Dell laptop brightness control not working?! [SOLVED]

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Description of the brightness control problem If you have a recent Dell laptop and are doing a clean install of Windows 8.1 (and possibly Windows 10), you may encounter an issue where the brightness controls (F11/F12 down/up) do not function properly. Specifically, the buttons pull up the Windows 8 brightness control slider BUT the changes do not take effect 🙁 Solution Thankfully, the fix was simple. Install the latest Intel HD video drivers! As soon as I installed the latest

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Enable remote MySQL connections on Turnkey Linux LAMP

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I am a big fan of Turnkey Linux. It is great for working on projects locally, though sometimes I need to allow others access to the MySQL server on our LAN. Here are simple instructions for enabling remote MySQL connections and for allowing user access: How to allow remote access to databases | TurnKey GNU/Linux docshttp://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/database-remote-accesssed -i “s/^bind-address/#bind-address/” /etc/mysql/my.cnf Configure MySQL to accept remote root connections (from any host (‘%’)): (added line breaks for readability) 🙂

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Negotiating an Oil and Gas Lease (Creek County OK)

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Recommended PDF: Lease clauses and forms, negotiation (RECOMMENDED) http://www.montana.edu/softwaredownloads/energydownloads/MineralLeasingHandouts.pdf Landmen.net – Clauses and Formshttp://www.landmen.net/clausesforms/clausesforms.htm  LEASE PROVISIONSOption to Extend Lease Surface Damages No Surface Operations Oil & Gas Only Royalty Increase Escalating Royalty Clause Minimum Royalty Clause Shut-In Royalty Clause Pugh… Negotiating Your OIl & Gas Lease | Oil, Mineral & Gas Lawhttp://www.kwgd.com/negotiating-oil-and-gas-leaseOne of the more difficult things landowners are called upon to do is negotiate an oil and gas lease.  Oil and gas leases contain many unique terms in the

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Mini-itx AM1 gaming system w/discrete video card and DC PSU!

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Mike sent me some info and photos of his awesome mini-itx system: I crammed the AM1H-ITX along with a 5350, a Kingston HyperX 4gb DDR3-1600 stick, Slimline DVD-Rom, Microcenter house brand120gb SSD, a couple 40mm fans, and an EVGA GTX 750 2GB (non-ti) into a Travla C158 case. I’m powering it with a DC power brick (part number 316688-001 or spare 317188-001) from either a beefy HP laptop or possibly a docking station. The specs are 18.5v, 6.5a, 120 watts.

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Control joints in concrete basement slab

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We are building a house and I have been learning a bit more about concrete lately. You may know the old saying ‘there is only one sure thing with concrete, it WILL crack’. 😉 Of course the trick is getting it to crack where you want to 🙂 ‘Control joints’ are cuts made in the concrete so that hopefully when the slab cracks it will follow the pre-made cut. This is the control joint layout that I came up with:

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