Solving technology problems, one at a time
A new problem that’s been plaguing my Mac these days is that the keyboard sometimes stops working, but only in the Finder. In all the other applications, it remains functional. I use a Wacom tablet,
Continue readingDrupal is often used in education these days, and a common requirement for course sites is to create protected areas for each course. You could simply have a separate Drupal site for each course, but sometimes that is not an option, or not efficient, particularly if you want to have some common areas, and other areas which are restricted by course.
There are many approaches you could take to do this using various Drupal modules, but one relatively simple method is to use the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module. This tutorial will help you get started with managing rights in Drupal course sites. In a later tutorial, I’ll cover forums, wikis and and blogs.
Continue readingI’ve been downloading disk image files (.dmg) containing Mac utilities and applications with no problem for years, but all of a sudden, a particular update .dmg always downloads in a corrupted form. I’ve been trying
Continue readingThe form described below works, but if the user’s email address is from hotmail, yahoo or gmail, GoDaddy will still block submission of the form. So here is the solution:
Make the following changes.
<form action="_gdForm/webformmailer.asp" method="post" id="form"> <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Submission" /> <input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="thankyou.htm" /> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Contact form"> <tr> <th><label for="name">* Full Name: </label></th> <td><input type="text" name="name" id="name" size="25" maxlength="255" /></td> </tr> <tr> <th><label for="email">* Email Address: </label></th> <td><input type="text" name="email" id="email" size="25" maxlength="255" /></td> </tr> <tr> <th><label for="subject">Subject: </label></th> <td><input type="text" name="subject" id="subject" size="38" maxlength="75" /></td> </tr> <tr> <th><label for="message">Message: </label></th> <td><textarea cols="30" rows="6" name="message" id="message"></textarea></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" id="button"><input type="submit" value="Send Email" /></td> </tr> </table> </form>
GoDaddy made some changes to their smtp email server settings such that old ASP mail forms no longer work.
Continue readingA few days ago, my iTunes started giving me messages like “iTunes could not sync contacts to the iPhone “My iPhone” because the iPhone disconnected.” It wasn’t syncing anything to the iPhone anymore.
After reading this forum thread I tried resetting the sync history in the iSync application preferences. This did not help and instead caused iSync reminder messages to come up every few minutes.
I also tried syncing the iPhone with all the “info” selections unchecked, and then finally replacing all info on the iPhone by checking “Replace with information from this computer” in the Info tab in iTunes. This last change seemed to work, but I realized later that something else had probably helped fix it:
I’d had a USB hard drive plugged into the same USB hub as my iPhone for the last few days, and when nothing else was working, I finally shut it down and unplugged it. So there was more power for the iPhone coming from the hub. It is a power issue.
Continue readingFacebook’s privacy settings can be managed in a very detailed manner, but setting them up correctly can be confusing to new members. It is not at all obvious that you have any control over what people see of your personal information.
To get started with taking back control over your personal life, take a moment to consider what privacy levels you might need. There may be items you may be comfortable with your family seeing but not friends, and vice-versa, such as photos of yourself uploaded by your friends. You’ll be grouping people into lists that will allow or prevent them to see specific items. Typical lists you might consider making would be “family”, “friends”, “acquaintances”, “coworkers”, “party animals”, etc.
Click “All Friends” under the Friends menu in the blue stripe up top.
Continue readingAt work, I installed Internet Explorer 8 on an old computer running XP to see how well it would work with our Learning Management System. It was immediately apparent that the scrolling and rendering performance
Continue readingA friend’s iPhone stopped functioning correctly when making or receiving calls. When he would call, people on both ends could not hear each other, unless he hit the “Speaker” icon. I tried resetting all settings
Continue readingAlthough some great books [1 and 2] have been written about the huge changes being wrought on society and culture by the digital revolution, it’s just as interesting to speculate about the smaller consequences of the adoption of new technology. Here are some of the ones I’ve noticed, but perhaps you will have your own to add. Please jump in and comment!
Item: Records have given way to CD’s which have given way to digital music streaming and downloads
With the advent of IE 8, I started getting calls about a new error when accessing our learning management system.
“Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.”
This error can be caused by many things, but in this case, I believe it has to do with the fact that the LMS has both secure and insecure assets in the frameset. Unfortunately, many times messages will come up asking people whether they want to view both types, and they will click “no” without knowing that the page requires them to function.
Since I can’t ever really know what is going on with a user’s home computer’s security setup, I simply tell them to reset their Internet Explorer to its default settings.
Continue reading