Recently, I finished writing a new page for my blog, and was looking to add it to the main menu. So I proceeded as I normally would – in the WordPress dashboard, I selected “Appearance,” then “Menus.” In that editor, I added the new page, and pressed “Save Menu.” Then, to my surprise, I got this error, which prevented me from saving my changes:
Granted, after reading the error message completely, I realized that I was at least somewhat to blame. After all, the size and complexity of my menus were beyond anything I’d seen before in a WordPress site.
I make heavy use of sub-menus. This screenshot only scratches the surface. Then again, was it my fault? Shouldn’t software like this just work? With that in mind, I took to Google to find a solution to my problem. What followed was a quest that lead to me trying many different things: changing PHP variables, checking error logs, restarting services, my server, etc. Ultimately, none of these steps worked for me. However, thanks to the articles I had encountered, I managed to find a way around the error, without actually modifying my server in any way.
“Trevor, if I understand it is only solved in the Customizer. If you edit and save your menu on the admin side you are still at risk of getting the menu cut off.”
Ah, yes, the customizer. I had totally forgotten that WordPress had another way of managing menus. And yet, it was right in front of me the whole time:
A big “Manage with Live Preview” button. How did I miss that? Sure enough, if I modified my menus using this “Live Preview” mode, the error no longer occurred. While not an actual solution, it successfully allowed me to save my menu, without any issues. I certainly learned from the situation, however, and decided that I’d reduce the complexity of my menus in the future. The world, after all, is more focused on search, these days – there’s no reason for me to build a directory. If someone’s looking for something, they’ll search for it, and that’s how they’ll find it. But until then, thanks to “helgatheviking,” and the great articles that lead me to solve my problem.
As I went to launch the Windows Store app today, I encountered an error I’d never seen before. Here’s what I saw:
My first instinct was to see if there were any new updates available for Windows, just in case. I quickly confirmed that I was fully up-to-date, and began to ponder what else I could check. To be safe, I verified that I could successfully log into the Microsoft website, just to confirm that I wasn’t having any authentication issues.
When these attempts failed to resolve the problem, I took to Google to try and find a solution. Unfortunately, most of the articles I found simply didn’t solve my problem. Ultimately, I figured it out, so I’m sharing my solution below.
Solution
Here’s what I did to fix the Windows Store error:
I clicked the Windows start button.
I typed “Troubleshoot” and pressed Enter.
When the “Settings – Troubleshoot” dialog appeared, I scrolled all the way to the bottom, and clicked”Windows Store Apps.” I then pressed “Run the troubleshooter.”
When the “Reset and open Windows Store” dialog appeared, I clicked the”Reset and open Windows Store” option.
After a while, the troubleshooter finished doing its thing, and Windows Store opened successfully in the background. (In my case, the troubleshooting app also said it couldn’t fix a cache issue, but since it didn’t impact my ability to use the Windows Store app, I didn’t bother look for a solution to that particular issue.)
So in this video, I’ll be showing you how to use the Selective Sync feature offered by Dropbox. So you’ll notice in the bottom right corner, I have a Dropbox icon that has a green checkmark next to it. That means the files are fully synchronized, they’re the same on my device as they are on the Dropbox servers. Now, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna click on this icon, and then I shall click the folder icon here, to show you the actual Windows Explorer version of my Dropbox.
Now what you’ll see is that it’s fairly simplistic, I have a Word document, and I have some photos. What you’re actually seeing here is a selective sync version of the Alternate Scene Dropbox folder, you’ll notice the name here is Alternate Scene. Okay? So here’s the idea, the Alternate Scene Dropbox folder is massive, in reality the true Dropbox size is something like 1.3 terrabytes. Now, synchronizing 1.3 TB to one machine is not necessarily something you want to do in all cases. In my case, that’s what I do, but for this particular test I’m showing you a scenario where I only want to see the example folder. That’s to say that I want to be able to synchronize and work within the example folder, but not actually have to pull the full 1.3 TB down.
Now, where this gets important is if you try to synchronize the 1.3 TB, but the location of the Dropbox folder on your machine, like right here, you see the location is “C:UsersMattRefghi.comDropbox,” okay, so let’s say the C: drive, the actual hard drive behind C:, is like 500 GB, right? And I try to synchronize 1.3 TB, well, eventually, Dropbox is gonna have a panic attack. In the bottom right corner here, you’re gonna see a message, it’s gonna be a red icon, and it’s gonna say “I’m out of disk space, what am I supposed to do?” Not in those words, obviously, but it’s gonna complain about disk space. So to resolve that, selective sync kinda comes to the rescue. What you do is you select specifically the folder that you want to pull from the servers, and you leave the other ones off your machine.
