Site History
Iâve been writing troubleshooting posts on my blogs since the early 2000s. In 2022 I started collecting them in a subsite as Hyperborea Tech Tips, after the domain I was using at the time. In 2026 I moved it here and renamed it as KV Tech Tips.
May 2004
- Focus! â Login Form Fail (Obsolete) If youâre going to set the initial focus in a form field, donât use onload(). Chances are youâll end up moving the cursor while power users are already typing.
August
- Clear Date Formatting Donât use a format like 8/9/10 - depending on where you send it, no oneâs sure if you mean August 9, September 8, or what.
- Wrong Tech for the Context: Fryâs Line Spotters If youâre going to replace an old technology with a new one, make sure itâs actually an improvement in the context in which itâs used.
September
- Pure CSS Buttons As part of a minor site optimizing kick, I replaced the validation labels with something smaller, less obtrusive, and directly on the page. I tried to duplicate the look of the classic antipixel-style buttons in CSS.
April 2005
- Simple Browser Categorization (Obsolete) Sometimes you want to know exactly what software people (or bots) are using to view your website. Sometimes all you want to know is which rendering engineâs quirks you need to cater to.
- Invisible Grub Boot Menu (Fixed) If your GRUB menu isnât showing up, but your system still boots⌠check splashimage and make sure it points at a real file
May
- Reusable PHP Please, when developing your plugins, be sure to always use the full opening tag for PHP instead of just <?
- CSS Outlines What makes Outline different from Border.
June
- Resolving SELinux audit errors on boot in Fedora Core 4 (Obsolete) Rebuild the initrd so it can label the boot filesystem with the new policy.
August
- Toolbars That Phone Home (Obsolete) I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.
- User-Agent Spoofing Explained Letâs say someone decides that theyâll only allow blondes into an event. Depending on how its done, UA spoofing can be like wearing a blonde wig, or it can be like a brunette wearing a badge that says âBlonde.â
October
- iPod vs. Ogg (Obsolete) Apple has no motivation to add Ogg support to the iPod. Theyâve paid the MP3 tax, and so has software their target audience is likely to be using.
- Apache, mod_ssl, and syntax errors in krb5.h (Obsolete) Syntax errors in krb5.h usually mean your Linux distro put Kerberos somewhere Apache isnât expecting to find it.
- Expected dict - Errors in FDF Acrobat Forms FDF uses parentheses to delimit strings. Make sure that anything you use to generate FDF code escapes them properly using backslashes.
- How Thunderbirdâs Scam Detection Works (2005) (Obsolete) Tracking down what causes Mozilla Thunderbird to label a message as suspicious, as well as how to train it to ignore emails that you know are legit.
December
- Bunnyâs Technorati Tags and WordPress 2.0 (Obsolete) To make Bunnyâs Technorati Tags fully compatible with WordPress 2.0 you need to change two lines in the add_tags_textinput() function.
February 2006
- Flock and self-hosted WordPress (Obsolete) If you canât post to your self/third-party-hosted WordPress blog through a program other than the website, and you use ModSecurity - check those settings.
- PHP5 and WP Cache 2 (Obsolete) Finding and fixing errors with WordPressâ WP Cache plugin and PHP5.
March
- Airport Extreme vs. Linux (Obsolete) Broadcom refused to release drivers or specs for the chipset, so for years no one could even write their own.
- IE7 disappearing float bug (Obsolete) In IE7, the exact wrong combination of floats and italics can make a floated element disappear.
- Fixing Flash in Fedora Core 5 (Obsolete) Flash hard-codes the paths where it looks for fonts, instead of letting the X server tell it where to look.
June
- Google Toolbar AutoFill is Weird (Obsolete) This form had name and e-mail fields, but AutoFill only recognized e-mail. I figured, OK, people might be using this, letâs see if I can adjust the page and make it compatible.
- Incremental Updates and the Problem of N+2 Itâs one thing to provide an updater that goes from version N to version N+1. But what if someone doesnât run the updater until N+2 is available? Or worse, N+3?
August
- Retroactive Robots Exclusion at the Wayback Machine How the Wayback Machine handles changes to robots.txt exclusions.
September
- WGA False Positive Experience The time Windows mistakenly told me I was running a pirated copyâŚbecause Norton Internet Security had blocked its validation attempt.
