Archives

Configure Your Vintage Live Wallpaper

Feb11

Find Settings On Your Favorite Classic Wallpaper

Koi by Kittehface

When Android updated the way they handle Wallpapers and Themes, some of the “classic” Live Wallpapers were adversely affected. One of my favorite Wallpapers Koi by Kittehface, was one of these.

Since that initial Theme rollout, additional updates have made it possible to run those Wallpapers again. But you may have trouble customizing the settings for your Live Wallpaper. If you try to access those settings through the app, or through the Desktop and Screen Saver settings, you may notice there are no customization icons or menu options. That  happened to my favorite Koi fishes Wallpaper. So how do you get to those settings?

Continue reading →

Intel 9560 Not Working

Jan9

Intel(R) Wireless-AC 9560 Not Working

Santa brought me a brand new 2019 Dell G5 5587 15.6″! A red one. Yeah! It’s been great. Until…..today when I started it up and there was NO internet connection.  Ok, so what happened and how do I fix this. Here’s what I found out.

  1. First make sure your wireless network is working. The easiest way to do this is to check your cell phone. If it has a connection, your pc should also have a connection.
  2. Many people who have had this problem, shut their computer down and started it back up. Which magically fixed the problem. So try that first.
  3. A lot of people said they had to do a hard shut down, before the problem resolved itself. A hard shut down is accomplished by pushing your power button and holding it for a few seconds. (Make sure any work you’ve done has been saved FIRST!)

If that didn’t work, you’re going to have to delve deeper. Continue reading →

WordPress Blog Creation Date

Feb10

Happy Anniversary

My Blog’s Anniversary

When did I first create my WordPress blog? You might be surprised by how many people want to know this after years of blogging.

Back in 2011, that date of creation was fairly easy to find. You could go to your Dashboard, Options and Domains. On that panel, you’d find the date you assigned the domain to your blog. For most people, that date is the date of creation.

But for others, the blog may have been up and running long before purchasing a domain name. Then what do you do? Yeah, good luck finding that.

If you search for this topic, you’ll find a wide variety of suggestions. Continue reading →

Industry Standards

Apr3

COBIT, ISO and ITIL

Nearly every industry doing business in the world has some organization providing best practice processes, procedures and standards. Information Technology is no different from those.

The most popular frameworks in use today, are COBIT, ISO and ITIL. While each of these was initially established for certain regions of the globe, each one has become an international standard world wide. Many corporations who conduct business around the world, utilize all three methods in some fashion.

It’s worth getting to know them all and what they provide or offer to your business and your IT services division.

Continue reading →

Getting Rid of Windows 10 and Weird Directories

Apr24

filesystemsRecovering Space & Running Your PC Faster

Everyone wants their PC to run as fast as it did when you first brought it home. But trying to maintain that clean processing power means you have to keep up with updates and maintenance on your machine. That can be time-consuming, but it can also be daunting for the novice user.

Well there’s help! So don’t give up. It’s easier than you think.

Removing Unwanted Windows 10 Files
Let’s start with Windows 10. Microsoft downloaded the upgrade to your system, whither you wanted it or not. That’s great if you want to upgrade. But if you’re happy with your current version of Windows, having Microsoft constantly ask you to upgrade is annoying. Those update files are also taking up a fair bit of space. But how can you get rid of all that? Continue reading →

SSL Not Working For Thunderbird v38.1.0

Jul25
Manual Configuration

Manual Configuration

July 25, 2015 Work Around

If you like Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird you may have downloaded and applied the recent 38.1.0 update and suddenly had a problem with sending and receiving secure mail, known as SSL.

Well take heart, it’s not you. It’s a conflict between Tbird and your mail server. The problem lies in the detection of the authentication methods supported by the mail server.  You can try to notify your mail host, but they may not respond to your note or do anything about the issue. So you’ll need a work around.

Even though this is a known issue, Mozilla says it’s not on their end. It’s in the default configuration of the email server installation. So there won’t be a Tbird fix coming down the pike.

There are a few different ways you might see this error:

  • Cannot Fetch mail using IMAP and send mail using SMTP
  • Authentication Method Not Detected
  • An error occurred during a connection to mail host

Continue reading →

Watch Out When Renewing Your Domain

Mar6

What The..Network Solution’s Deception!