Now let me show you how to actually do this, check it out. You go to the Dropbox icon in your taskbar, left-click it, and then you’ll notice that there’s a gear icon, right there. That’s what I would like you to click, so I’m gonna go ahead and do that, and then in here you’ll notice that there’s a few options, the current status of your drive, you’re up to date, you can pause syncing, and then there’s Preferences, that’s what I would like you to click, so click Preferences. Alright, now, on this screen, you can go ahead and switch to the Account tab. Took a little while on my machine, there. So on the Account tab, you’ll notice, there’s some options, but the one that matters to us is “Selective Sync”.
Okay, so if you click on selective sync, here you can actually see the full structure of my Dropbox folder, so I have a Data folder, which is huge, a Clients folder, also huge, these are all massive, so I’ve chosen to not include them. I’ve just said “hey, I want Example.” That’s all. Alright, so if I click on this little arrow here, to the left of my Example folder, it’s gonna show the Photos folder, which basically means that I can customize not only the top-level folders in Dropbox, so not only the main list of folders that you saw, but I can go into the depth of saying well I want the Examples folder, but I don’t want the Photos ’cause it’s big, or whatever. You actually have that flexibility.
It’s important to note that the Dropbox competitor known as Google Drive has unlocked this feature as of April this year, so for a while it was lagging behind, but right now it has the same thing, the ability to select a subfolder in addition to the top folder.
Alright, so, to show you an example, I’m gonna go ahead and uncheck Photos. Alright. Now it turned into a square, but that’s totally normal, it’s kinda showing you that yes, it’s synchronizing, but not fully, so what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna click update, and you will see shortly the effect of that change. So I’m gonna click update and it’s suffering a little bit to accept my change. So it says, “unchecked folders will be removed from this computer’s Dropbox. They will still be available on the web and other devices.” This is just to keep you calm, so, I’m gonna – again, I’m trying to click OK and there’s some little freak-out in the Dropbox interface. Okay, but it works. And you’ll notice on the left here, you may have noticed that the Photos folder has disappeared.
So in this case my example is super simplistic, so it’s not totally useful, but consider a case where you’re having space issues on your computer, you’re – not necessarily even your Dropbox folder, right? So let’s say on your computer your Dropbox is fully synced, you’re all good, and then you start adding games and stuff outside of the Dropbox folder, and then Dropbox either has issues synchronizing, or you just realize that “hey I need some space, but I don’t want to remove those games from outside my Dropbox folder.” So what you could do potentially is kinda review your Dropbox folder and see if you can actually pull some of these files off of your computer, and leave them just on the Dropbox servers. This could be a nice way to, you know, gain storage space on your local machine while still ensuring that your data is completely safe.
So that’s the first scenario, really changing selective sync when your Dropbox is already synchronized to your machine. Now there is another scenario I wanted to show you, what if you’re first installing Dropbox, is there a way to immediately tell Dropbox not to pull down the whole world of files in your Dropbox, or must you wait until it’s already set up and synchronized? The answer is you can do it while installing, and I will show you the exact procedure.
Alright, so here’s how you do it when you’re installing Dropbox. Basically, the first time you launch Dropbox after it’s been installed, you’re gonna get this screen. The screen is a “Set up Dropbox” screen – it asks you to sign in with Google, or to enter simply your existing Dropbox credentials. So I’m gonna do that, I’m going to enter my existing Dropbox credentials, and I’ll see you after I’ve authenticated.
Okay, so now I’ve authenticated, and look what we can see. The “set up dropbox” screen now shows the full size of my Dropbox, which is 1.2 TB, or 1,200 GB, roughly, and it says that it’s too large to fit on the computer. This is of course totally valid. And it offers me two options: choose folders to sync, or sync everything. Now sync everything is kind of a crazy choice, which is why that it is not even – oh, it is enabled, but not suggested, okay, interesting.
So I’m going to choose folders to sync, ’cause that’s the logical thing to do in this situation, and you’re gonna see this dialog that we saw earlier. So in this dialog, I can make the same choice that I did earlier, right now I’m going to actually put the Example folder, if Dropbox will allow me to click on the arrow, and have it work, okay, I’m going to click on the Examples folder, and I will also choose to have the Photos. And once I’m done that I will click Update.