October
- A9 and the demise of SiteInfo (Obsolete) Amazon.comâs search site, A9, has scaled back drastically. The rewards program is gone, as are bookmarks and history. Theyâve even discontinued the A9 toolbar.
November
- On Broken HTML From time to time the idea is put forth that less common browsers need to start dealing with bad code. There are two problems with that view.
January 2007
- Fixing Feed Problems with WordPress 2.0.6 and PHP 5.2 (Obsolete) Feeds are broken on WordPress 2.0.6 with most, but not all, browsers because of an HTTP header problem. Hereâs how to fix it.
- Web Design is Like Pizza A lot of pages arenât as specific as the authors think they are. When you write code and test it on only one browser, youâre not testing that the code is correct, youâre testing that that browser makes the same assumptions you do.
February
- WordPress Broken on PHP 5.2 Again (Obsolete) WordPress 2.1.1 should have fixed the PHP 5.2 problems, but not if youâre also using the internal cache.
April
- When Tags Vanish: WordPress 2.1 (Obsolete) A change in plugin hooks in WordPress 2.1 caused older plugins to fire when a post got new comments, causing some weird behavior like losing custom fields.
May
- PHP 5.2.2 vs. WordPress XMLRPC (Obsolete) A bug in PHP 5.2.2 breaks WordPressâ XMLRPC interface, which breaks stats and other clients.
June
- Fedora 7 Problems With Glint Video Driver (Obsolete) Grab the Live CD first and make sure that all your hardware works properly. If not, see if the fix is available before you actually upgrade.
August
- Promise SX6000, FreeBSD, and Linux (Obsolete) If you want to build a Linux or FreeBSD system around a RAID array, donât use the Promise SuperTrak SX6000 controller. At least not for now.
November
- When digiKam Failed to Connect (Obsolete) File permissions. Always check the file permissions.
January 2008
- The Right Tool⌠Think about when to use client-side scripting vs. server-side scripting.
March
- Webslices and Microsummaries (Obsolete) Both features have since been removed, but they offered and interesting way to let visitors know when a site had been updated.
- Whatâs Dynamic About It? It doesnât really update that often: maybe 3 or 4 times a month. Is it really worth building that file dynamically?
November
- Flash 10 and WordPress File Upload Problems (Obsolete) WordPress use(d) SWFUploader for uploading images, but Flash 10 broke it. Fixed in WP 2.7. Obsolete now that Flash is discontinued and HTML+JS can handle nicer uploads.
June 2009
- Fixing Twhirl (Obsolete) Just delete the entire ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS/ folder and start from the ground up.
July
- @font-face Crashes Firefox on Fedora 11 (Obsolete) Until Fedora updated one of its libraries, Firefox on Fedora 11 would crash on any website that uses an embedded font.
November
- Keep Numbers in Server Errors â404â transcends language and font barriers.
December
- Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux (Obsolete) Flash works on the Google Chrome beta for Linux, but may need an extra symlink for the 64-bit Chrome to use the 32-bit Flash.
- Chkdsk Fail (Obsolete) If chkdsk gives you a âcannot open volume for direct accessâ error on Windows XP, try running msconfig and selecting a Diagnostic startup.
February 2010
- Android Browser Using Extra Space? Check Gears! (Obsolete) Androidâs web browser stores several types of data: cache, history, cookies and passwordsâŚand Gears, which might use more memory than youâd expect!
- Why Google Buzz Wonât Run on Your Android Phone (Yet) (Obsolete) Buzz relies on several HTML5 features which were added to the browser with Android 2.0. Older versions support Gears instead, which may be the way to solve it.
March
- Nepomuk is Not Running (Obsolete) KMail kept tossing errors on launch because an old config was trying to load the wrong Nepomuk backend.
April
- How to Get Rid of Windows Live Messenger (Obsolete) Start to uninstall Windows Live Essentials, then choose which pieces you want to get rid of. And WLM will go away.
May
- G1 Sync and Texts Blocked? Check Your Apps! (Obsolete) Lack of space can prevewnt Android from doing basic things like syncing and sending/receiving messages.
June
- Mac OS X Finder Deleting Files on a Linux Share If you connect to a Samba share from MacOS and it deletes files after telling you it canât copy them, try turning off unix extensions in Samba.
