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.

Making the Rii Wireless Keyboard function keys work on a Raspberry Pi

A while back I bought a Raspberry Pi. I wanted to use it to play videos on our downstairs TV, but I also use it to play Minecraft with the kids and do math lessons with my son using Khan Academy. It's a fun, versatile little device.

Then last Christmas, my wife gave me a Rii wireless keyboard/trackpad to use with the Raspberry Pi. It worked nicely for the most part, but for some reason the function keys wouldn't work. The function keys on this keyboard double as media keys (for volume, etc,), but even when pressing the "fn" button they refuse to act as function keys like they should. This made switching to "full screen" mode in Chrome a little difficult.

Fortunately, there's a way to make them work perfectly, and like most things in the Linux world, it's not at all straightforward or simple. Fortunately, I managed to figure out the steps to accomplish this fix not only once, but twice. I got most of the steps from this article here, but I decided to write them down here for anyone else as well (in my own clumsy way) who might need them.

1. First, go and download this hid-apple-patch. Put it somewhere easy to find on your Raspberry Pi and unzip it (right clicking and choosing "extract here" works nicely). This is a "patched hid-apple kernel module."
2. Next, you need to install something called "dkms" (Dynamic Kernel Module Support). Open the terminal app and enter "sudo apt-get update" then "sudo apt-get upgrade" to update everything first. Then do "sudo apt-get install dkms."
3. Now with dkms installed, navigate your way in the terminal to the folder you unzipped in step 1. Then do the following commands to build and install the patch.
1. sudo dkms .
2. sudo dkms add .
3. sudo dkms build hid-apple/1.0
4. sudo dkms install hid-apple/1.0
4. Next, use the nano text editor to open the config file:
   sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf
5. Add this single line to the empty text file: options hid_apple fnmode=2
6. Save the text file and reboot

Ta-da! Your Rii wireless keyboard now has function keys that work when you press the "fn" button.

Under-depreciated

Oh, how I hate programming — and in particular programmers who decide that easy bits of code that anybody can use need to be depreciated (because "security") and replaced with nothing, requiring you to go hacking away in PHP at the core bits of your WordPress installation to achieve something you used to get with one line of code and should be built into a plug-in to begin with.

Take the simple act of having a "success page" after filling out a form. Any decent contact form program written since the dawn of the web would have this as an option — a page you go to after filling out a form that says, "Thank you." Easy enough, right?

Not in Contact Form 7. Oh sure, you used to be able to do this with one line of code:

on_sent_ok: "location = 'http://www.example.com/thank-you-page'";

But then someone decided, "Oh that's too easy, let's mess with people a bit." So now the process is considerably more complicated, namely editing the functions.php file in your WordPress installation to do exactly the same JavaScript thing, just in a way more likely to break things.

1. add_action( 'wp_footer', 'redirect_cf7' );
2.  
3. function redirect_cf7() {
4. ?>
5. <script type="text/javascript">
6. document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
7.        location = 'https://www.example.com/thank-you/';
8. }, false );
9. </script>
11. }

And again, it does exactly what the "old" method did, so aren't there still security concerns? No, I guess not. Because reasons.

And shouldn't this be built into the plug-in anyway? You know, one field called "success page" that you just fill out with a URL and be done with it? But no, things have to be difficult. And stupid.

https://www.rocketclicks.com/client-education/contact-form-7-thank-page-redirects/

Fake PC Repair Sites

Whenever I have a problem with my PC, which is often, I find it's awfully easy to stumble upon a fake PC repair site. That's a site that looks innocently like an real site with real repair advice but is actually just a front to sell you some specific PC "cleaning" or "repair" tool. Like this useless waste of space below.

http://windowsreport.com/fix-explorer-exe-error-system-call-failed/

My recommendation? Whenever checking out a site, scroll down a couple pages to whatever solution they're pushing near the bottom. If the name of the commercial program just happens to have the same name as the website, move right along. Whatever problem you're experiencing likely has a free solution that actually works.

