Dell Latitude 7290’s keyboard’s backlight has a terribly short “on” period. It is set to 10 seconds only by default. Even on AC power. While industry standard is somewhere around 30 seconds or so.
This article shows how to resolve this issue in Dell Latitude 7290, but most other laptops and notebooks will most likely have a very similar solution — find in somewhere in BIOS.
Read More “Dell Latitude 7290 keyboard backlight”I just wanted to add my docs a little bit a feel of an old typewrite. I found some cool fonts for that, but — to my extreme surprise — I couldn’t install any of them on one of my Windows 10-based PCs (I did it successfully on two others). With Windows claiming that file is invalid whereas I was 100% sure that files are a correct.
Solutions as weird as enabling Windows firewall or installing a copy of file instead of original one didn’t work for me, so I had to figure out another one.
I managed to do so, but the answer was as weird and scary as Microsoft is — try to get yourself an administrator privileges and for all users instead of current one. Worked for me!
Read More “Can’t install any font. Windows claims that file is invalid”Nearly every version of Microsoft Word offers a cool feature of inserting fields into various parts of your document. These fields are auto-populated on various occasions and contains always up-to-date value with no need for you to manually update or write that particular value.
Most likely you’ve already seen that in action. Naming page numer or total pages count as first two out of a long row of examples.
You can have virtually every value in such field. The same functionality that counts pages of your document automatically can insert (and always refresh automatically) some document property, like author name, document title etc. You don’t need to write your title manually in many places. You just add a field that corresponds to this particular document property, everywhere you need, and that’s it. Anytime you hit Ctrl+A to select entire document and then F9 to manually refresh all fields (or anytime Word does this refresh for you), you always get most up-to-date value taken from your doc’s properties.
Problems starts when you try to insert some specific field, like Company Address or Company E-mail.
There’s either some bug or some weird logic in Microsoft Word 2010 which causes that you must insert this field in a very specific way. Otherwise you get a field which value is not being auto-updated.
Read More “Certain fields are not auto-populated in Word 2010 document”Windows Spotlight is a Windows 10 feature that displays you a beautiful images on your lock screen along with some location’s information and from time to time, some tips. On contrary to some users, I really like this feature and prefer to have different lock-screen image each day instead of the same dully picture.
When Windows Spotlight stops working there are several solutions in order to restore it.
If you’re lucky, the simplest one will give you expected results and you’re done in a matter of seconds. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up messing up with Windows PowerShell, for which you need administrator privileges.
Read More “Restore not working Windows Spotlight”By default, when you enable Bluetooth in Settings app in Windows 10, your PC will become discoverable by all the nearby devices. But there’s a small (old good) Control Panel checkbox to control / disable this behavior. It is reported to be working in Windows 10 as well.
If you are 100% sure (see details in the following parts of this article) that your PC with Windows 10 is discoverable via Bluetooth even though you have turned such possibility off, then truly disabling Bluetooth discovery will require you to:
But, first let’s make ourselves sure that you really need to do anything.
Read More “Disable Bluetooth discovery in Windows 10”Current situation forces us to switch from face-to-face meetings into on-line experience. I was forced to lead my courses this way. Today I had first attempt and wanted to share some info on how it went.
I decided to use Zoom.us, because I had some previous a bit less positive experience with Microsoft Teams and quite very bad experience with Cisco Webex. And thus I wanted to try something else or different. Zoom.us was first that came on my list after removing Teams and Webex from this list. It was also very important to me that free version offers quite a lot and paid version isn’t that expensive at all.
If you’re new to on-line meetings topic then this article might be useful to you. If you have been using this kind of services previously or have otherwise experience in this area then you may not find much value here.
Read More “My first Zoom.us experience”I just wanted to get rid of my current phone in “Your Phone” app in Windows 10. But, since this is Microsoft and 25+ years of experience in making users lives as hard as possible, you cannot expect a simple “Remove” button. And there is no easy way to do this.
I’ve went through two different guides of removing phone from “My Phone”. None of them worked. I’ve ended up uninstalling “Your Phone” app (which itself wasn’t too easy task).
Read More “Remove phone from “Your Phone” in Windows 10″I had the issue of seeing this nasty error message each time when I clicked any link in my Microsoft Word:
I was struggling with this issue in both Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Word 2013.
I have correctly identified that this problem is related to me removing Internet Explorer 11 from my Windows 10 (an optional feature in this version of Windows). However, while bringing it back resolved this problem for my office computer with Office 2013, I was forced to do a little bit more to resolve this issue on my home computer with Office 2013.
Read More “This operation has been cancelled… after clicking a link in Word 2010”How can we discuss about unlinking one Epic from another, if Epic-to-Epic linking is not possible in Atlassian Jira?