July
- Quick Fix: WordPress Social Homes and LinkedIn Icon (Obsolete) If your WordPress blog shows a blank icon for LinkedIn, this simple change will fix it.
August
- Android Stops Syncing When Low on Space If your Android phone gets a Low on Space warning, take care of it. The phone will stop syncing messages, contacts and email until you do.
- Setting up a Wireless Network on Linux 2.6: Ralink 3062 and Network Manager (Obsolete) Wifi on Linux can still be a pain to get working. Hereâs how I set up a Zonet ZEW1642 on Fedora 13 using the Ralink 3062 drivers.
October
- Mobile Web Layouts vs. the Viewport Mobile web browsers now use a larger virtual screen to provide an imitation desktop experience - even if youâve provided a better one tailored for small screens.
July 2011
- Variables vs. Autocorrect Avoid naming a variable one letter off from a real word. Autocorrect can really mess up your documentation or email.
August
- Donât Hide Version Numbers It breaks user expectations with no real benefit, and makes it hard to tell if youâve actually gotten the latest security fix.
September
- What Can You Build With the Google+ API So Far? (Obsolete) Google Plus has released the beginnings of its API for third-party apps. All you can do so far is read a userâs public activity. What can you do with that?
October
- Keep Your System Updated! Most drive-by computer infections use old vulnerabilities for which patches are already available.
August 2012
- Using Bookmarklets on Android You canât use menus for bookmarklets, but you can use auto-complete.
May 2013
- Weird 404 logging error with PHP and mod_rewrite on DreamHost Under some circumstances, a PHP script generating a 404 error will deliver the 404 to the browser, but get logged as a 200 OK by Apache.
June
- Vizio E422VA: Connecting that Internet-Connected TV to Wi-Fi Update the firmware over wired ethernet first, and use a WPA password without spaces.
September
- WordPress Name+Number Login/Registration Attacks I was seeing a lot of brute force login attacks with odd usernames, and found that they were actually trying to register and kept trying the wrong form.
October
- Double Lock Screen (Obsolete) Usually multiple desktops on Linux will stay out of each othersâ way when they arenât running. Not always.
- Dates and ColdFusion Query of Queries ColdFusionâs Query of Queries is very particular about the format of dates on both sides of the comparison.
November
- First Stab at WordPress/MySQL Tuning (Obsolete) My job sent me to a class on scaling, optimizing and troubleshooting MySQL this week.
- cfspreadsheet + GetTempFile() = NullPointerException In ColdFusion, CFspreadsheet expects to write to a .xls extension, not .tmp, so you have to make sure the name ends in .xls before you write to it.
- Android App Crashing on Start? Clear the Cache An app was crashing every time I tried to launch it. Clearing the cache fixed it without having to uninstall and reinstall, or clear the (extensive) data.
- Feedly 404 Feedback Loop (Obsolete) I set up my site to publish an RSS feed of 404 hits, and added it to FeedlyâŚwhich tried to retrieve the broken URLs, adding a new item to the reportâŚ
- Moving With a Comic Collection Standard long or short boxes are fine. Just make sure you load them in a way that they wonât tip over.
December
- Scheduling for Midnight Plan for 11:59 PM or 12:01 AM, so thereâs no confusion about which day it is!
January 2014
- Find the missing Windows 8.1 update on a Dell (Obsolete) If the 8.1 update is missing from the Windows Store, you need to uninstall a minor update and then reinstall it manually.
August
- Email Verification Best Practices More important than whether the email address exists is whether it actually belongs to the person who is signing up.
September
- Move Your iTunes Library from Mac to Windows In theory itâs easy, but you have to deal with a different folder structure, illegal characters, and then wiping and resyncing your iPod.
October
- POS Touchscreens When touchscreens first hit POS terminals, they tried to replace the PIN entry pad too. It was awful to use. Iâm surprised they brought back real buttons.
December
- Lessons from a Spam Attack: Moderation, Alerts, and Beware Auto-Sharing After cleaning up a spam flood, I learned to be a lot more careful with auto-sharing, more thorough with moderation, and turn some notifications back on.
January 2015
- NVIDIA/Nouveau picture extending beyond screen (Solved) After switching video drivers, my display extended past the edges of the screen. It turned out to be a monitor setting hidden by the old driver.
