Tech Tips

Description Never heard of Notepad++? https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Transcription In this video, I’ll be showing you how to open multiple instances of Notepad++. That is, multiple windows. By default, when you double-click on the shortcut, you’ll get one window. Double-click again, still one window. The reason is of course that there are tabs, so the program doesn’t the logic in opening multiple copies of itself. But of course there are cases where this could be useful. In this particular case, I have two files, list a, list b. To view one, I have to hide the other, so naturally, there is a benefit to having both open at the same time, and I might actually want that. To get that done, I … Read more

Transcription Hello everybody. In this video I’ll be showing you how to clear up hard drive space. So we’ve all been in this situation, we accumulate too many files and we need to clear up some space so we’re able to install whatever, install a game, install some software. I’ll be showing what I typically do to clear up space. Now the most basic thing you can do is if you’re aware of where the largest files are on your drive you just manually go to them and delete them using Windows Explorer. But let’s assume you don’t know that. There’s a few things you can do. Even though I’m using Windows 10, most versions of Windows that are fairly … Read more

Alright, so here’s a quick problem I just encountered. To record video game footage for my Let’s Play videos, I typically use a nifty little program called Fraps. Natively, Fraps generates video files in the AVI format. Normally, working with these types of files is extremely simple. I drag them into Adobe Premiere, it processes briefly, and bam, they’re ready to be manipulated. But today, for some reason, I got a new dialog after that processing step. The dialog reads “File Import Failure”, and it contains the following error message: Pretty scary, especially when the recording in question is 58 minutes long, and you don’t quite feel like re-recording it. Solution I took to google, as I always do, and I found a particularly useful … Read more

Okay, so here’s an interesting issue. Newer versions of PowerPoint have this really simple method for adding YouTube videos to presentations. All you have to do is switch to the “Insert” tab in the ribbon, click “Video,” and then click “Online Video.” Doing that will make the following dialog appear: From there, all you have to do is search for a YouTube video. Only public ones can be found, you can’t reference unlisted videos as far as I can tell. So let’s say you selected a video for your presentation, and pressed Insert: Good. The video appears in your PowerPoint presentation, and it can be played whenever you switch to the “Slide Show” view. However, if you decide you’re ready to present, and you activate PowerPoint’s … Read more

As with most software, it is generally known that keeping WordPress up-to-date is a wise idea, a best practice. With each release, the platform performs better, gets more secure, introduces new features – put simply, it gets more awesome (scientific term). But, in this quest for awesome, one must be cautious. Updating WordPress, or even its plugins, may have unintended side-effects. If you’re a hobbyist, running a small site, it’s probably not a huge deal. If you’re using WordPress for your business practices, a hiccup can prevent people from doing their jobs properly, and that’s bad for all involved. Today, as part of my regular tasks with one of my clients, I started updating plugins. One of the ones I updated … Read more

UPDATE: As of November 25, 2016, I have a video tutorial for this. The written post continues below. Internet Explorer has matured quite a bit since the release and subsequent infamy of its 6th version, IE6. Over the years, Microsoft has made many changes to the way the browser works, and overall, I’d say they’ve been successful in delivering a better browsing experience. However, they’ve also formalized certain parts of its configuration, and as a side-effect, it’s not always easy to make changes that are fairly straight-forward in one’s mind. A good example of this is changing the default search engine that’s used by the address bar. When IE is first installed, it comes with Bing pre-configured as the only … Read more

As a devout user of Google Chrome, I was surprised to discover that all of a sudden, I couldn’t install any extensions. The developer in me (who communicates in binary, by the way) knew that it was probably a permission-related issue that had something to do with my download folder. But, being a creature with many other things to do, I avoided the problem for a while – I had other things to deal with. That is, until today, when I really wanted it to work. So, here’s the error message as I saw it: Solution And here’s how I solved it. I clicked on Chrome’s menu button – the three gray line icon to the right of the address field. Then … Read more

As I was working with WordPress today, I happened to stumble into a webmaster’s horror scenario. It all started when I noticed that some of my plugins were out of date. In an effort to correct this, I selected all outdated plugins, and then clicked the handy little “Update plugins” button. Instead of seeing the progress messages, I was greeted by this: It was the timing of the Internal Server error that made me uneasy – did the upgrade process have time to complete? Any interruption could potentially result in database corruption, so I launched another window and tried to see if everything was working normally. Here’s what I saw: Even after a few refreshes, that message remained – which meant … Read more

A few months ago, my Windows installation became corrupt, and despite my best efforts, I had to format the hard drive. I’m the type of guy that makes a whole lot of backups, so I proceeded to format with confidence. I did, of course, make a few last minute exports just in case. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that there was something wrong with one of the most important items on my checklist: my primary Subversion (SVN) repository. To my surprise, the backups only included the revisions that occurred prior to November 2011. While horrifying, I remembered that I at least had the live version of my working directory. Unfortunately, I turns out I didn’t. Something strange happened to that directory – … Read more

Here’s a very interesting problem I encountered just last week. I was speaking to a colleague over the phone, and she told me that she had placed a particular document in a folder that we both shared on Dropbox. I looked into that folder, but was unable to locate the file that she spoke of. At that point, I realized that the Windows client really had no way of reporting whether it synchronized properly, or not. No matter what I did, the Dropbox client was convinced that everything was synchronized. Since I wasn’t getting much information from the desktop client, I decided to log into the website. Surprisingly, the file was visible from the web interface – but it wasn’t … Read more