Category Archives: Software Tips

Thunderbird auto spell check not working [SOLVED]

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Thunderbird’s ‘check spelling at you type’ feature quite working for me last month. Since that time I have been working without inline spell check in Thunderbird (and it has been quite annoying ;-)). Today I finally took the time to figure out how to fix the issue! First I tried simply checking my settings: The box was already checked to ‘Enable spell check as you type’ but I went ahead and unchecked/checked it and hit ‘OK’ just to make sure

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[Err] 2006 – MySQL server has gone away Navicat/WordPress [solved]

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Recently I tried upgrading to the latest version of the WordPress Download Monitor plugin. It did not go well 🙁 Thus, I tried to revert from a backup made using Navicat. Unfortunately, the restore would fail every time while trying to import my wp_posts table (a pretty important table!) I tried exporting the backup to a SQL dump and importing that. No luck. Finally, I tried resolving the actual ‘MySQL server has gone away’ issue itself and I had success. This tip

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Dell Windows 8 Unknown Device SMO8800 [solved]

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Q. I saw you help people with SMO8800 unknown device issues, but can you help me on my Dell Windows 8 laptop? Thanks! -Wobe A. Here is the download link for a Windows 8 driver for Dell laptops that will resolve the unknown device SMO8800 issue: (free fall sensor) OS Compatibility: MS Windows 8 64-bit, MS Windows 8 32-bit Laptop Compatibility: Dell E5420 Vostro 3450 Vostro 3750 XPS 15 (L502X) XPS 15z (L511z) XPS 17 (L702X) And many other similar

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iPad Air cannot access (hotmail) mail server?! [SOLVED]

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Q. My new iPad Air stopped downloading my Microsoft Hotmail and now I am stuck at about a month ago on my email! I have it set to download all time email in my settings yet every time I try to download it says something like ‘cannot connect to mail server’. Any ideas? -Ian G. A. Hi Ian, I am sorry to hear about your Hotmail problem. 🙁 It seems that in iOS7 there are a number of issues with

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MySQL: Count the total occupancy rate for a time period (month)

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Recently I encountered a somewhat interesting MySQL/PHP task: determine occupancy for a reservation system. This entailed determining how many reservation days fall within a particular month. It was not possible to simply determine each reservation length (datediff from/to) and sum them because some reservations started before the month in question and other reservations lasted until the month was over. Therefore, one solution is to get the reservation lengths then compare the start and end of the reservation to the start

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Reverse order of individual items in a delimited string

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Topic: Reversing the order of individual items in a string. Specifics: I had a date contained in a GET query string that was formatted as follows: 01/27/2013 and I needed it reversed to 2013/01/27 Here is a simple method to do the reversing in PHP: $toDate = htmlentities($_GET[‘to’]); $toDateNew = implode(“/”,(array_reverse(explode(“/”,$toDate)))); Explanation of code: First you explode the $toDate variable, then reverse the resulting array, finally you implode that array back into a string. Of course there are other date

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Chromebook Guest Browsing mode for Google Chrome

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Cool tip! Turn on Chromebook’s Guest Browsing in Google Chrome To test/enable Guest Browsing in Chrome 1. Visit Chrome://flags in browser address bar and enable the below two flags Enable new profile management system, and Enable GAIA profile name and icon. … via How to Get Chromebook’s Guest Browsing in Google Chrome? (click the link to get more info) Photo by JD, Google Pixel Chromebook:  

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Using Parrot Zik headphones with Windows 7 / Win8 [solved]

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Recently I tried pairing some Parrot Zik headphones with my Dell E6430 laptop. The pairing was quite easy but there was no sound when playing media files etc. 🙁 The solution for me was to: Disable the Parrot RFcomm service Specify that my ‘headset does not have an LCD’ After doing that, the headphones worked quite well with Windows! 🙂 It would have been nice if everything would have just worked right out of the box but overall I still rate

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