February
- Jetpack Related Posts Missing on an SSL WordPress Site? (Obsolete) If you canât get Jetpackâs related posts to load on self-hosted WordPress running HTTPS, check your SSL settings to see if you need to disable RC4.
August
- Make Feedly Notice an Updated WordPress Post by Changing the GUID Changing the GUID of an updated post in your RSS/Atom feed will tell feed readers that itâs a new post. Hereâs some WordPress code that will let you do that with a custom field.
September
- Third-Party App Stores Wonât Install on Android? Check Screen Dimmers Android wonât react to an Install button if the screen image is filtered by an app like Twilight or Lux. Fortunately itâs easy to turn them off temporarily.
- Canât Log into Feedly or Pinterest on Firefox 40? Check Ghostery! (Obsolete) After upgrading to Firefox 40, logging into Feedly with Google or Pinterest with a Facebook account failed. It turned out to be Ghostery.
June 2016
- HTTPS is a lot easier than it used to be The cost of implementing HTTPS on your own site is a lot lower now than it used to be.
August
- Using WP-CLI with WordPress 4.6 on DreamHost (Obsolete) To use wp-cli with WordPress 4.6, you need to use a newer version than the one installed, and to do that, you need to enable PHAR in PHP.
September
- Redirecting HTTPS with Letâs Encrypt and Apache If you canât set up a DNS record to verify your domain, you need your HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect to skip the ACME challenge folder. Hereâs how.
- Donât Use Infinite Scroll Infinite scroll is like finishing a sandwich, and the server plops another one in front of you without asking what you want on it, or if you want it at all.
May 2017
- Forgetting Out-of-Range WiFi Networks on a Samsung Galaxy Phone (Obsolete) The tedious solution: Rename your own hotspot, remove it from the phone, then rename it back.
November
- Android Wonât Stop Vibrating Notification options are per-app and per-conversation, so if you change vibration, you need to change it on everything youâve already set.
- NVIDIA on Fedora 27: Bad Resolution and Painful Mouse Lag (Fixed) (Obsolete) As of 2017, Wayland didnât work with the binary NVIDIA drivers, and the system would lag painfully. If you tell GDM not to use Wayland, it will fall back to the older display system.
March 2018
- Using vi Without an Escape Key Ctrl+[ usually works as ESC, and if you can send that combination somehow, you can still use vi!
- Batch Adjust Photos for DST with ExifTool I always forget at least one camera when switching to/from DST, and I always forget the command for exiftool to batch-adjust the image timestamps.
- Airplane Mode: Battery Saver! An old phone with an old battery was still powered after two weeks.
- Groovy, null, and ânullâ Sometimes you get a null value, and sometimes you get the word null. Make sure it checks the one you expect!
- Alternate Sharing Buttons (Now with Less Tracking!) Sharing buttons that donât talk to Facebook, Twitter, or even a third party until you actually click on a button! Iâm testing SharingButtons.io on one site, and Share42 on another.
- Whatâs in Your Social Media Archive? I checked out what you get when you export your content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and Mastodon, with an eye for both private archives and migrating to your own site.
November
- ALWAYS Put the Record ID in the Edit Form Users might have multiple pages of your app open in different tabs or windows. Use a page-specific ID, not something shared like a cookie or session data.
April 2019
- Facebook Page Flagged for⌠domain_placeholder.com? Probably not! (Obsolete) Facebook sent out a suspension notice with placeholder names by mistake.
- How to get Grails to use a reserved word with Microsoft SQL You can use a custom database mapping from reserved to [reserved].
June
- Rebuilding a Minecraft Villageâs Economy Upgrading a Minecraft world to the Village and Pillage update leaves all villagers unemployed. Hereâs how to build all the workstations and upgrade the village!
- Reformat an SD Card for a New Android Device You canât reformat an encrypted SD card from an old Android device, but you can plug it into a PC and reformat it there.
- Preventing Notification Overload My approach: figure out which ones are most and least important, then turn off the least and only keep sound for the most important.
- Firefox Thinks Itâs Running an Older Version Than Last Time (But Isnât!) Look for the compatibility.ini file in your Firefox profile, and delete the LastVersion line.
January 2020
- Java: Annotate Your Overrides Always use the Override annotation when youâre overriding a method, so the compiler will TELL you that you made a typo.
February
- WordPress Combined Searches Theyâre not in the UI, but you can use URL tricks to search for combinations of tags, categories, authors, and so on.