Now it says congratulations, it’s been successfully installed, you can now add your personal, I’m not interested, I’m going to click “skip this.” Now what’s happening is that it set up the folder again, so if you look in the bottom right corner, it shows that my Dropbox is currently synchronizing. So what I’ve noticed is that even if I’m pulling a tiny amount of files via selective sync, it still takes a while for the initial synchronization action, I think this has to do with the number of folders that selective sync surely has to consider on the Dropbox side. But for you as a user, as all this means, you select your folders in selective sync, and you just wait for it to synchronize, and once that’s done, you will see the folders that you selected in your Dropbox, which, mine is currently empty, but if I give it time, the folders will appear here. And that’s how it’s done, guys, I hope this helps.
A while back, Gmail decided to change the look of the Compose Email interface, I’m talking about this feature right here. When you press Compose, in the past there used to be a full screen editor. Right now what they have is a little pop-up like this that writes New Message, to, subject, cc, bcc, has a place to type your message, and then of course you can send, and there’s some controls.
Now, this is different… but let’s go ahead and do what I’m looking to do, which is attaching a file. I have this photo right here. Let’s say I wanna send this photo to myself. My instinct, to get this done, is to drag the photo, and then drop it within the browser. Most modern websites support this – and of course Gmail does. Notice here? It’s saying “Drop files here”… so, this is encouraging… if I drop the file there, it should attach it, right? So I’ll go ahead and put my email up here, and I’ll write “photos,” okay, so it’s attached graphically, it seems. So I will send it to myself, and immediately check my own inbox.
Hmm. Notice what we see here? There is no attachment, normally, there’s supposed to be a paperclip, there’s no attachment. Instead, there’s this graphic built-into the e-mail. There’s a little arrow which then lets the person download it, but initially, they just see a preview. Maybe what I want is the old-school attachment system. That’s what I grew up with, and that’s what I’m used to seeing – I don’t like the idea of the preview – maybe it’s important to me that they see the fullest version of the file in their monitor.
If I want that, here’s how you do it. You simply click Compose, and when you’re here, you have two options. You can either click on the little attachment symbol down here, it says Attach Files. And then select the file from here, by going to desktop, doing whatever you want.
Or, and here’s what’s sneaky. You can actually grab the photo just like I did before, drag it, and instead of dropping it in this super attractive area, here, go down, to here, believe it or not, if you drop it here, Gmail interprets it as an attachment.
Isn’t that kinda special? Anyway, I hope this little trick helps you guys. I thought it was really not obvious to begin with. And I figured this could help a few people.
Now if you watch my videos, you may have noticed that I like to hide the clock in Windows 10, when I’m doing a tutorial – I’ll show you what I mean. So if you look in the bottom right corner here, you see the time, you see the date. Now, I like to hide this because when I make edits in my videos, sometimes it spans a few minutes. The cuts are a few minutes apart. And I don’t want people to see the clock jumping, I think that that’s a distraction, so I like to hide that clock.
Now I’ll show you how you can hide the clock as well in case you’re recording, or if you just wanna hide the time for some reason. It could also be useful during presentations. So to hide the clock, you, instead of right-clicking the clock itself, what I recommend doing is right-clicking the taskbar, so you right-click here, and in the options that appear, you will select Settings, the one all the way at the bottom.
Alright, now when this window appears, you simply need to scroll all the way down, until you see the Notification area, which is a bit in the middle here. And the notification area has two options: “Select which icons appear in the taskbar”, and “Turn system icons on or off”. You’re interested in “Turn system icons on or off”. So click that. And from this point, it’s pretty straight-forward. Clock’s at the top, click it, it goes from On to Off, and you’re done.
Now, if you’re a Windows user, there’s a certain point in your life where you learn that Ctrl+Alt+Del is your best friend. From Ctrl+Alt+Del, you can actually pop up the task manager. So, I can’t show Ctrl+Alt+Del on screen here, because of the way my video capturing software works, but that’s one way to pop-up task manager. The other way is to simply right-click in the taskbar in Windows, so down here for example. And then you’ll notice that there’s a task manager option. I can simply select that to launch task manager.
But regardless how you do it, I wanted to quickly show you a feature that not many people necessarily encounter. So over here you see a simplified list of apps. I can naturally right-click, end them, run a new task, I can do a number of things here. However, if you click More details in the bottom left, you’ll notice that of course, there are more details, there’s more information, multiple tabs, now, I’ll leave you to explore this on your own time, the only thing I wanted to show you that you might not realize is that the performance tab is special.
They don’t tell you why, but if you click here, you’ll notice that there’s pretty little charts, they’re happening in real time, all good, but if you double-click anywhere on the right here, I think pretty much anywhere, but typically I double-click here. You’ll notice it turns into another type of window. It hides all the extra noise, and you just see the chart you care about.