Well… technically saying and by definition, you cannot link an Epic to another Epic. However, there’s a bug in most recent version of Jira Cloud that in fact allows you to do this.
Read More “How to unlink Epic from Epic in Jira Cloud?”Many on-line guides (like this one) says to simply go to Settings > Writing and under Remote Publishing to check the XML-RPC protocol checkbox, in order to enable XML-RPC access to your blog.
After that you should be able to access http://yourblog.com/xmlrpc.php without any problems. When you try to do this via browser, you will most likely see “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only” message. But, that is still a good news, which clearly confirms that XML-RPC access to your blog is enabled. Otherwise (i.e. without correct enable of XML-RPC) you would hit 403 Forbidden error instead.
If this isn’t working or if you need more fine-grained control over XML-RPC access to your blog then you may find some ideas worth to consider in this short article.
Read More “Enabling XML-RPC access to your WordPress.org blog”If need to reset your Samsung Smart TV to default values or you’re trying to do some other administrator-level operations then you will most likely hit a screen asking you to provide PIN number:
The default out-of-the-box PIN for all Samsung Smart TVs is 1111 or 0000.
If none of above is working then you might need to reset it.
Read More “How to reset PIN in Samsung Smart TV”Microsoft Outlook in each and every version is missing some obvious, yet very important functionalities and Microsoft’s dumb-asses are reluctant into hearing users voice and adding them. One of such very-missed features is greying-out passed days or highlighting current day.
Without them each and every day in Outlook Calendar looks just the same and ultra-fast distinction between today’s events and passed events is simply impossible.
Fortunately, some workarounds do exists. They may not be enough for all of us, but at least they allow you to learn a little bit about conditional formatting that you can use in Outlook Calendar or Outlook itself (for i.e. colouring events and e-mails etc.).
Read More “Highlight current day or gray-out past days in Microsoft Outlook”Ever wanted to share your WiFi’s SSID and password among friends, neighbourhood or family members without revealing the password? Now, it is possible with a standardised QR code for that purpose.
It may look like this:
To get QR code like that, all that you have to do is to visit a service (or run a program) like for example Pure JS WiFi QR Code Generator (qifi.org — probably the most recognisable one), provide essential data (SSID, encryption mode, key, whether SSID is hidden) and hit the Generate button.
Free of charge and we love you, Evgeni Golov, for that! :>
At the bottom of the main page for qifi.org you’ll find the list of mobile phones’ cameras supporting WiFi QR codes. To update this information — starting with Android with Android 7.0, default photo camera (at least on stock Android in Motorolas) offers native support for such QR codes.
Google Contacts by default orders contacts in each group / label alphabetically. Because Google knows better than you what you need there is no sorting option or any other way to change it.
However, if you need certain contact to appear always as first (even if its name doesn’t start with “a”) there’s a small workaround to Google stupidity.
The idea is to add + (plus sign) as Phonetic first (name) to such contact. You can get access to this field after clicking Show more:
Google Contacts gives Phonetic first field bigger priority than to First name and any contact that has anything except empty value or space in this field will appear over all other contacts.
With Windows 10 you can have the possibility to setup most of the settings in two ways:
Most settings are accessible via both ways, but also most are configured differently in both cases.
The best example is network subnet configuration — a very key configuration parameter in a very key aspect of your PC (that is: access to network and Internet). It is expressed as “subnet mask” when configuring in Control Panel and “subnet prefix length” when using Settings. And it also accepts a way different values.
This is, of course, needed only, if you are connecting using static IP address. If you have DHCP server in your network, and it assigns dynamic IP addresses to your devices, you may safely skip this article.
Read More “New way of providing network subnet prefix in Windows 10”In all Windows versions prior to Windows 10 changing the network name was as easy as going to Network and Sharing Center and clicking network name. In Windows 10 it is way, way more difficult (reasons, Microsoft?) and you need to be system administrator in order to perform this.
If you wish to change network name (but not connection name, as these are two different things) then follow these steps (source):
Windows key + R, type secpol.msc and press Enter to confirm.You might have to log in again or to restart your computer before the changes are applied.
Visit source for this post to learn about an alternative way of achieving this (i.e. using Registry Editor).
With the introduction of Windows 10 and significant changes in icons and thumbnails caching the issues of:
is more than common.
In this article I present most often used solution for above problems. Not all of them must be run in you particular example and they will not help you for every icon- or thumbnail-related issue.
But, this is the most comprehensive solution that I found so far, since many of these attempts are spread in the Internet across many different sources. Here you have all of them in one place.
