Category Archives: tips&tricks

Solved: Mac option key not working on Nixeus MODA Pro keyboard

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There are plenty of articles and Youtube videos showing how to switch the Option and Command keys when you adapt a PC keyboard for use on the Mac.  (System Prefs – Keyboard – Modifier Keys – Choose the correct keyboard, then switch Command and Option).

But even after doing that, the Options key wouldn’t work.  I finally noticed the “Win Lk” light at the top right.  Gaming keyboards let you turn off the Windows key in case you accidentally hit it during a game, and that’s the key that is now mapped to Option for my Mac.

Turning if off just requires holding Fn and pressing F8, which also has a “no Windows” symbol.

iPhone tip: disable the extra click needed to unlock your phone

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iphone-touchid-pexels-400In a recent iOS update, Apple started requiring an extra click of the home button to unlock your iPhone, instead of just allowing a “click with finger resting on Touch ID” to unlock the phone.  It’s not a big change, but just different enough to be frustrating.

To go back to the original behavior, go to Settings – General – Accessibility – Home Button and enable “Rest Finger to Open”.

Ultimate Guide to Google Sheets

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zapier-sheets-guideZapier has published a free ebook called The Ultimate Guide to Google Sheets, and it mentions my “Insert and Delete Cells” Sheets Add-on!

The book takes readers first through a detailed Google Sheets tutorial, then dives into deeper features that help readers build their own custom tools and apps using Google Sheets’ most powerful features.

Here are links to the book:

– Zapier Learning Center: https://zapier.com/learn/google-sheets/
– Kindle store: https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-Sheets-spreadsheet-ebook/dp/B01IMV1NH2/
– iBooks store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ultimate-guide-to-google-sheets/id1135333631

SNI with Rackspace Load Balancers: racklb.sh script

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CLBThe Rackspace web dashboard allows you to attach a certificate and private key to a cloud load balancer for ssl offloading.  But even though the load balancers support SNI and multiple certificates, neither the web console nor the “rack” command line scripts expose this functionality.

If you want to attach additional certificates to a load balancer from the command line, check out racklb.sh at https://github.com/karlkranich/racklb.  The script doesn’t do a lot yet, but does the two things that I miss most from the web console:

  1. Expose the private (ServiceNet) address of a load balancer
  2. Manipulate the certificate mappings

To get started with it, clone the repo and check out the readme and “racklb.sh -h”

Thanks to Adam Bull at www.haxed.me.uk for the inspiration and sed magic in this script!

Solved: How to Map a Drive from Windows 10 to OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite Server

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local-security-policyWe have an increasing number of Windows 10 machines in our office, and realized that we couldn’t get them to connect to shares on our OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite) server.  We have a bunch of Local Network Users, and had no problem connecting as them from Windows 7 machines.  But Windows 10 machines would just pop up the authentication dialog again with the message “The specified network password is not correct”.

I tried all of the Local Security Policy changes that people have mentioned on the ‘net, and nothing worked.  I finally came across somebody mentioning that you have to put the server NetBIOS Name in ALL CAPS when you authenticate.  So, in our case, we needed to make one Local Security Policy change on the Windows 10 clients and put the server name in all caps when authenticating.

Details below:
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Solved: “ORA-28001: the password has expired” on Windows 8.1

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odbc-errorWhile working with the development version of a document library that uses Oracle for storage on a Windows 8.1 laptop, we ran into the error “ODBC error: [Oracle][ODBC][Ora]ORA-28001: the password has expired”.

It turns out that up until Oracle 10, the default password policy was no password expiration.  Starting with Oracle 11, there is a default password lifetime of 180 days.

Here are the steps we took to fix it:

1. Get DBA privileges

Assuming you’re logged into Windows as “joe”, check if you’re in the “ora_dba” group by running cmd.exe and issuing the command “net user joe”.  You’ll see a list of local groups that you belong to near the end of the output.  If you don’t know who you’re logged in as, try “whoami”.

If you’re not in the ora_dba group, you can add yourself with the Local Users and Groups tool in Computer Management.  Except that tool is gone in Windows 8.1.  Very frustrating!  In that case, issue the command “net localgroup ora_dba joe /add”.

2. Set the password lifetime to unlimited

Now you can change the password lifetime with this series of commands:

sqlplus /nolog
connect / as sysdba
ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED;

3. Change Oracle user passwords

You may or may not need to change the password of Oracle users on your system.

From the sqlplus prompt, use the following command (use double quotes around the new password and replace the username “system” as needed):

ALTER USER system IDENTIFIED BY “new_password”;

Hope this helps some people!

Temporarily use a blog page as your front page

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I wanted to temporarily redirect people who browse to www.keynote.org to the page www.keynote.org/donate.  Since this is a WordPress site, I should have been able to easily do this by logging into the dashboard and going to Settings – Reading and changing the static front page to the Donate page.  For some reason, the Donate page wasn’t rendering properly, even though the page looked fine when it wasn’t set as the front page.

Rather than take the time to figure out what is going on in the WordPress processing, I added the following line to the .htaccess file after “RewriteBase /”:

RewriteRule ^$ http://www.keynote.org/donate [L]

This matches any browser requests that don’t have anything after the hostname and redirects them to /donate. It seems to be working well so far.

Communicate your message through a custom 404 error page

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Mars Hill 404

I love the idea of using a custom  error page to communicate the gospel — I wish I were that creative!  Above is the 404 page that you used to get from Mars Hill Church.

Think about ways that you can use your 404 page to educate, encourage, or entertain.  Hopefully your site is organized well enough that people won’t see the page often, but they will eventually — it might as well be a positive experience!

Depending on how you’re hosting your web site, there are different ways to customize your error pages.  If you’re using WordPress, your theme might have a custom 404 page template as described here.  If you’ve coded your site manually, your web host might have a control panel to edit error pages, or you can point to custom error pages via your .htaccess file.  The web host 1and1 shows how to use the .htaccess file here.

1and1 upload_max_filesize problem

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This is one of those frustrating stories for a tech, where you bang your head against a problem for a few hours, finally fix it, then try to break it again to document it and it doesn’t behave the way you expect.  But it’s still working, so maybe it will still help someone else…

I was trying to upload a 4 MB photo to my WordPress 3.4.2 site hosted at 1&1, and the uploader told me that it was too big — that the maximum upload file size was set to 2 MB in php.ini.  It doesn’t appear that 1&1 gives me access to the main php.ini, so I tried to add one to the root folder and/or the wp-admin folder of my WordPress installation.  Neither seemed to work, but I eventually figured out that I needed the file in the wp-admin folder and I needed to log out and back into the WordPress dashboard.  Here’s the simple php.ini that I added to the wp-admin folder:

upload_max_filesize = 10M
post_max_size = 10M

What was extra frustrating was what happened when I removed the php.ini to document this: instead of going back to 2 MB, the maximum upload size went to 8 MB.  That’s bigger than I needed, and if it had started that way I wouldn’t have had to go through all of this.  I can’t explain it!