Quick Easy Tech Tips, Tricks and Reviews, with a little bit of Dog Stuff!
Have you ever had a large USB drive that only shows 200mb when you plug it into your Windows computer? Frustrating isn’t it!
And what makes it worse is that nothing you try in the “Format” utility will change it – it always says 200mb in the capacity drop down.
The reason this happens is that in some stage in the USB Drive’s life it has been plugged into a Mac, and it has done “Mac Things” to the drive. Thankfully, there is an easy way to fix it.
Power Cycling sounds like riding a bike really fast up a hill, but in the technology field it refers to a way to get everything back online when things aren’t working right, or you have to recover from a failure or freeze.
A Power Cycle is achieved by turning everything off safely, disconnecting the power sources, and leaving everything to sit for a in-determined amount of time (some say 30 seconds, some say 30 minutes).
I find Power Cycling makes all my devices talk to each other quicker. As I have a somewhat sophisticated home network, yanking the cord on everything from time to time allows new routing tables to be created, and old machines that are no longer connected to the network (That may have been a Master Browser (Machine that tells other machines where everything is located)) to be removed from the environment.
We’ll use my network as an example to go through the procedure, as things do need to be done in a specific order. Using a IP Scanner (There’s lots of free ones available – just Google IP Scanner) I generated this view of my home network.
To begin a Power Cycle, I turn all off the Computers and my Server off. Once they are safely and completely shut down I yank the power cords from the sockets (This is important, if it is still plugged in, there is still power going in, keeping things in memory – So YANK IT!). With my Laptops, I take the batteries out. Next, I shut down and unplug my WD TV media machines and the “Elements” hard drives attached to them. My iPhone and iPad are now shut down by Pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button (Power Button on top right side of device) for a few seconds until the red “slide to power off” slider appears, and then slide the slider. Lastly, My Airport Extreme Router, D-Link Switch, and ADSL Modem are all disconnected from the outlets.
Now I go throw a tennis ball with my Dog Benson for about 10 minutes. This allows plenty of time for any power left in the devices to drain away, and all caches and memory to clear.
After playtime I get ready to restart everything. First, I plug the modem back in and let it initialize and connect to the internet. Then I turn on my Switch, and my Airport Extreme Router is next. When they are all operational and happy, I turn my computers on one at a time, beginning with the one I use most, first (So it can become the Master Browser). Once it is up and connected to the internet, I turn the next one in my usage order on, and let it connect, then the next, etc, etc. Then, I boot up my WD TV Live Hub and reconnect the “Elements” storage drives, and lastly, I power on my iPhone and iPad by holding down the Sleep/Wake (Power Button on top right side) for a few seconds until I see the silver Apple logo appear.
Everything should be back up, running, and happy!
Some people will tell you there is no advantage to power cycling. I personally, do believe it helps, and if you are undecided, Try it for Yourself and make up your own mind! What have you got to loose?
**NOTE** – THIS ARTICLE VERSION IS WRITTEN FOR MAC USERS – WINDOWS VERSION COMING SOON
PART 1 – Setting up MAMP (Experts Shortcut – Install MAMP and proceed to step 2)
If you have a WordPress Blog or Web Site, it can be VERY handy sometimes to be able to take your live published site and copy onto your local computer. This enables you to play with, set up and assess plugins, try out new themes and layouts, and generally mess with your site without affecting your real live site.
To get started you need to create an environment that will allow your site to function on your computer. The two main ingredients to a WordPress installation are PHP (web language) and SQL (Database). To get these two engines running on your computer you need to download some free software that installs them as part of a server. MAMP (Macintosh + Apache + MySQL + PHP) is excellant for this. It is available free from MAMP.info HERE. The free version and the paid version are bundled together, but for our purpose here, the free version will be fine, so lets go ahead and install that. Once you have downloaded MAMP, Unzip the zip file and run the installer package.
Click continue.
Click Continue.
If you agree, click continue.
Confirm you Agree……click continue……And once you arrive at the screen below, we will tell the installer not to worry about MAMP PRO, and to just install MAMP Free. (If you want to try MAMP PRO free for 14 days, skip the following 2 steps).
Click the “Customize” button in the left.
Uncheck the “MAMP PRO” option.
Type your password to allow the installer to run.
Once the installer has finished, click “Close” in the lower right hand corner. You can now open a new finder window, and in your Applications folder you will see a new folder called “MAMP”.
Double click the “MAMP” application to start it up.
Now click the “Start Servers” button.
Once you have green lights, click “Open Start Page’. this will open your browser to a page that will tell you if all your services (IE PHP and SQL) are up and running on your machine.
WOOHOO! We’re ready to start copying our web site!
PART 2 – COPYING LIVE SITE
Its now time to copy over the files from the site we want to clone. To get started, log into that site, For this tutorial, I am going to use my Photography and Design site Gruffpuppy as an example. Once logged in, click “Plugins” and select “Add New”
In the search field type “Duplicator”.
Once Duplicator is found, Install and then Activate the plugin.
When activated a new item will appear in the Column Menu on the left side called “Duplicator”. Click it, and you will be brought to the main screen of the plugin. To begin downloading a copy of your live site, the Duplicator asks you to name the back up package. You can change the default name, but in my experience the default auto generated name that is already in there seems to work without error. If you are happy with the name, click the “Create” button, the first in the top right row.
You will now be asked to confirm, and Duplicator will start compressing your entire site into a zip file, ready for download. This can take a while, so now is a good time to stretch your legs and get a drink. Once it has finished compressing, the screen will update automatically with your available downloads.
