TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

This is only a problem, as I have no solution. I tried to set up my new Vizio M70-E3 display (circa Dec 2017) to accept HDMI audio/video from two Acer Veriton N4640g mini-PCs.  These PCs are quite capable and run Windows 7, which I prefer.  They are also small and almost silent, and so good media PCs. The Veriton is VGA only.  I figured that I could use a VGA-to-HDMI adapter to convert the signal.  However, the adapters I tried did not work. (For anyone reading who is unfamiliar with Vizio TVs, they have no discrete audio inputs.  If they had, I would have bypassed the HDMI video first thing.  But this is not possible.) The first was the Cable Matters VGA-to-HDMI Converter with USB Audio .  The video on this worked perfectly but there was no audio.  The drivers were fine and Windows showed the USB audio device playing, but the TV did not play the audio.  I tried several ports, several HDMI cables, and two separate identical converte...

Problem:  Snuggles either stops working or begins barking incessantly.  This is apparently a very common issue, and also one that most parents dread - a broken toy on Christmas morning. Cause:  Snuggles has a loose battery connection, somewhere.  This is causing the puppy to either not work, or reboot over and over.  The constant rebooting is the cause of the incessant barking - it is replaying the startup bark over and over. Solutions: 1.  Try removing the gaskets in the battery holders.  They look like this: These are normally separate parts and are not glued into place or anything.  Just pull them out with your fingernail. The gaskets really don't have any function in Snuggles.  They theoretically seal the batteries against water, but this should not make any difference since Snuggles is not a water toy. Once this is done, reinstall the paws (battery covers) as normal.  They should be able to press down on the...

God damn you, Mozilla.  You DO NOT do a major, massive update to people's web browsers without any warning in the middle of the work week!  This is Change Management 101, go buy a bloody book on the subject! And don't you go telling me that it's in the media/news/whatever.  If you are going to screw with people's machines this way, you tell the up front and DURING THE INSTALLATION PROCESS that big changes are coming.  You DON'T spring it on them as just another update. Anyway, if you are still reading this, possibly you are like me and not too enthused with Quantum breaking all your extensions, add-ons or whatever.  You could waste ages trying to figure out if Quantum supports everything, plus dicking with the UI.  Or you could roll back. Fortunately, rolling back is indeed simple: all you have to do is close Firefox and re-run the Firefox 56.0.2 installer again.  Yes, it really is that easy. More detailed instructions, including what to do if ...

Problem:  Tassimo machine runs the wrong cycle with the cleaning disc in.  Usually, the problem is it will not run the descaling program no matter how long the brew button is pressed. For example: -  It runs a regular cleaning cycle instead of a descale cycle; or -  It runs an "add water" cycle instead of a descale cycle; or -  It runs an "add water" cycle instead of a cleaning cycle. You can sometimes tell that this is what the machine "wants" to do because the wrong icons light up when you put in the cleaning disc.  For example, the "add water" icon may light up, which is not supposed to occur with the cleaning disc in place. Solution:  It's probably reading the wrong barcode off of the cleaning disc.  Mostly this occurs because the window that lets the machine "see" the barcode is dirty. To fix, lift up the disc holder and clean the little rectangular window underneath, then re-insert.  The machine should then be able...

VPNs are good but their connections are rarely perfect.  Usually, when they disconnect, your router fails over back to using the unencrypted WAN connection.  This is convenient but leaves your network connection exposed, which rather defeats the purposes.  Likely little point in being protected only 99% of the time, right? Worse, you don't even know if the VPN is off.  Everything just blithely continues on as usual.  You'll only know if you manually check.  Which is stupid. If you're like me, there are some devices on the network where you don't really care if they keep working or not.  Perhaps there are some where you actually want them to keep working, even if the VPN stops (Netflix?).  And there are probably a couple where you want them to stop working the second the VPN goes down. If you search you will find lots of VPN monitoring programs that purport to kill programs upon VPN disconnect.  However, not one of these will work if...

