Tag Archive | blogging

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 →

HyperLink To Open Local Files

May6

pcworkingOpen A File In A Local Program

So you have a file on your PC and you want to make life easy for yourself and create a link from a personal home page in your browser to that file. But you want a program, like NotePad to open that file. What do you do?

You can search the internet high and low and you’ll find several javascript, php and visual basic solutions. But isn’t that a little over kill? Yes, yes it is. There’s a lot of information about why you can’t do this, or don’t want to do this. And some of that is valid. If this webpage was online and available to the world, the last thing you want to do is click a link that will run an executable file. That’s a huge security risk. Yes indeed it is.

But recently I had a need to simply open a text file  on my pc, in Notepad. Now I could have changed how the browser handles files like this and anytime it finds a .txt file, it can open Notepad instead of displaying the file in the browser. But that’s not what I wanted to do. I only want Notepad to open for this one file, on this one page, for this one link. There’s got to be an easier way than all that overkill coding!

Of course there is. And a huge thanks to my very smart friends on MozillaZine – a Message Board for everything Mozilla. And in particular a big thanks to Gingerbread Man! I love that place. Now let me say this solution does not work with Chrome or IE. All I can suggest there is…use Firefox. Continue reading →

HTML 108.2 – Captcha

Apr13

web-forms3Installing Form Security

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. Computer programs can be bots that surf your site looking for information to use for malicious purposes. This type of phishing can capture email addresses on your contact forms and then begin spamming you endlessly. Or hackers can attempt to use your email for the spamming purposes.

Captcha creates a generating and grading test that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.

You can acquire a free, secure and accessible CAPTCHA from the reCAPTCHA project. This is a Google project and it can be used for WordPress, MediaWiki, PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Java, and many other environments.

They’re becoming very popular because they are affective in dealing with the phishing problems. And for the most part, they’re pretty easy to set up and use. You’ve probably seen these tests when you’ve filled out a request form or tried to email someone through a contact form. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t. Continue reading →

HTML 108.1 – TheSiteWizard Form

Apr13

web-forms2Finding The Right Contact Form Program

In HTML 108 – Web Forms I mention my favorite site for creating a Contact form program and webpage: TheSiteWizard.com.

You can build a customized script specifically for your site at TheSiteWizard.com. At the time of this writing – I really love this place! They advertise their Wizard as:
TheSiteWizard.com’s Free Customized Feedback Form Wizard creates a FREE feedback form for your website. This allows you to put a Feedback Form or Contact Form on your site so that visitors can send you messages / email or make comments.

In full disclosure, TheSiteWizard site isn’t the greatest user-friendly site I’ve seen.  But I’ve written instructions for what to do on their site for a few friends and it seemed silly not to add that here to my blog as well. So here are my easy instructions for using TheSiteWizard.com site for creating your own form. Continue reading →

HTML 108 – Web Forms

Apr13

web-formsBuilding A Form

There are many reasons you might want to create a web form for you site. It can be a contact form to gather specific information from visitors, feedback on a particular topic for a school project or perhaps you’re hosting a tea part and need information from guests in an RSVP.

If you’re a business you may want to design a job application, or service request form for customers to complete. Forms aren’t just for email! You’ve probably filled out dozens of forms online for a wide range of reasons.

There are several ways to design a form and there are two parts to that design. The form itself and a program that processes the data entered into the form. That program can be easy, such as a Contact Form. Or it can be complicated, such as those used by corporations to take in data, process it and give you a specific result.

This post isn’t about the programs. It’s about the forms and how to set up an easy Contact Form that you can use for eMail contact, a questionnaire or that RSVP and anything else you might want to have eMailed to you. Continue reading →