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After over a year without a post, it gets difficult to get motivated to patch the constant stream of security issues that Wordpress brings. I’ve been thinking for some time about minimizing the footprint of this blog and the other properties I host for friends and family, and I decided I would use static sites where possible. This weekend I decided to pull the trigger and export everything from Wordpress to Markdown.

Titanfall Resolution Out of Range / Black Screen

I wanted to share this fix to a frustrating Titanfall issue that I haven’t seen listed as solved anywhere else. I was running into issues when launching the game. My computer would simply display an error message that was saying that the resolution was out of range. Frustratingly, when I tabbed out of the game, I could see everything fine and even navigate to the resolution options where I would select windowed, but the game wouldn’t save the resolution changes.

Synchronize files in Windows or across PCs using Symbolic Links

Check out these handy little guys…   http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/" target=”_blank”>http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/   Very niche, but might come in handy someday. What this does is sync a file to multiple directory locations on a hard drive. i.e. same file exists in C:\Folder A as in C:\Folder B and updates both if you make changes to one or the other.   I’ve been using them a while to do a couple different things:  

Useful Tips and Shortcuts for Eclipse IDE

I’ve used several IDEs in combination with many different languages, but the one I’ve felt benefits the most from a lot of user knowledge / tweaking is Eclipse. Now, for this list of tips and shortcuts I’m assuming that you are using Java, but many (if not most) of them are language-independent. Keyboard Shortcuts: ALT + SHIFT + L: Local variable extraction of text selection (i.e. makes a new local variable out of the highlighted text and inserts a reference in its place automatically).

Google Chrome pale blue screen – SOLVED

In my case, the issue was caused after I installed the Hangouts extension from the Chrome Web Store. It seems the Hangouts extension was causing the pale blue screen. To solve, I simply closed the Hangouts app from the taskbar and re-launched Chrome.

Outlook 2010 – The Operation Failed [SOLVED]

When sending an email from Outlook 2010, I received the error “The Operation Failed“.     For me, this ended up simply being an issue with the email address autocomplete feature. Solution: I typed the first few letters of the recipient’s email address, pressed the down arrow on my keyboard, then pressed the Delete key. Then, I manually re-typed the recipient’s full email address, and my email sent without any problems.

“Documents.library-ms” is no longer working. – Windows 7/8 [SOLVED]

After I upgraded to Windows 8, I began receiving this lovely vague little error message when navigating to any of my Documents, Pictures, or Videos libraries through the left navigation panel in Windows Explorer. Here’s the fix: Open a Windows Explorer window Right click the offending Library Click Delete Right click on Libraries Click Restore Default Libraries    

[SOLVED] No device drivers were found – Windows 7 install from external hard drive

When attempting to reformat a Lenovo ultrabook via USB external hard drive, I received the following error:

No device drivers were found. Make sure that the installation media contains the correct drivers, and then click OK

The solution was as simple as switching the external hard drive from a USB 3.0 port to a USB 2.0 port, rebooting, and restarting the installation.

If that doesn’t work, some other suggestions I found were to try and enter your particular PC’s recovery mode to see if there is an option to reinstall Windows from there, or to try re-copying the Windows installation files to your USB drive/external HDD.

Digital Signage, and its good friends Prezi and AirPlay

I got to thinking again. Don’t worry – I didn’t pull a brain muscle this time. I’m not sure if you’ve ever used/seen/experimented with Prezi… but I’ve got to say that I think, along with wireless video signage/AirPlay in general, this has to be one of the most under-utilized multimedia tools out there. It’s seriously incredible (and dead simple). Imagine something like this running on the various displays. For free/cheap. And with content editable by everyday users.

PowerShell Reports, an interface with Bootstrap and jQuery

I use PowerShell for as much of my job as possible. One of the most common things I’m asked to do is to provide some sort of report, and in some cases these reports need to be updated periodically. Instead of emailing these reports out, I decided to string together a bit of JavaScript, static HTML, and an indexing job from PowerShell to create a semi-dynamic reporting interface for the reports my scripts create.
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