You will need to download both files (Installer and Package) to your desktop. If you have a large site, the package file can take some time to download. Once your files are downloaded, there’s one more small task.
Select “Settings” from the column menu on the left and then “Permalinks”.
Although no action need be taken, It is important to take note of the setting. As you can see, mine is set to “Day and Name”, but yours could be different. We need to know this setting when we recreate and activate the copy/clone of our site later. Once you have written down or memorized your permalinks setting, you can log out of your site.
PART 3 – SETTING UP A DATABASE FOR YOUR CLONE
The next step is to set up a blank SQL database on your computer. With MAMP running, click the “Open Start Page” button again, and click “phpMyAdmin” from the top menu of the page that opens.
Now, click “Databases”.
In the create databases field, type a name for the new database. It can be whatever you want, but it is important that you write it down, as we will need to use the name later. Im calling mine “gruffpuppy”, one word, all in lower case. Then click the “Create”. Once this is done, close out of the web browser window. There is no need to create “Users” for the database as we will use the root/default user account, which is automatically created for every database.
PART 4 – CREATE THE COPY/CLONE OF YOUR SITE
With MAMP still running, and your server active (Green Lights) , its time to move the files “Duplicator” created to your local server directory.
Open a new finder window, and go to “Applications”, open the “MAMP” folder, and then open “htdocs”.
Drop the zip folder and the “installer.php” file Duplicator created in and close the finder window.
Open up your favorite web browser (For this tutorial I will be using Firefox, as there’s a little bug I want to show you, that doesn’t seem to appear in Safari) and in the address bar type “localhost:8888” and you will see a directory listing of your “htdocs” folder.
Double click the “installer.php” file and the Duplicator installer will open. YAY! This means your server is all working great, and you are viewing your first web page on your local server. Now it’s time to set up the database connection. In the MySQL Server area, leave “Host” set to localhost. in “User” type “root”, as we will be connecting using the automatically created user profile I mentioned earlier. In “Password” type the word “root” again, and for “Database Name” you need to type the name you specified earlier in phpMyAdmin. I used “gruffpuppy” so that’s what I am typing here. When your done, press “Test Connection”.
As you can see, my connection is good and I am ready to move on to the next step. If you receive an error here, you need to go back and check your credentials. It’s usually a typo of your credentials or database name. Once you have a successful connection click the “Close” button.
Check the warning box and click “Run Deployment”.
Another warning will pop up, which is irrelevant to this project, so go ahead and click “OK”.
Duplicator will now start building the copy of your WordPress Web Site. This can take a while so be patient.
Once installation has finished, you are given an opportunity to change some parameters. Unless you have some special circumstances outside of the scope of this tutorial, your fine to accept the default settings. Click “Update Tables”
The next screen means the duplication of your site is now complete, and there’s just a little bit of house keeping to be done before you can use your site.
STEP 5 – FINISHING UP THE INSTALL
At this point, I recommend closing all open windows of your web browser and opening one new window with your default homepage showing, and then clear your browser history, cache and cookies etc. More often than not in Firefox the next step will yield an error in the process and you will not be able to continue. It looks to me like something that is kept in your browsers memory blocks the CSS (cascading Style Sheets) from loading and your site looks like this:
If you are using Firefox, Select “Tools” from the menu bar and then “Clear Recent History” gets you going, and in Safari, Click “Safari” and then “Reset Safari” to bring up the browser cleaning options. Once you are all cleaned up, type “localhost:8888/wp-admin” in your web browsers address bar and VOILA!
Log in to your site with your regular username and password.
From the menu column on the left select “Settings” and then “Permalinks”.
Referring back to the note we made in step 2, make sure the appropriate setting is selected (mine was Day and Name) and press “Save Changes”. Even if your setting is already selected, it is still important to press the “Save Changes” buttons so the option is written to the database.
Your site is now completely cloned/copied to your local machine and you can mess with it until the cows come home without affecting your live site in any way.
STEP 6 – HOUSEKEEPING
The last step is to delete your install files from your “htdocs” folder.
Locate the “installer-data.sql”, “installer-log.txt” and “installer.php” files, move them to the trash and give yourself a pat on the back! YOU DID IT!
In PART 1, we looked at how to listen to internet radio (specifically 181FM 80’s Hairband Station) on the go. In this part, we will look at two ways to listen at the office on your computer with a web browser, assuming your computer has sound capabilities. The quickest and easiest way to listen is to simply navigate to www.181.fm.
Once there, you will find a list of ALL of their cool stations down the left hand side. There’s SO much good music to listen to there. But if its Glam your looking for, Just navigate down to “80’s Hairband”, and click it. A new window will open with a player in it, and it should start playing immediately.
Another way to listen to internet radio through your web browser is to go to Tunein.com, and in this case, again, we will search for “80’s Hairband” in the search bar at the top.
Once 181FM 80’s Hairbands appears, click it to open a new window which contains a player, and even the album art for the songs it is playing.
In Part 2, we looked at how to play Internet Radio on a web browser, but at home you are more likely to have iTunes installed, which is a better way to listen in my opinion.
With iTunes open, look down the left hand side, and find the word “Radio”.
Bet you didn’t even know that was there did you! Give it a click, and behold the staggering amount of music you have access to that you didn’t even know was there!
Towards the bottom of the list you will find 80’s Flashback. Expand this category by clicking the triangle to the left, and way down the bottom you will find 181FM 80’s Hairband.
Give it a click, and it will start playing.
To avoid having to do the search each time, just grab the listing for “181FM 80’s Hairband” and drag it to the playlist area and drop it.
It will create a link to the station, so next time you want to listen, all you need to do is click the playlist, and it will start playing immediately. Cool Huh!