July
- How to disconnect OneDrive on macOS from an extra account that doesnât exist anymore. Hidden inside the resource folder of the OneDrive app package, thereâs a command to reset OneDrive.
August
- Minecraft Bedrock Beta vs. the Microsoft Store Thereâs got to be a better way to do this. Actually, I know thereâs a better way to do this, because Minecraft already does it in Java Edition.
November
- Workaround for Gmail being blocked by âTemporary Errorâ in Firefox on Fedora (Obsolete) In this case it was a Fedora-specific issue, but it could be worked around by holding down shift and hitting reload.
- Wacom Registration error: âProfile ID Missingâ (Solved) Uninstall and reinstall the drivers, or manually reload the registration page in your browser instead of following the link.
December
- Fix for âAmong Usâ not joining games on Linux Change your server region and change it back. No, it doesnât make sense to me either. But at least it works.
January 2021
- Repair missing UEFI entry for Fedora Linux Boot to a live image and either manually edit the menu with efibootmgr or use a specialized tool like boot-repair.
April
- Quick Start: Setting up Gemini on a VPS Without Root Agate is easy to set up, you can use cron to launch it at start, and Gemini doesnât need root to listen on its port.
May
- WordPress 5.7 Upgrade Breaks Posts with Emoji in the Title? Posts with emoji in the title mysteriously stopped displaying anywhere on the blog except the edit form, possibly due to mismatched character sets.
- Java Lag vs. MacOS System Updates The MacBook mysteriously started lagging on Minecraft worlds that had run just fine the day before. It kept lagging until we manually installed the latest system update.
June
- Add a Gemini filetype to Gnome You might need to create a gemini.xml file and/or a .desktop file for your favorite Gemini clients. Hereâs how and where to put them.
- Tell Firefox to open Gemini links with your favorite client Youâll need to click on a Gemini link to get the config options, and then you can choose what to open it in.
- Tell (most) Linux Web Browsers to open Gemini links with your favorite client Most Linux web browsers will open unfamiliar URL schemes with XDG, which will look for .desktop files for the applications that can open it.
July
- Why is NginX serving different localhost sites to Chromium vs. Safari or Firefox? If you have NginX listen to IPV6 in one localhost server {} block, listen to it in all of them!
August
- Windows Losing Drives After Sleep (Solved) It turned out the motherboard had two SATA controllers, one of which worked properly and one which didnât. I just moved the cables over.
- Linux Ejecting DVD Drawer on Wake (Fixed) (Obsolete) Itâs a recent bug in the Linux kernel. Wait a couple of days and itâll be fixed and Fedora will ship the new one.
November
- How Many Bits of Pi? Apparently all Raspberry Pi CPUs show up the same in the Linux kernel, so you have to look at the actual hardware to verify what processor youâre running on and whether itâs 32 or 64-bit.
January 2022
- Web Font Downloaded Twice When Preloading Weirdly enough, you need to add a âcrossoriginâ property even if the font file is on the same site.
- Seeking the Perfect Balance for BOINCing After a brief stint at distributed computing early in the pandemic, I came back first to Folding@Home, then BOINC, with the goal of only using spare power to help out with research.
April
- Google Drive insists âA newer version is already installedâ (Solved) Drive wouldnât reinstall because the uninstall had failed. What finally worked was copying the program files from another computer and re-running the uninstaller.
- Invisible Taskbar Icons on Windows - But Only Microsoft Store Apps (Solved) Clearing caches, fixing corrupted files, just unpinning and repinning might work - or you might just need to uninstall Google Drive.
- How to Find Stuff General tips for looking for something in real life that you know has to be here, somewhere.
May
- Eleventy data cascade not picking up front matter on layouts (Obsolete) Fixed in 1.0.1: Eleventy normally combines the front matter in layouts along with the templates, data files, etcâŚunless the layout is set globally.
- WordPress Complexity vs. Eleventy WordPress has gotten complicated to run, complicated to use, complicated to render⌠Eleventy is complicated too, but only to set up.
- Installing Valhelsia on Linux MultiMC no longer downloads mods from CurseForge, and CurseForge wonât run Minecraft on Linux. But AT Launcher will, and has a workaround for CurseForgeâs API limits.
