Tech Tips

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

One of my favorite features in Windows 7 is the taskbar, as it combines the convenience of Vista’s Quick Launch, while organizing windows in a more intuitive manner. I’ve grown accustomed to dragging program shortcuts into it, and having them remain there permanently. That is, until this morning. For some reason, I discovered that Windows wouldn’t let me drag a batch file to the taskbar. In DOS, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows, batch file is the name given to a type of script file, a text file containing a series of commands to be executed by the command interpreter. Even when I right-clicked the file, I didn’t see the typical “Pin to Taskbar” shortcut. Seeing as batch scripts can execute programs within themselves, I was … Read more

As a fan of WordPress, as soon as 3.2 was released, I found myself reading the changelog. While doing so, I noticed a very intriguing feature addition: Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release Zen mode? Distraction-free writing? Sounded good, so I proceeded to update all my WordPress installations. To fully impress upon you how significant of a feature it is, here’s what the typical WordPress WYSIWYG editor looks like: It’s a full-featured page, that’s for sure – but it also has quite a lot of controls surrounding it. The text editor itself loses … Read more

Immediately after updating Internet Explorer to version 9, I noticed a pretty severe bug within Gmail. A huge blue bar appeared, forcing all the buttons to appear on individual lines. Furthermore, despite the fact that I had one e-mail in the inbox, the graphical issues may it impossible to see. With the problem only existing in IE9, and not in my other browsers, I began searching for a solution. Solution A Gmail Help article revealed that the problem originated from my Compatibility View settings: Internet Explorer has a Compatibility View, a feature that affects how some websites are displayed. If Compatibility View is enabled for google.com, it may cause some Gmail features to display incorrectly. So, we suggest that you … Read more