Category Archives: Tech stuff

The Nintendo DSi

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

For my birthday a couple of weeks ago, my daughter gave me a Nintendo DSi.

I was delighted.  Maybe she thought I was entering second childhood, or maybe she was being very pointed in including a program to increase my brainpower, but nevertheless, I am having great fun with it.

nintendo-dsi

I tend to be a messer at heart.  When I get a new toy, I try just about everything, just to see what I can do with it.

I soon found I could connect to the Internet, but that seemed to be rather limited, in that I could upload photographs to Facebook, but that was about it.

Then, on another messing trip, I hooked into the Nintendo software download area, and lo and behold – there was an Opera browser.

It is remarkably simple to operate.  I have visited quite a few sites, with no problems.  However, I then tried to write a post using the DS.  That’s where my problems began.

As the DS doesn’t have a keyboard, an on screen keyboard appears if ever a text field in encountered.  It’s slightly slower than typing, but not much.  The main problem though is that it doesn’t seem to recognise Textareas on a web page, which means that I can log into my sites, enter my username and password, enter the title of my post, but then I come up against a blank wall.

Pity.

It would be a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop!

WP-ADMIN giving a blank white screen

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I look after a few blogs, and one of them started giving some trouble that had me baffled.

Every time I logged into the Admin section, all I got was a white screen.

Seeing as I had no access to Admin, it was very difficult to diagnose what was wrong.

The first thing I did was to check my .htaccess files, and also did a check to see if there were any files there that had been inserted.  All was fine, so I was fairly sure my site hadn’t been hacked.

The second thing I did was to upload a new version of WordPress.  This hopefully would overwrite any files that had been modified.  Still no joy.

Just in case there were any additional files that had been inserted, I then deleted my WordPress files [with the exception of wp-config file and wp-content directory] and reinstalled.  I was reluctant to do this, as it’s a live site that gets quite a bit of traffic.  It didn’t clear the problem anyway.

I trawled the Internet, and the main suggestion seemed to be that a plugin may be at fault.  I renamed the plugin directory, and tried again.  Still no joy.

I eventually found the solution to my little problem, and I must say I was surprised, and more than a little annoyed, as it’s a WordPress bug that should be addressed.

The following are a Before and After snapshot of my wp-config file.


Before


After

Notice the difference?

Note the line numbers.

Apparently the addition of white-space at the end of the file was sufficient to muck up the system.  Why, I don’t know but deleting the three blank lines was enough, and the site is now working perfectly.

Very strange.

A website called Lazarus

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I wrote just over a week ago that this site didn’t exist as far as the world of search engines is concerned.

It transpired that it had been hacked, and a couple of lines of code inserted which redirected search engines to another site.  Naturally, I removed the hack and then had to set about undoing the damage.

It appears that my efforts have been successful.  Traffic has started to filter in from searches, as is plainly illustrated by Google Analytics –

It’s not much, but it’s a start.

At least the site is no longer being ignored!

This site does not exist

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have been running this little site for some time.

It gets very few hits, but it never occurred to me to investigate the reason.  In the grand scheme of things, I supposed that people just weren’t interested in some rather boring musings or little technical gems that I had picked up along the way.

The other day, I did a check to see what keywords people were using to find the site.  I ran off a list for the last year.

It was empty.

No search engines are seeing the site. 

The site is search engine friendly in that it has all the recommended robots.txt and other files.  I have a plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) that generates the required sitemap files for search engines.  I also have the ‘All in one SEO pack’ installed.  All in all, it should provide a feeding frenzy for searches.

I went into my Google account to see if I could find any error messages. 

There are a few errors, including a complaint that ‘robots.txt’ is unreachable, which it isn’t.  It also complains that my ‘sitemap.xml‘ file is an HTML file, which it isn’t.

According to the stats page, the site has been crawled, on an average of 11 times per day so Google is aware of it’s existence, yet if I do a search for ‘the other fellow’ there is no sign of the site (when it should be near or at the top of the results?).

I am baffled.

Anyone any ideas?

Disabling Caps Lock

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

One of life’s little irritations is the Caps Lock key.

It is a hangover from the old days of the typewriter, where you would press the shift key right down and then press the lock to hold it down.  Of course, in the world of computers, it’s a simple toggle switch that is very easily tapped, and THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE WRITTEN EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, which is a right pain.

I have a habit of accidentally striking the Caps Lock, and I find it really irritating.  What’s worse, there is little requirement for the key these days, especially with the style of writing I use.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could disable it?

I had a search around, and my prayers have been answered.

I found a very small, very elegant little program that sits quietly monitoring the Caps key and which toggles it back to normal instantly if it is tapped.  In effect, The Caps Lock key on my keyboard now does nothing. 

Suppose though I want to use all uppercase?  Then all I have to do is tap Alt + Caps Lock and my keyboard is back to normal.  It is simple, quick and efficient.  It also counts the number of times the Caps key is struck, and so far it has saved me eleven times.

If you suffer the same slings and arrows of the redundant key then you might like to try installing the program.

It is available here.  It is a mere 17Kb zip file, including licence and Readme.

It claims to work on all Windows systems up to XP, but you can take it from me that it works in Vista too.  I can’t speak for Windows 7, but maybe someone would like to try it and let me know?

Of course, it’s many thanks to the developers.  They are going to save me a lot of hair tearing.