Pay forever for the new "EOS Webcam Utility"

 So, I have a seminar coming up that I've been asked to record. The webcam solutions I've found have been rather inadequate. Then I had a brilliant idea — why not use the DLSR camera I already have as a video input device? I have a nice telephoto lens for it, which I'm hoping will mean I can record the meeting at the back of the room using OBS on my laptop and stay neatly out of the way.

Of course, Canon doesn't like to make things simple. First, OBS won't recognize the camera as a video input device because I connected it via USB. First, I need to download the Canon EOS Webcam Utility. You can find it on the Canon website, but it's not free, of course. You get a "free trial" for it, after which they will charge you $5 a month for it. Forever.

So forget about that. I remembered using this feature before and not having to sign up for some stupid monthly fee. That's when I found this website where I can download an older, free version, that lets me do what I want. (Just be sure to scroll down to the bottom to the download button that says "Free: 4.54MB." All the other "download" buttons are ads in disguise.)

Ejecting a disc on a Wii with a broken eject button

 I've been letting the kids play with my (relatively) old Nintendo Wii for a while, and for Christmas, I got a couple extra controllers and some multiplayer games so we could play some games as a family sometime. Unfortunately, the eject button somehow stopped working — it's either stuck or jammed or in some other way not "clicking" the way it should, so we were stuck with Twilight Princess and absolutely no other options for something as simple as ejecting a disc (not even one involving a paperclip).

So off to Google I go to find a solution. Naturally, it was ridiculously difficult. There were plenty of web forms with answers like "use a sledgehammer" or "push the button harder." One guy on YouTube suggested a "five minute solution" of taking the Wii apart by uncovering multiple hidden screws and unscrewing them with a specialty screwdriver so you can mess with whatever button-pushing mechanism was going awry (this involved adding a piece of tape).

The solution that wound up working for ME was even more ridiculously complicated, but I didn't have to buy a novelty screwdriver or start taking apart my hardware. Instead, I installed an app specifically to tell the Wii to eject the damn disc. This is the sort of feature any competent developer would have put in the UI to begin with, but Nintendo has a way of not bothering that sort of thing.

1. The first step was installing a "Homebrew Channel" on the Wii, something Nintendi does NOT want you to do (because it's helpful and usful). To trick the Wii into doign this, I used the "LetterBomb" crack to do this, which meant finding my Wii's MAC address and then plugging it into a sketchy website to download a ZIP with the files I needed. I loaded this on a 1GB SD card I'd been keeping in a drawer and found the "bomb" message in the Wii message-board (after a couple tries, as it didn't take the first time).
2. After a few command prompts (and some scary-looking Linux crawling across teh screen), the installation was done and I had a new Homebrew software on the Wii menu. I launched this and got to see get to see a blank screen with bubbles and nothing else. This is because Homebrew Channel needs you to put apps, but there's nothing in the documentation that makes this obvious or explains how to install the apps.
3. So to install apps, you take the same SD card you used to install the LetterBomb and add a director that says "apps." Then you can download an "Eject DVD" app and put its unzipped contents in there. And this worked. I opened the Homebrew Channel, then ran the Eject DVD app, and the disc came out. Now we can play a different game at least. Hooray!
4. The "Eject DVD" app was actually my second choice. I'd wanted to install an actual channel to eject the disc on the main Wii menu. There's a Wiki page for something called "Power-Off Channel" that allegedly does this but doesn't actually contain a working link to the app. I had to hunt around for Google to find that. Then, of course, I had to make sure I downloaded the second app instead of the first, as the first just powers off the Wii while the second (allegedly) gives an option to eject the disc.
5. So what THAT does is give you a "wad" file, which is a Wii channel (I guess). How do you install it? Well, you need yet ANOTHER Homebrew app for that, WiiModLite, which will let you install "wad" files that you download on the Internet. Put that app in the apps director and then put the "wad" you downloaded form step 4 into a new directory called "wad." Load the app on the Homebrew Channel and follow a few prompts to install the new channel.

So there. Those are all the steps you need to follow to eject a disc. Because Nintendo couldn't be bothered to add an "eject disc" button to their UI. Thanks, Nintendo. Now I know how to hack a Wii.