I have a domain that was due to expire on the 16th of this month. When I logged into NetSol (Network Solutions) today to renew the domain, I was greeted with a message that I had products that had expired or were due to expire.

Now this concerned me, because I’m pretty good at keeping up with my domains and making sure they don’t expire. It costs extra if you let them run out and who wants to pay more than they have to?

Thus I put these types of things in my schedule. I know several weeks before they come due. And if that wasn’t enough, I also signed up to receive notifications from the vendor keeping me up to date. I have 11 domains. Yes 11 between myself and my customers. It’s not hard to keep up with them all.

After some investigation I realized that what’s being reported as expired is a “private registration” service on the domain I logged in to renew. What?!

I have NEVER registered any of my domains with a private registry! EVER! So why would NetSol say I have an expired service that I never had in the first place? Is this a sleazy way to confuse unsuspecting customers who will “renew” something they never ordered in the first place? Continue reading →

The Mosquito Ringtone

Jul21
Mosquito Ringtone by Springwolf © 2014

Mosquito Ringtone
by Springwolf © 2014

More Than A Secret Sound For Teens

The Man and I had our son (the Prince) a little late in life. I went after the career, before I was interested in going after the family. What that means is that that Daddy person and I have to explain some things to the child about aging that most of the “Moms and Dads” of his friends at school don’t have to deal with. I’m old enough to be their Mom and in a very few cases, their Grand Mom.

We’re like all people getting older, things stop working well as we age. Right now today’s challenge is… we don’t hear as well as we did when we were younger. Ok so some of that comes from blaring the radio in the car when we were teens and twenty somethings. The point is, we’re constantly asking the Prince to repeat what he says and he’s constantly getting annoyed by it. He thinks it’s simply a matter of our paying more attention to him. It doesn’t dawn on him that we’re talking about biological science here and he needs to increase the volume of his voice. We’re getting old, come on kid, speak up.

This has become an opportunity to have a teaching moment and conduct an experiment that will help keep the Prince interested in science.

A few years ago I had heard about teens using their cell phones when they weren’t supposed to be, by turning off all sound and loading a sound file onto their phone that only they and other kids can hear,  The Mosquito Ringtone. Continue reading →

Creating Ringtones from MP3

Jul12
ringdroid

Ringdroid by Ringdroid Team

Android App Review

RingDroid: ☆☆☆☆☆
There are several products recommended for creating your own ringtones. Recommended by who? Other users, a few technology magazines, people who are supposed to know about these things. Two of those seemed to appear on almost everyone’s list.

The first runs on your pc where you can manipulate files and turn them into notifications, alarms or ring tones from your music library. Once created, you transfer the new sound files to your phone.  I tried this PC version program. I hated it! It was clumsy and made no sense to transfer a music file that you downloaded to your phone to your pc to create a sound file to transfer back to your phone. What?!

Then there’s RingDroid.
RingDroid is much easier to use and it’s right on your phone. You don’t have to worry about transferring files from your PC to your phone unless you want to. And if something goes wrong, you don’t have to go back to your pc try to fix it and transfer it again.

After using RingDroid for a week, let me say I LOVE IT!
I had some sound files that I wanted to use for alarm sounds, but they wouldn’t show up as available files for my phone. Start up Ringdroid and open the MP3, save it with a new name as a ringtone OR a Notification and tada you have your favorite sound on your new phone! (Thanks to the Folks on Galaxy Nexus for this tidbit!)

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© 1997-2014 Springwolf, D.D., Ph.D., Springwolf's Kosmos. All Rights Reserved.
© 1997-2014 Springwolf, D.D., Ph.D., Springwolf’s Creations. All Rights Reserved.

 

Space In 3-D!

Jun13

A Simple Gift That Opened The Universe

So back on June 6th NBC shared an interesting Tweet.

@NBCNews – Jun 6
Dream Chaser taking shape as space taxi rival to SpaceX, Boeing http://bit.ly/1xlsiWe @b0yle pic.twitter.com/FAgUEaDznN

bulldogplane

Dream Chaser

And being the science geek I am, I had to take a look at the picture. Pretty kewl looking, don’t you think? I did and I replied to NBCs tweet. Continue reading →