Now this can be useful if you wanna work while keeping an eye on the performance of your computer for example, so I can stick it in the corner, and work on some stuff in the left-hand-side of my screen, and still know what’s happening with my CPU performance.
Now they call this “tiny footprint” mode, but they don’t really explain that it exists. So sometimes people accidentally double-click when they’re in this window, and they find themselves here, and they don’t know how to come back. Well, to come back, you double-click again, simply, to return, but I kind of wish they would explain it, but I still think it’s a nifty little feature in Windows 10.
You can also of course select other sections and have that appear. You can also resize when in this mode, and, oddly enough, other tabs do not have the same feature, so you can go around double-clicking to your heart’s content, yet, it doesn’t work. So, why did they only add it to this tab? Probably because it’s pretty graphs – again, they could have told us, but at least now you know, so go ahead and enjoy.
Alright, here’s how to show or hide file extensions in Windows 10. You’ll notice on my desktop I have a file named Note. I can tell it’s a Word file, but I can’t see the .docx extension. If I really want to see that, I have to enable file extensions in Windows, I’ll show you how to do that.
All you have to do is launch Windows Explorer, and once Explorer appears, all you have to do is locate the tab at the top named View, and then click it. And once you’re in this area, you’ll notice on the right that there’s an option here: File name extensions. It’s really that simple. Click the checkbox, you’re all set. If I go back on the desktop, you’ll see that now it’s docx.
You can of course undo it if you want to hide it, personally I leave it on all the time.
Okay, everybody, here’s how you can add Hibernate to the list of power options in Windows 10, in case it’s missing. You can also use the same steps to remove it, of course.
So Windows 10 has a number of power options: Sleep, Shutdown, and Restart. These are all pretty well known by people. What you need to know about Hibernate is that it’s kind of like Sleep, except it does not keep it in a low power state, it actually shuts down. So Hibernate will take the computer offline, but it will also save the exact state you were in, all the windows, you had opened, all the files you were working on, whatever, it will actually save them to the hard drive in a special file that’s a few gigs in size, usually. So you get to save power, the computer’s off, but when it reboots, it actually remembers exactly where you were.
So here’s how you can add that option. Click the windows button, and type “Power Options”. Now in this particular screen, you’ll see some options on the left that you need to pay attention to. You see the one that says “choose what power buttons do”? Oddly enough that’s the one we need to click. So let’s do that, and in this list, you have a few things you can change, but if you notice at the bottom here: shutdown settings, Hibernate… notice how it’s unchecked? Exactly.
So if we wanna change that, hm, we can’t ’cause it’s grayed out, that’s because we have to have administrator rights, so up here I’m just gonna click “Change settings that are currently unavailable,” and then I’m going to select Hibernate from the list of options. And then I’m gonna click “Save changes”.
There you go. Now I can actually click the Windows button, and if I click the Power Options, Hibernate is there.
In this video, I’ll be showing you how to change the homepage and the default search engine in Internet Explorer 11. Now, while I am using IE 11, keep in mind that these steps may work in IE 10, or even IE 9.
Alright, so the first thing that happens when I launch Internet Explorer is typically I get hit in the face with MSN. MSN is a very busy website, and some people like it, but me, personally, the first thing I want to do is get this monstrosity out of my face. So to do that, I have to first click the gear button in the top right, I’m just gonna zoom it so you can see it here: tools.
So I click tools, and then I scroll down to options, Internet options, and I’m gonna click that. Now the first field that you see is actually the first field that’s actually selected, is this one right here, called Home page. It’s fairly straight-forward – simply changing this to Google. I’m gonna put Https Google.ca, the Canadian version, and s for secure, so it has higher security. I’m then gonna click apply, and then I’m gonna click OK. So this solve the home problem, and I can test that just by clicking the little house icon in the toolbar here. Goes straight to Google, much better. If I type a search, it goes to what I want, everything’s cool.
But what if I type something up here? “I’m searching.” Oh, look at that, it went to Bing. You know, Bing is not the worst, but personally, I’m a big fan of Google, so I definitely want this to be changed to Google. To achieve that, we have to click on the gear again, and here there’s an option called “manage add-ons,” click that option. On the left, you’ll notice “search providers,” second option. I’m gonna click that. And here all I see is Bing, of course.
Now the solution is to locate the link at the bottom that’s kind of not obvious, that’s written “Find more search providers,” that’s what I’m interested in. Bottom left. I’m gonna click that. Now, on this page, they have a gallery which has different search options, so simply scroll, and there’s Google Search. I’m gonna click add.