Versa won't sync

My previously-mentioned Pebble finally bit the dust, first getting a crack and then getting exposed to water, which I believe shorted it out. Pebble was swallowed up and spit back out by FitBit anyway, so I figured it was time to move on to something new.

That turned out to be a Versa, which is a lovely smart watch that can't sync worth a crap. Go and Google "Versa won't sync" and you'll find a hundred thousands posts from people all experiencing the same problem: your smart watch ignores your phone, turning it into a fancy, overpriced pedometer. It's genuinely embarrassing that the FitBit app has two or three settings to be "always connected" when connecting even once seems to be absolutely impossible.

Now, if you've found your way to this pathetic site, you've probably already tried all the recommended solutions, all which are a variation of "turn it on and off again," and none of which work. Well, here's my advice: return your Versa to the place you bought it from and request a refund. Seriously, that's the only way FitBit will get the message that this problem needs to be solved.

If that isn't an option, however, you're welcome to screw with your watch any number of ways. I find it tends to connect every now and then, completely on a whim, which is almost often enough to be tolerable. Sometimes it's when I walk away from my phone and walk back again. Other times I screw with "optimization" for the FitBit app in my battery settings, and then it starts working (for a minute, anyway). It's no guarantee, but it's at least easier than a factory reset (which is always a joy and won't help anyway).

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Bluetooth Bane

So my new Pebble 2 and Android smartphone (a G4 Moto Play) refused to talk to each other this morning. I wasted about an hour trying to pair, un-pair, and re-pair their Bluetooth relationship, but absolutely nothing worked. To add to the aggravation, every website that claims to have an answer to this seems to be blocked for some reason.

So the solution eventually came when I reset the Pebble to factory settings and completely uninstalled and reinstalled the Pebble app. Then it worked again, thank goodness, but seriously — how long has Bluetooth had this ridiculous issue? I remember a decade ago struggling to get a wireless mouse to work and then afterward simply using a corded one instead.

P.S. This happened a few more times, and each time the solution was something along the lines of un-pairing the phone and Pebble and repairing again, usually by "forgetting" the Pebble in my Android Bluetooth settings. A pain? Yes, but it usually worked (and isn't nearly as horrible as the FitBit Versa).

Unfortunately, process.my.sanity has stopped

So, I just bought a new (refurbished) Nexus 10 for the wife off of Groupon. And of course, it's completely unusable. After logging into Google and starting it up, it starts getting an endless stream of errors, always "unfortunately, google play services has stopped" or something. I went to Google to find an answer, and of course there are thousands of posts all over the place all with the exact same problem.

So what's the solution? There isn't one. Oh, there are lots of alleged solutions, but not a single one that works. If you hate yourself and want to feel the white hot pain or trying to make the piece of garbage you bought online work, you can try any one of the following:

1. Delete the cache
2. Reset app preferences
3. Uninstall the Google Play Store
4. Wipe the System Cache Partition
5. Reset to factory settings

When none of those ideas work, you can muck around with the firmware, installing a custom ROM or any number of things that will void your warranty. Don't worry, it's EASY!

Or your could just send it back and hope the next one will work. Which it won't.

Getting a PayPal API Username and Signature: an exercise in futility.

Every now and again and I need a reminder of how much I hate myself. That's when I decided to do something that should be brain-dead simple on WordPress using the pre-installed, already-configured WP eCommerce plug-ins — connecting to our business PayPal account for online payments.

Super easy, right? All I have to do is enter a few simple, little PayPal things into the settings boxes. Like these:

Why, an API Username, Password, Signature, and Merchant ID. I should be able just to click right over to my PayPal account and find those right under "My Selling Tools" on my PayPal profile, which is EXACTLY where PayPal's helpful help files says it should be. RIGHT?

WRONG! They're not there. They're not ANYWHERE.