July
- KeePass Password Managers KeePassXC, its browser extension, and KeePass2Android are a nice, clean set of apps to manage your passwords on your OWN desktop and mobile devices, auto-fill websites and apps, and sync over your own server or cloud provider.
August
- About This Collection I wanted to make an idea-based collection instead of a time-based collection, and make it as light as possible.
- Combining RSS and Atom Feeds with Python How to build a combined feed from multiple sources that you can publish for followers to subscribe.
October
- Cloning a GitHub Repo via Mobile Firefox Even on a tablet with a big enough screen that GitHub looks like itâs showing the desktop version, you might have to insist on it to get all the buttons to appear.
- Setting Expiration and Lifecycle Rules on Non-AWS S3 Storage DreamObjects, DigitalOcean Spaces and others may not have expiration and lifecycle controls in their web panels, but they still use the same API, so you can use s3tools or the AWS CLI.
- Recover Disappearing Inventory in No Manâs Sky: Waypoint If new items have been disappearing from your inventory, they might still be there but hidden. And you can probably use the refiner to get them back!
- Automate or Not? Sometimes it takes longer to automate something than it would to just repeat it yourself. Sometimes itâs worth doing anyway.
- Split Up One Old Git Commit Into Several Yes, you can use git rebase to split a really old set of changes into several.
November
- Wrapping Your Head Around Mastodon Iâve been on Mastodon for several years now, and itâs completely replaced Twitter for me. It is a shift in perspective on how social media works, so here are a few tips to help wrap your head around it.
December
- Useful command for running GoToSocial in Docker alias gts=âdocker exec -it gotosocial /gotosocial/gotosocialâ
- Overheating CPU Check the fans. Check the airflow inside and out. And check the inside of the heat sink. If air canât get through the plates, heat canât dissipate.
- Letâs Encrypt on Alpine Linux The Easy Way Donât use acme-cert. Use certbot.
January 2023
- Remove GPS Tags After Taking a Photo Google Photos wonât remove GPS data from an image, but you can easily remove just the location data using a desktop or laptop.
February
- No Manâs Sky: Disappearing Freighter Base (Obsolete) Before the Fractal update, No Manâs Sky had a bug where if you completely empty your old freighter before buying a new one, the base doesnât transfer.
May
- Auto-Switching a Website to Dark Mode You can easily tell your site to use darker colors when a visitor is using a dark theme by using CSS media queries.
July
- Get Your Phone (or Tablet) a Case! You WILL drop your device. A case will make it a lot less likely for it to break. (Ask me how I know!)
- How to Change the Default Email App on Android Itâs not in Default Apps, so you need to clear the default preferences for your old app first.
- What to Put In About Boxes What I want to see when I open the About box for your application
August
- Reversing the Fridge Door: The Missing Steps The directions leave out the fact that you have to prop up the refrigerator to remove the feet and an additional screw on the bottom hinge assembly.
- Nextcloud Needs Me To Sign In Every Time (Desktop Linux) Make sure your keyring manager is starting before the Nextcloud client.
September
- Is the Xcode Updater Stuck? Watching install.log will show you whether the Xcode updater is still doing something or not.
- How to Put a Phone Extension in Your Android Contacts Use a comma for pause just long enough for the remote to pick up, or a semicolon to wait for a greeting first.
- Fixing a Blank Article Pane in NewsFlash Thereâs a bug in WebKit that can prevent articles from displaying in NewsFlash, but thereâs a workaround.
October
- Broken HTML Email on Lucee CFMAIL on Lucee through 5.x uses an encoding that can break minified HTML or CSS when sending formatted email.
- Get the Date/Time in ISO 8601 Format on the CLI On Linux: Just type âdate -Isâ in the commandline. On macOS: type âdate -Isecondsâ
- Database Upgrade Problems! MySQL 5 â 8 with WordPress My webhost upgraded their database server from MySQL 5 to 8. The upgrade itself went smoothly, but I did find some after-effects on my WordPress sites
- Java/Groovy Overloading and Null Parameters When you overload a Java method to accept different types of parameters, it canât always determine which to call when one of the inputs is null. Hereâs a hacky workaround.
November
- Thunderbird Gets a 400 Error Setting Up Gmail Normally thereâs no good reason for your email client to accept cookies. Except here.