Okay. And I get a pop-up, now this is important. I would like to use search suggestions from this provider, notice the checkbox there? I’m gonna leave that checked, because that is what I want. Okay, I’m gonna add. Perfect. Now, it’s been added, but this is not totally clear. In any case, all I have to do now is close this window, and I have to close this as well, manage add-ons. And then I have to go back to the gear, back to manage add-ons, and back to the search providers section. Now I see that both Bing and Google are there. Alright… but notice this: status, default, for Bing. That means that even if I try to type a search again like I’m searching in the address bar, it’s still gonna pop up Bing. So what I have to do now is right-click, actually left-click Google, right-click “Set as default.” Perfect. Now all I have to do is press Close. And then I can try doing my search again. Ah, Google. Much better.
Now, to each their own of course, if you like MSN, or you like IE, and things like that, that’s fine. It’s just that personally, I’m all about the Google, and so that’s how you can configure Internet Explorer to have Google as the search engine and the homepage.
Alright, so this is definitely one of the most popular questions I get asked: what do you do when your Dropbox is full? There’s actually two approaches to this. The first is to maximize the free space that Dropbox gives you for performing certain tasks. The second is to flat-out delete files that are using too much space in your Dropbox. I’ll be exploring both of these with you. There is of course a third option, which is to pay for Pro, Dropbox Pro, I think it costs about 10 bucks a month.
Alright, so the first way I’m going to show you involves going to Dropbox.com, so this is flat-out Dropbox.com/home, I’m logged in, and then what you have to enter is this: Getspace. Don’t try looking for a link, I had difficulty finding it, but if you actually type just “getspace” here and press enter, it’ll go straight to the page. On this page, you can see a few things. Yeah, you can upgrade your account, that’s gonna help, obviously, but we’re gonna assume that we’re not doing that right now. So I’m gonna scroll down… refer friends to Dropbox, this is a classic, if you know friends that could benefit from Dropbox, you may recommend this to them, you can actually invite them to their e-mail and if they install Dropbox on a machine, then, you’re gonna get credit for 500 megs. This is good, but personally I don’t like bothering people that much unless they really have a use for Dropbox, then I’m happy to recommend it to them. Because, by the way, when you recommend someone, they get 500 megs, and you get 500 megs, it’s kind of like not just you, they get it too.
Then there’s the tutorial here, “Get started with Dropbox.” This is just a tutorial you have to step through, a few tasks you have to do for them. You do enough of these, five steps, you get 250. It’s a pretty easy way to get it. Now here’s another option, following them on Twitter, again, fairly easy if you have a Twitter account, just do it. Or tell them why you love Dropbox, this one you can do absolutely anything, you can put a smiley face, and they won’t bother you. And at the end here, you can keep tabs on how much space you’ve earned by just clicking this link, and it’s gonna show you all your accomplishments on that front, right now I’ve got nothing. Alright, so that’s the first method, really trying to maximize the space that you already do have.
Now, let’s say you don’t want to maximize the space that you have, but you instead want to figure out what’s wasting the most space, and you want to resolve that problem. I have a tool for you. The tool’s called WinDirStat, I’ll be showing you how to use it, I actually did another video on it, so if you want to check it out, you can check in the description. Alright, so this is WinDirStat. Instead of pointing it to a drive like I did in a previous video, I’m gonna point it instead to a Dropbox, you can see that at the bottom there. Okay? So I’ve selected a folder, and I’ve selected the Dropbox, my Dropbox. Alright? So once I’ve done that, I just have to click OK, and it’s gonna start calculating and stuff, but I’m gonna interrupt this because I have already done it in advance.
Alright, so the scanning is done. Now let’s take a quick look. As I mentioned in the previous video, the larger the square, the bigger the file within the space you selected. So the space I selected is my Dropbox folder. So the bigger the square, the bigger the file is taking up space in my Dropbox folder. So this is probably the easiest way to debug what is wasting the most space. If I click on this massive square over here, massive rectangle, I see that it’s a video game footage from Postal 2. Okay, so naturally, it’s raw video files, based on a Premiere project, okay. Makes sense. Now I know that if I delete this file, it’s 127 gigs by itself. That’s definitely gonna make a big difference in my Dropbox folder. I can keep repeating the process by clicking these giant squares, and eventually I’ll clear up enough files to reduce the space used in Dropbox. Keep in mind, you can right-click at any point and say you want to delete, send it to the recycling bin, or delete with no way to undelete. And it’s also possible to simply say you want to explore there, which is one my favorite options – you just say “explore here” and it pops open a Windows Explorer window focused on that file.
And that’s how you can free up some space in Dropbox, I hope this helps.