So… what's the solution? Is there some magical account setting or special status that lets me have access to an API? After an hour of Googling, I can't find an answer. The WP eCommerce site says I just have to have a PayPal Express Checkout account, or a a Verified PayPal Business Account, or maybe I need to upgrade your account to a Business account. It doesn't matter, because no matter what I click, I just get bounced back to this page, which only lets me log back into my own account with no modifications no matter what I choose.

Of course, PayPal is also ridiculously impossible to get hold of, and I have to fight with their phone tree for hours just to get hung up on.

The Answer

Eventually I discovered one of the five different PayPal modules, "PayPal Payments Standard 2.0," did NOT require any API settings in order to work, so I wound up using that instead.

Sorry, Dave. I can't open that.

So, I burned a PowerPoint presentation to a DVD-R disc. It's the master disc of a large system of presentation files, and everything fit neatly and runs perfectly on my hard drive. Once burned to the DVD-R, however, I only get this lovely message.

That's right. It simply "can't read" the file. It even apologized. However, by "can't read," it doesn't mean the file isn't readible. No, if I open PowerPoint itself and do a file/open, the file opens JUST FINE. It simply refuses to open it from the desktop.

Why? Simple. "Show help" reveals:

The presentation cannot be opened. Your antivirus program may prevent you from opening the presentation. To fix this problem, make sure your antivirus program is current and working correctly. If the problem persists and the presentation is from someone that you trust, turn off your antivirus program, and then try to open the presentation again. If you do this, make sure you turn on your antivirus program again after you open the presentation.

So there you have it. It's my anti-virus programs fault! Why? How do I disable it? Do I even HAVE an anti-virus program running? No, I DO NOT. One lovely fellow has this as a solution, however:

"Just to let you all know, I reinstalled Windows from CD and I am now able to open PowerPoint files without any problems. Thanks for all your help."

That's right. The solution to one file randomly not wanting to open is to REINSTALL YOUR ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM. Yes, seriously.

OK, I'm done yak-shaving for the day.

Skype stuck while signing in on Android

Yeah, the title pretty much says it all. I tried logging into Skype, which has been sitting dormant on my phone for pretty much a year or two, and somehow it just sits and spins on that stupid "signing in" screen. After watching the dots circle around for half an hour, I give up and try again. And again. Then I reboot the phone and try again. And then I reinstall Skype and try again. Nothing I do will make it sign it.

Then I reluctantly go to Google, where other people have had this exact problem with absolutely no solution from anyone. I won't link to any of these sites, but if you Google "Skype stuck on signing in Android," you'll find plenty of them, all with two-year old posts on how "This is happening to me, too! Has anyone found a solution?!" Nope. No solution.

Oh wait I got it to work now.

Want to know how? OK, I don't know exactly why, but my phone started working again after I did a couple things. Not sure if these will work for you, but give it a try.

1. I sign up for a new damn account. Don't panic, I was still able to log back into my old one, but out of sheer frustration, I created a new Skype account with my Skype app. Guess what? It logged in fine and started bugging me to verify my phone number and add contacts. That was all I needed to make sure the app could actually get past the sign in screen.
2. I signed out of this new account, and then signed in on the web to my account and found I had some "inactive credits" for some reason. I reactivated them.

After doing these two things, I logged back into my old account, and it seemed to work fine. Not sure if that was just a coincidence, but maybe it'll work for you.

There, Internet, was that so freaking hard?

And this, my friends, is why I use an ad blocker most of the time. If you can't see, the GREEN button on the right is the button I have to click to download this software. The BLUE button on the LEFT is an AD for completely unrelated software.

WordPress missed schedules

I have a couple blogs that use WordPress. I used to use Blogger, but WordPress offered certain features that Blogger simply didn't have (which I won't get into right now). It seemed to work great for a while, but at some point WordPress decided to start ignoring my scheduled posts. When it would come time for one post or another it go live, it would shrug, label it "missed schedule" and go back to sleep. This seemed like the kind of problem that should be easy to solve with a bug fix from some developer, except nobody in the WordPress community has been able to fix it. Instead, the only solution they have is to disable the WordPress cron and set up your own command via cron to get it to work.