- s3cmd crashes with âexpected str instance, bytes foundâ s3cmd 2.3.0 breaks on Python 3.12. The fix is simple, and will be in the next s3cmd release, but hereâs how to fix your local copy before itâs released.
- Moving WordPress: Finding and Updating Old Paths How to find every last reference to the old path in the entire site and config because WordPress stores absolute paths all over the place and some configurations will break if you donât update it.
- Replacing a Nosepad on Glasses Without Screws Most of the instructions I found were for nosepads attached with screws. These clips just locked the pads in place.
December
- Slow or Broken Sync with Nextcloud: Token does not exist Some applications have trouble syncing unless you assign them an app-specific password.
January 2024
- Finish Those Blog Drafts! If youâre not quite satisfied with your draft, schedule it for a few days out instead of just saving the draft. If you really think of a way to make it better, you still have time.
- KB5034441 Wonât Install The Windows 10 installer didnât set aside enough space to install this fix, but a generic error covers up the actual reason.
- When Not To Use A Redirect Donât use a redirect when changing a setting on your web server would do the job better.
- Running Mac Software on Linux: Good Luck Out of curiosity I went looking to see if there are any macOS compatibility layers for Linux these days. There isnât much.
- Finding Fediverse Feeds How to find the RSS/Atom feeds for Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Misskey, and other Fediverse platforms.
- What do GNOME Online Accounts Do? Itâs not obvious which services GNOME will use from each provider. Hereâs where to find it.
February
- Readable Email and Web Pages Itâs 2024. If youâre still designing websites or email like you would design an 8.5x11" promotional hand-out on a sheet of paper, you really havenât been paying attention to how people use the internet over the past decade.
March
- Reverse the Colors when Viewing a Web Page Not as good as a real dark mode, but you can easily reverse the colors on any website youâre viewing, turning light pages dark and dark pages light.
April
- WordPress Plugin: Combined Readme You can use a README.md instead of a readme.txt so the same file works for both the plugin directory and your git repository.
- Empty AJAX Replies Working on ColdFusion But Not Lucee The default response type on Lucee is text/xml, and some front-end code will try to parse the empty response and throw an error.
May
- WordPress + ActivityPub in a Subdirectory This rewrite rule lets other Fediverse sites find your blog through the ActivityPub plugin, without breaking Letâs Encrypt renewals.
- Notes on E-Paper Display Computers A low-power e-ink laptop sounds great, but I havenât found any yet. Just prototypes, Android tablets, and high-powered e-ink/OLED hybrids.
- Using Plasma Discover on GNOME in Fedora Fedoraâs packages for Discover are missing dependencies, so you have to install kf6-purpose and kf6-kitemmodels on the command line to use it.
June
- Geary With Gmail, (Mostly) Without GNOME Install GNOME, add Gmail to your online accounts, then uninstall the rest of GNOME. But keep gnome-online-accounts!
July
- PineTab2 Notes: Getting Things Working Things Iâve had to do on my PineTab2 to get various features working and/or usable.
September
- Nextcloud Tasks: Mobile, Recurring, and Compatibility Gotchas Which desktop, web and mobile applications have and havenât worked well for me since switching my personal to-do lists to Nextcloud Tasks.
October
- Tell Me What Changed! When you release a new version of your software, tell me whatâs new!
- Update Checks Should Be More Honest Software updaters have a bad habit of telling you theyâre up-to-date before actually checking - and worse, telling you theyâve just confirmed itâs current when they actually couldnât get an answer.
- Getting Logged Out of ClassicPress ClassicPress uses a strict mode for admin cookies, so following a link to your dashboard from another site requires you to log in again.
November
- Install Vivaldi on Arch Linux for Arm64 If you donât want to use Flatpak or Snap, hereâs how you can modify an AUR package for x86_64 to build an Arm64 package for Arch.
- Share to the Fediverse with ShareOpenly A share button that connects to Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog, Threads and more. Hereâs how Iâve hooked it up to Eleventy.
- How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT You can use IFTTTâs webhooks target to hook up anything to autopost to a Mastodon account.
January 2025
- Separate Stop/Reload Buttons When a button changes in response to something over which you have no control, it may change between the time your brain tells your finger to click or tap and the time it registers.
- Windows 11 âPROCESSOR START TIMEOUTâ BSOD on Parallels I got this error trying to relaunch my VM after updating Parallels Tools. The solution was simple: turn it off and back on again.