Problem:  You have a nicely curated VLC playlist in xpsf format, and you want to copy those files (and only those files) to a new destination.  Like, your phone or portable device, for a trip or something. There is a tool called "XSPF Export Tool" out there, done by Gerald at Dragonzero.  It did not work for me. There is another tool called AmoK Playlist Copy .  It does not support .xspf playlist format. So what worked for me was: -  In VLC, save the playlist into *.m3u format, and -  Use AmoK Playlist Copy to copy the playlist files to a new directory. Worked perfect for me.

Update August 2022:  The solution below did NOT work for me, so three more years of putting up with this nonsense. Pretty much every time I ran Macroworks, it would hog the CPU to the point where the machine became almost completely unresponsive.  It took 20-25 minutes just to start Task Manager and kill it.  However, I may have found another solution:  Set Macroworks' "Priority" in Task Manager to "Low".  This seems to let it hog the CPU without actually getting in the way of anything. This is (again) a new development and I don't know if it is going to pan out, but it's worth a shot. ------------------------------- Update Oct 2019:  Per the comments below, I updated to the latest MW (as of mid-Oct) and  it seems to be completely fixed. Oddly, PI does not mention this anywhere that I could find.  Perhaps they don't want to admit they had an issue, or perhaps the issue really was confined to a few lucky users. However, you DO need to manually...

Problem:  Word stops accepting non-ASCII keys.  Everything works using mouse shortcuts, but keyboard equivalents do not work. For example, you can type "normal" text.  But arrow keys, function keys, and keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-X for copy, Ctrl-V for paste, do not work.  Home and End keys do not work.  Function keys like F7 for spell check do not work.  Number pad arrows do not work. Possible solution:  Using the mouse, try starting the spell checker (Review / Spelling & Grammar.).  For whatever reason, this unlocked all of my special keys again in Word.

Things to know: -  XBMC is too old to recognize the ".nomedia" file.  You'll need to upgrade to a recent build of Kodi. -  To get a proper ".nomedia" file in Windows, you have to tell Windows to name the file ".nomedia.", with a trailing period. -   advancedsettings.xml should be in "%appdata%\Kodi\userdata\". -  You don't need all the fancy regex crap you see in the examples.  <regex> somethingsimple </regex> will do. -  If you're having problems with "excludefromscan", you should know there is a separate tag for TV shows called "excludetvshowsfromscan".   So if you're having problems with "excludefromscan" not excluding TV show directories, this is probably why.  That last one killed me for bloody hours.  I suppose it makes sense to have different settings for movies and TV, but why oh why isn't the first tag "excludemoviesfromscan"? Also, Kodi 17 Krypton d...

Problem:  After weeks/months/years of trouble-free operation, various programs such as Word, Excel, Acrobat etc. start popping up their dialog boxes on the "wrong" monitor in a multi-monitor display. For example, the "Find" or "Format cells" dialog of Excel may appear on the right-hand monitor instead of the center one, or on the center one instead of the left-hand one.  Or, for dual-monitor displays, it shows on the left if Excel is on the right, or vice-versa. Possible solution:  If you are running an AMD FirePro graphics card, chances are your monitor settings recently got f^ck@d up for no apparent reason at all and completely scrambled your nice monitor setup.  God only knows why this happens at all (I sure don't) but I'll bet it happened to you. You went through all the pain of resetting monitor positions in the Windows Display settings, because your left monitor became your right, your center became the left, etc.  And (probably) re-org...

Problem:  Firefox suddenly barfs "Your connection is not secure" messages on major sites such as Mozilla, Google, Blogger, PIA, and possibly several others.  But several other major sites (news, Bing, etc.) are OK.  Phones, tablets and other PCs on the same network are not affected.  And there is nothing in recent news that Google has somehow messed up their security certificates and basically screwed the entire online population of the planet. Solution:  Chances are your PC clock is wrong, either because you just reset your BIOS or replaced the backup battery in your PC, and forgot to re-set your clock. If your PC thinks it's 2004, it will fail a lot of current security certificates. Another possibility is your antivirus is interfering with Firefox security validations.  This is not likely unless your AV and/or Firefox has changed recently, but is supposedly a known problem with Avast in particular. Similar issues can cause a "Your connection isn't...