Read More “Incorrect or missing icons or thumbnails in Windows 10”If you’re getting Error 777 when trying to login your D-Link DWM-157 modem to a mobile network of your choice then the quickest solution is to disable automatic logon through 26006 (HSPA) mobile connection, It is added (and enabled) by default and apparently by mistake when installing drivers for this GPRS modem. If this doesn’t help or if you have different problems with this modem then you may also find help in this article.
This blog post focuses on D-Link DWM-157, but it may turn out to be useful for other D-Link mobile modems or for other GPRS modems at all, because it discusses the most popular issues when connecting to the Internet through GPRS USB modem.
Please, note that there is a certain amount of magic in this article. As you play with D-Link DWM-157 (or other D-Link modems), it quickly turns out that many things aren’t that certain as they were supposed to be.
Read More “Error 777 and other problems using D-Link DWM-157 GPRS modem”This is just a memo on the quickest solution for above mentioned problem, in scenario, when you can run Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your keyboard + click Task Manager + click More details).
regedit.exe + hit Enter,HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon + hit Enter,Shell key, if it has explorer.exe value; “reset” it to this value otherwise.explorer.exe) right-click it + select Restart.shutdown /s -t 01 + hit Enter.Each run in Task Manager must be with Create this task with administrative privileges checked.
It is important to restart computer exactly this way (with executing these parameters), as described above. In my case this was an essential point into solving this issue, as shell was OK and restarting it didn’t help.
If this solution doesn’t work (shell is not restarted or no positive effect after restarting whole computer) then you must ask uncle Google for more help, because this quick memo won’t help you, sorry.
Newest edition of Windows 10 (tested on 1903 edition) comes with Your Phone application that should — at least by its designers’ mean — ease your day-to-day management mobile device.
Unfortunately, it is still quite new, meaning — buggy. And the list of functionality is not quite long. In fact, you may have problems finding it usable at all or counting scenarios in which using this app is plausible.
Read More “Your Phone app: You can control a mobile device from Windows 10. Really?”SkyDrive is a far ancestor of OneDrive. It can appear in your system with the installation of Office 2013, Office 2016 and Office 365. When it is installed, Windows 10 immediately “captures” this situation and replaces it with newer counterpart — OneDrive. Unfortunately, it is not able to purge corresponding context menu items and eventually you’re left with a disabled and not working “SkyDrive Pro” item.
This article shows you the quickest way to correct this problem. You can also use it to perform general clenaup of your context menu as it doesn’t narrow to SkyDrive Pro item only.
Read More “Get rid of SkyDrive Pro from context menu”If your Raspberry Pi-based Flightradar24 data feeder runs 24/7 and yet your public stats still looks like this:
Then you need to do a little tweak to Pi24 configuration and problem should be easily resolved.
Read More “Scattered data sent to Flightradar24”After a nearly five years of struggling with hardware and software for feeding data to Flightradar24, I have finally decided to give it a try with Raspberry Pi. On contrary to what some of you may think, this is not a guide on how to achieve it. The original text is very good and quite self-explanatory. No need to copy it here.
In addition to feeding data to Flightradar 24 there are hundreds of ideas how can you use your Raspberry Pi. With this article I wanted to show you (and remind to myself) just of a few IMHO most interesting ones.
If you’re just unpacking your first Raspberry Pi then better read these two articles:
before even continuing with this article.
Read More “The very introduction to Raspberry Pi”Slack 4 is here! Fresh, new, nice and… awfuly white again!
Found two different solutions for bringing darkness to my Slack (this one and this one). As usually, the truth lies in between, so the best option for me was to mix these two solutions in own one (or to be honest, to add a crucial note from second solution to the first one).
Folks at Slack read different books about usability. Not only they haven’t given us their own dark theme, but starting with Slack 4 they’re making application of custom-made dark themes more and more problematic.
Here is an enhanced version of (this guide to turn the light off in your Slack (Windows 10 only, sorry).
Read More “Dark theme in Slack 4”With introduction of the "new" Microsoft Office’s file formats (XML-based, i.e. DOCX, XLSX etc.) Microsoft has finally solved problem of Unicode support and storing and displaying special characters in documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. The only problem is that they’ve forgotten about Visual Basic for Applications and macros which still are using dully ANSI encoding.
The fastest solution is out of Excel and is based on altering Windows 10 control panel settings to instruct Windows how it should interact with applications that do not fully support Unicode.
But, suppose you don’t want to or can’t change your system settings. Then what?
Quick Google search revealed some possible solution, including:
Since I failed on finding a correct solution, I had to dig myself own one. Here’s the deal…
Read More “Polish and other non-ASCII special characters in VBA and Excel’s macros”