Which is great if it would work. But it doesn't. Well, at least not all the time. It worked once on one of my sites, but not on another. Anyway, if this happens to you, just remember one thing: SCHEDULED POSTS WILL NEVER WORK RELIABLY. No, not ever. They won't. Please don't try to find another solution. There is none. Especially not a plug-in that claims to fix the problem. It actually required another plug-in that will very easily break WordPress and every other site on tour server. It just happened to me, and I had to figure out how to disable the plug-ins via FTP to get everything back online.

So for now the solution is to post stuff manually. With no scheduling. Sorry. There is no solution.

Syncing files: THE SOLUTION

So after much frustration in trying to sync files on two flash drives, I finally discovered the solution: I had been ripped off. Yes, I bought my second flash drive on eBay, where the seller claimed it was 64Gb in size, but in reality, it was a 4GB drive that had been HACKED to APPEAR to be 64GB in size. The file sync programs I was using weren't at fault at all — they simply had no way of knowing what size the flash drive actually was, copied what files they could, and then got terribly confused as they continued to write data to places that didn't exist.

So the solution turned out to be surprisingly simple: caveat emptor — buyer beware. If you see a 64GB flash drive on sale for $10, you didn't get a deal. It's like a $20 Rolex. It's fake, and you'll be sorry. Pay an extra $15 for that in-the-box flash drive from Kingston instead of the no-name drive from China. Trust me. It's not worth the hassle.

Syncing files: SO DAMN HARD

So I have a USB Flash Drive for getting stuff done, namely graphic design work. Yes, I'm aware of the existence of Dropbox, but I'm the only one using these files, and I've had no problem working on them via a separate, tiny flash drive. Like any sensible person, I want to back these files up so I don't lose them when my flash drive inevitably falls out of my pocket and through a sewer grate.

This, apparently, is a ridiculously difficult task that no one has ever done before.

No, really. I have a second flash drive the exactly same size as the first. I can copy files between the two with a drag and drop, right? In theory, yes, but then Windows Explorer freezes and crashes for no reason or otherwise gets interrupted. A better idea would be a file synchronization program. You know, one that looks at the files and folders on both drives and then copies only what's needed from one to the other. Then I could pick up right where I left off, right?

Ha! I only wish.

Sure, I googled around for a free file synchronization program. You know, like FreeFileSync. I gave that program a try or two. It took ALL NIGHT to mirror my 30 gigabytes of files. But no problem, the hard part is done, right?

Except that it didn't copy all the files. See, I checked the "properties" and it looked like it had filled up the drive nice and neatly. But then when I did some more work and needed to sync to keep everything up to date, it acted like I had left half the drive untouched. I checked and I found whole folders left COMPLETELY EMPTY on my destination drive. I backed up again, which took a couple HOURS, and then I deleted one or two tiny GIFs so I could test a third backup. Result: FIVE MORE GIGABYTES TO COPY. This was a fail.

So I went to Synkron, a nice little app (when it runs and doesn't fall asleep into that white-out "Not Responding" mode). At the moment, it's syncing the same folder (I've given up on trying for the whole damn drive) that FreeFileSync couldn't seem to figure out, and it's very slowly copying all the same damn files that FreeFileSync had supposedly copied YESTERDAY.

So while I'm waiting for that charade to wrap up, I find out that Microsoft has a tool called SyncToy, which does pretty much the same thing the others do. I give it a run and discover that my destination drive is now completely full. This means that SyncToy will just have errors as it tries copying files to a drive that's already full, but SHOULDN'T BE because it's the same size as the source drive which ISN'T full. My suspicion is that one of the sync programs decided to spew a bunch of invisible files everywhere and fill up space, but none of the sync programs has the ever-so-useful option (as rsync does, which is NOT available for Windows) of DELETING files that shouldn't be there before trying to copy anything. Wouldn't that be nice?

So what's the solution? REFORMAT the destination drive and start all the hell over again. For the THIRD TIME.