OK, I assume you didn't deliberately change anything.  If you did, start checking the drivers for your latest hardware before doing anything else. Symptoms:  Stable Windows 7 x64 system suddenly has HDD indicator light on solid (or nearly solid).  Happened suddenly without warning, re-occurs within a few minutes after booting.  PC will freeze for at least several seconds at a time.  CPU activity is high.  Task Manager is slow, hangs frequently and tells you nothing useful.  Process Explorer seems to show System process (PID 4) taking lots of CPU, but no other details - no real indication which process is actually hogging your hard drive.  Turning off antivirus doesn't help.  Acrobat may complain about a "serious error" when started and/or freeze up.  Inability to use Disk Management tool.  Shutdown takes tens of minutes, if it happens at all; might freeze on "Logging off" or "Shutting down". Cause:  Something probably ...

It's been a maxim in the backup industry for years that you can't image a live system. You always, always, always have to shut it down, boot from alternative media, and image that way.  Having spent more hours than I'd like on this, I can state this has always been true. Until now, apparently.  The Samsung Data Migration utility just imaged my live Windows 7 system, in all its glory, from a smaller M4 SSD to a larger 850 Pro SSD.  It took about 30 minutes.  It even kept the hidden system partition. Does nobody else realize what a godsend this is?  It's a working bare-metal restore solution for a live system. OK, yes, the Samsung utility only writes to Samsung SSDs.  (That's touted as a safety feature, as you're unlikely to have two Samsung SSDs in the same system, but we all know why that really is.) But, still - backup of a full image of my SSD on a live system?   Anytime I want to?  Really?   It's a god-damned miracle. In case...

The single best damn accessory you can buy for a PC is an internal SATA hard drive dock.  No, not the crappy external USB kind, the internal built-in SATA kind. Why?  Because: 0.  ZERO compatibility issues with anything.  It's SATA, works with USB boot stick, Hiren's Boot CD, UBCD, all other boot media, all third-party utilities, etc. 1.  It lets you plug in another hard drive and make hot backups daily. 2.  It lets you remove said drive and replace it with another in about 5 seconds.  Meaning now you have both hot (online) and cold (offline) backups, and are proof against nearly every virus out there (including ransomware).  Good for weekly, monthly and quarterly backups. 3.  It lets you take your backups offsite; now you are proof against disaster.  (Hey, a 10 months old backup is better than nada .) 4.  It lets you migrate your current HDD/SSD to a newer, replacement, and/or larger HDD/SDD very easily.  Which is ...

For my kids first console I went with the original Wii: Wii is best for kids, the games are (usually) pretty good, and the hardware and games are cheap.  What the Brits call a "cheap and cheerful" solution.  Six-year-olds can't tell the difference! I was lucky and managed to pick up a "softmodded" Wii, which had been modified to run game ISOs from an external hard disk.  This was good for me since most game discs are wearing out from inevitable wear and tear, and the Wii disc readers can't be too far behind.  Hard drive copies are impervious to both issues.   My system was blank (no games).  And I had no real idea how to use it or how it was set up, and the info on the web was horribly disorganized at best.  This information is aimed at any other late adopters who don't need to set it up, but do want to understand it. This guide presumes you have/use the following: -  Configurable USB Loader softmod for Wii. If your Wii shows "cfb" w...

For the low-down on this, see the Register article here . Though The Register mentioned Synology, they did not mention that large numbers of Rackstation and Diskstation NAS devices of every type have used the affected Atom chips.  The DS1815+ is certainly getting attention , but my own RP2416RP+ - something that I would hope qualified at a mid-upper-end model, at least when I purchased it - is similarly affected.  Lower-end model owners have also reported issues.  And at this point there is no reason to think that every Intel Atom C20xx device is not affected. (And here I was mulling over the idea of retiring my old server, since my Rackstation has been doing so well.  Good thing electricity rates are cheap enough that it wasn't worth turning off the old kit.) So far Synology has not released any statement regarding the issue or what steps, if any, they are going to take to correct it.  They are probably still trying to figure out how to minimize the im...