Where to find Adobe CC fonts

I've been using Adobe CS6 for the past several years rather than switching to Creative Cloud. I'm one of those crazy people who doesn't want to pay $600 every year for the same software. This hasn't been a problem up until now, when a client needed a file put together using some specific fonts and had no way of sending them to me.

Seriously. The file was created with InDesign CC, and Adobe will not let you include the fonts when packaging it up. They do this to force more people to sign up for Creative Cloud, of course, but nobody's going to pay $600 just to access a few fonts for one project. Certainly not me.

So here's how I got the files. It was tricky, because Adobe does not want you to know where they are. But they're here:

Mac: /Users/<your user name>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/.r

Windows: C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\r

Now, when you open this folder (on Windows anyway), you won't see fonts per se. You'll see some files with no file extensions and given numbers instead of names. But those are your fonts. Just copy them out and add a ".ttf" file extension, and viola! You've got your fonts.

WordPress Preview Not Working

I don't like Google as a company, but there's a reason I wind up using their search engine rather than DuckDuckGo. Here's an example.

I'm having a problem with WordPress where, if I hit "preview," I get an error page instead of a preview of my page (saying "This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?"). In search of a solution, I go to DuckDuckGo and search for "WordPress preview page not found."

The result — a bunch of completely unhelpful pages.

Yeah, I know how to use the preview function, DuckDuckGo. How about help finding the problem I described in my search query? So, I go to Google with the exact same search term. Guess what?

Hey! There we go! Several sites with people posting about the problem I'm having. Maybe those sites will be useless, but at least I'm finding what I actually searched for. This site is the one that had the correct solution, by the way. Just in case the page disappears someday (which happens often), I'll recap the steps to fix this problem below.

1. In your browser, log out of your WordPress site (or sites if you have more than one logged in.)
2. Close all your browser windows, even the minimized ones.
3. Relaunch your browser and make sure it only has only one tab open.
4. Click the menu at the top right of your browser window (it usually three horizontal lines)  and choose "Settings." This opens up a new page.
5. Click on the "History" tab at the top. Then click "clear browsing data" on the left hand side.
6. Under "advanced," check everything except passwords and auto-fill form data. Then click "clear data."
7. Repeat the process under Basic, with browsing history, cookies, and caches images and files. Choose "all time" for the time range and choose "clear data."
8. Close your browser and start it up again.

Something went wrong

This screenshot perfectly encapsulates the "Microsoft experience" I've had throughout my entire life. "Something went wrong," followed by some incomprehensible errors codes and only one option presented: to give up.

Backing up Google Autheticator

So my phone is having Stupid Issues yet again, so I'm going to do a factory reset as a last resort before buying a new phone. Of course, I can't just wipe the phone without more Stupid Issues. Namely, I have a number of sites that, for one reason or another, require I use Google Authenticator to access them.

So, how do I backup my Google Authenticator codes before doing a factory reset? Simple: you can't. You need to have saved whatever numbers or QR codes you used to set up your keys to begin with. And if you didn't save those? You're SOL and simply have to lose access to all the sites and set up entirely new codes for everything after I wipe my phone.

The apparent solution was to have used "Authy" instead. Maybe. Who knows? In any case, even the factory resetting didn't fix the Stupid Issues, so now it looks like I have to buy a new phone if I want simple things like Bluetooth enabled once again. Thanks, Google!

Flash is dead to me

Whoever thought I would need a working copy of Flash in order to look at my tax return? You see, being the idiot I am, I assembled all of my previous tax returns — including this year's — using Adobe Acrobat. And I stupidly saved them as a "PDF portfolio," so I could collect all the documents in one place with a single password.

Well, guess what? Acrobat was apparently completely, entirely dependent on Flash to display these files, and now that Flash is DEAD, all I get is a black screen when I open my document — along with a completely unhelpful note that I need to reinstall Flash, which no longer exists.

So, is there anyway to retrieve all of my tax information? NO. Of course not. It's no longer available. Because of Flash. I can only hope now I have my physical copy still accessible before I have to call my accountant.

You'd think Adobe would have some kind of knowledge or experience in digital document creation or something, but that pales in comparison to their history as an enemy of backward compatibility.

So if you were dumb enough to save anything as a "PDF Portfolio" assuming you'd be able to access it indefinitely, you'd better download the Flash Player now before Adobe takes it away (and your documents) forever.

Download here.