Firefox or Google Chrome. Simply install the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox (or Adblock for Chrome), subscribe to a filter list, and then manually add the following filter:
twitter.com###recommended_users
Done! No more "Who To Follow" box!
Solution: Mouse Cursor in Windows 7 Disappears
I reinstalled Windows 7 on my MSI Wind U123 today because of a number of problems with sound input and PulseAudio on Fedora 13 that I couldn't be buggered to fix. After the install, I ran Windows Update as normal, rebooted, and then noticed that my mouse cursor was gone. I could still click around and select things, so I knew the mouse was working, however I couldn't see it.
Searching Google proved worse than useless. The two best solutions listed were to either enable pointer tails (annoying) or lower the hardware acceleration level on your video card. Although true that both of these options will work, they both suck.
The real fix? Install the correct video drivers. As it turns out, when I ran Windows Update I accidentally selected the Intel Graphics driver update, which caused the problem. After downloading and installing the correct driver direct from Intel the cursor suddenly reappeared. Magic!
TL;DR Version: If your mouse cursor disappears, go to your video card manufacturer's website and get the drivers from them.
Fixed: Broken Permalinks in WordPress
I recently moved servers to a new host (a friend of mine had provided me with a free CPanel account on his VPS before this), and the transition had appeared to work rather well. Then, when I checked my blog stats this morning, something seemed off:
See that last big dip? Guess when that happened!
So I started looking around the site, and sure enough - the main pages displayed fine, however everything else was broken. In fact, anything with a 'fancy' permalink was 404'ing.
Once again, a quick Google search lead me to this thread on the WordPress forums. After digging around, I found the problem - in Apache's httpd.conf file on my new VPS, I needed to change the following line:
AllowOverride None needed to be AllowOverride All
Note, though, that there are two AllowOverride entries in httpd.conf - one wrapped in <Directory></Directory> tags, and one all by itself. The problematic one is the second AllowOverride entry that isn't wrapped in Directory tags.
TL;DR Version: If you enable fancy permalinks in WordPress, and start getting 404 errors in Apache even with a proper .htaccess file and mod_rewrite enabled, change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All in httpd.conf - just make sure you do it to the second AllowOverride entry!
Howto: Find the Serial Number on a new Dell Monitor
I picked up a few Dell P2210t 22" widescreen LCD monitors the other day.
Very nice!
As part of my asset acquisition process, I have to document serial numbers and assign an asset tags to each new asset. When I turned the monitor around, though, I ran in to a problem:
WTH?
Hey, uh, Dell? Did you forget something?
Well, actually they didn't. Apparently all of the required labeling is too much of an 'eye sore', so Dell has decided to hide it:
Pretty Sneaky, Dell
I would have appreciated it if Dell would have made more of an effort to point out where it is (I actually had to refer to the unpacking diagram to show me), but that's it. Hidden with the USB ports is a small little pull-out card. Now that I know it's there, though, it does make it easier to get a serial number off of a monitor when I have to figure out which asset belongs to which program when someone has inevitably pulled off the asset tag.
Fun Fact - Number of times the word 'ass' appears in this post: 6.
Irony, thy name is Google Chrome
The other morning, the Developer Channel version of Google Chrome prompted me to upgrade with the following text box:
Updated with my own screenshot
So I dutifully updated as I usually do, only to start experiencing crashes on just about any page I loaded. I know Google was going for humour here, but I think they were oddly prophetic this time....
BIOS Updates on the MSI Wind U123
I've been updating the BIOS on my MSI Wind U123 religiously since I got it, hoping each time that the latest update will finally allow me to boot, well, anything other than DOS from my class 6 SDHC card (so far, no dice). Went I went to apply the latest update, though, I was greeted with a slightly different message than normal:
ERROR: BIOS has no flash information available
As it turns out, this message doesn't actually state than the end of the world is near, or that you'll never be able to update your BIOS. In fact, all it means is that the laptop isn't connected to AC power and is running off the battery. Simply plug in your laptop and the update will run without issue.
Now why couldn't they have just said that in the first place?