February
- KeePassXC Browser Extension vs. Flatpak (Not Working Yet) Web browsers running through Flatpak have trouble interacting with KeePassXC.
- Useful Bookmarklets A collection of bookmarklets that Iâve found useful.
April
- Move Email Archives to a New Account Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Apple Mail and Outlook can move messages from one IMAP account to another. Just drag and drop! But Gmail makes it a bit more complicated.
May
- Windows on MacBook Boot Camp Stops Connecting to External Displays Go into Device Manager and tell it to show hidden devices. There could be a broken display config interfering with the driver for the real adapter.
June
- The State of Local-Only Fediverse Posts (WIP) Which Fediverse servers can handle local-only posts, and which apps can publish them? Hereâs what Iâve found so far.
July
- DIY MacBook Data Recovery Over the LAN The MacBook would boot as far as the login screen, but any attempt to use or repair it would just reboot, even at the Genius Bar. I managed to recover recent files by connecting from another computer over the network and copying them, 60 seconds at a time.
- GNOME/Wayland Fails to Log In After Installing XFCE (Solved) The most ridiculous Linux bug Iâve encountered in ages: Installing XFCE changed a mouse cursor setting for GNOME that caused the login screen to crash when trying to log into GNOME/Wayland.
October
- Downgrading a Microsoft Surface Device to Windows 10 You can reinstall Windows on a Surface tablet or laptop using a hardware-specific recovery image and a USB drive. Microsoft will want you to log in and provide the serial number of the device you want to reinstall.
- Unhide the Windows 10 ESU Offer Windows Update is a bit flaky about making the offer to enroll a Windows 10 system in an extra year of security updates. If itâs not showing the offer, this can make it re-check whether your system qualifies: cmd /c ClipESUConsumer.exe -evaluateEligibility
- Gmail on SeaMonkey Yes, you can still connect it after the switch to OAuth2. You need to create a placeholder account first, and find the right settings, which Gmail doesnât seem to tell you anymore.
December
- Using BOOX Devicesâ Page Flip Buttons With Third Party eBook Apps A few eBook apps work with the buttons out of the box, but most need you to enable page-flipping with volume buttons, one app at a time.
January 2026
- Outlook Mangling HTML <pre> Tags Itâs 2026, and Outlook is still mangling email. Itâs collapsing whitespace and line breaks in HTML preformatted text, so you need to fake around it with non-breaking spaces and <br> tags.
February
- Using the loop_end Hook With Multiple WordPress Loops I tried to add some custom navigation at the end of the posts lists using the loop_end hook, but it got added twice. Another plugin was running through the Loop and calling rewind_posts(). To make my code only run after the visible Loop, I picked a hook between the loops and checked did_action() for that hook.
- Select All of a Code Sample Using Minimal JS A short (~10 lines) JavaScript fragment to select an entire code snippet when someone clicks, taps, or presses a key on it.
March
- Using Unicode Half-Stars Symbols in Ratings Filled and outlined stars have been in Unicode forever. Half-stars have been available since Unicode 11 (2018), but font support is still spotty. Fortunately you can embed a font on your website that does support the symbols and rate something four and a half stars.
- Connect macOS Calendar, Contacts and Reminders to NextCloud Current versions of macOS hide the options to add a CalDAV or CardDAV account behind a couple of âmoreâŚâ links, and it still asks for an email address when you get there. Or you can download a Device Management profile if you know where to look.
April
- Minimal User Setup for Debian Cloud The quickest way to set up a sudo-capable user on a Debian cloud (or nocloud) image with useradd, usermod and the sudo group.
- Adding External S3 Storage on Nextcloud Using OCC Itâs easier to add a storage folder for all users or for your own user via the GUI. But it is possible to create a folder for a specific user using the commandline tool.
May
- Tech Tips have moved to KVibber.com New site, new name. What used to be Hyperborea Tech Tips is now KV Tech Tips on a domain based on my name instead of a half-remembered old movie.
June
- /dev/null: Permission denied on Alpine Linux One of my Alpine Linux VMs broke during an upgrade and started throwing errors about the permissions on /dev/null. Just fixing the permissions didnât persist across reboots, but resetting the device manager did.
July
- Hide Related Posts by Post Format Hereâs how you can hide related posts on Asides or Links when using Contextual Related Posts or Jetpack on your blog.