Rogers Marketing: Opt-Out is Hard-ish To Do
It seems like ages ago I'd gone and opt'ed out of Rogers Marketing 'services' - I made sure that I'd chosen opt-out options for email, snail-mail, and SMS, and all was well. However, a few months ago I started receiving telemarketing phone calls on my Rogers-provided cell phone. I did the individual opt-out each time they called, a different company/number would call each time.
While updating other parts of my account today, I decided to double-check the marketing settings, and found this:
Click for the full-sized image
Err, that's great Rogers - you're not going to have anyone call my work number, but why isn't my cell phone in the list, and why can't I add it?
A quick call to Rogers (meaning twenty minutes of hold time) later and I had an answer (sort of) - the rep that I got instructed me to http://www.rogers.com/optout and enter the relevant details to opt-out of all marketing on that number.
After doing this, my cell number still isn't listed in the Marketing Opt-Out in my Rogers My Account section, but the site did say that it may take 1-2 weeks for the changes to take effect. Only time will tell, but next time the telemarketers call, there will be a few more questions as to how they got my number.
Rogers Wireless Hijacks Wildcard DNS Records
Although I can't confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn't work outside of Rogers' network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.
I'm no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I'm even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It's their service, and there's no opt-out link on the page.
Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different -- you'll need to alter them as applicable).
To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):
- Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
- Assume root (su command).
- Remount the system partition in to read/write mode -- mount -o rw,remount /system
- Browse to /system/etc.
- Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
- Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file -- 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
- Save and quit!
You're done! You've just manually opt'ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you'll just get the normal 'Not Found' errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you've entered doesn't exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn't running a webserver.
TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers' Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.
Rant: Microsoft Telephone Activation
I've blogged about Microsoft Telephone Action before, but now I'm off on a rant....
Click 'Continue Reading' for the wall-of-text!
Windows Cannot Connect to the Printer: 0x0000007e/0×00000006
An HP P4015dn - This morning, the bane of my existence
Windows 7 has been very good to me so far, but this morning I was literally pounding my desk in frustration over a printer issue. I just received two brand-new Dell Optiplex 780's and was in the process of configuring the printers on them when I happened across this little message:
Windows Cannot Connect to the Printer: 0x0000007e
Now here's the situation. The computers are running Windows 7 Professional x64. The printer (an HP P4015dn) is connected to a Windows XP x86 machine and shared normally. Of all of our printers, this is the only one directly shared with a computer due to a wiring issue I have yet to correct (although now I'm going to make an effort to fix it). I have several other computers running XP and Vista (x86 and x64) that already print this computer without issue, so I was rather stumped. Then I realized I had attempted to install the Vista x64 Postscript drivers instead of the Windows 7 ones.
Unfortunately, Windows 7 no longer provides a dedicated 'Printers' control panel, and the 'Devices and Printers' one doesn't have a Server Properties option to let you manage installed drivers. So, I stopped the print spooler service and manually deleted the drivers from C:\Windows\System32\spool\Drivers. When I tried to re-add the printer, though, I got this message:
Windows Cannot Connect to the Printer: 0x00000006
Hmm. Google wasn't much help, so I went to an old standby - I mannually added the network printer by choosing to create a local port (silly, I know). Here's how to get this working:
- In the Devices and Printers control panel, choose Add a Printer.
- In the new window, click Add a local printer.
- On the following screen, select Create a new port, and then choose Local Port from the drop-down list and click Next.
- When asked to enter a Port Name, use the full path to the printer. For example, if your printer share is called Dave and is a computer with the name PrintSrv1, you would enter \\PrintSrv1\Dave as the Port Name. If you receive an error saying The network path was not found, check the computer name and share name, then try again.
- You should be asked to install a driver. Manually download the correct driver (in this case, the HP Universal PostScript driver worked for my HP P4015dn) from the manufacturer's website and extract it to a folder on your computer. Then click the Have Disk... button in the Add Printer wizard and point it to that folder, then click OK and Next.
- Wait for it to install the driver.
At this point, the printer should be installed and functional. Print a test page to make sure everything worked alright, and then do a little dance (as long as no one is looking)!
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