Everyone loves WordPress – especially when it comes time to upgrade to the latest version of a plugin or of WordPress itself. You just click a button, and it does all the work.
Those of you who are used to doing things “The Joomla Way” can no doubt testify to the glory that is WordPress.
Sometimes, you can’t automatically update WordPress itself. In such cases, you need to manually install the newer version. Normally, you delete most of your old WordPress files (be sure to read the manual update instructions!), and then simply upload and uncompress the new version in your application’s directory. Voila! Everything just works…
Well, most of the time. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, you are dumped back to the initial WordPress setup screen. If you fill in the fields and carry on with the install, it will look like you have just destroyed your entire old WordPress site when you are greeted with a default, empty home page.
Fortunately, you haven’t destroyed anything! Here’s how to get your site back in just 3 steps…
Read more…
Scottie Do-It-Yourself, Programming upgrade, wordpress
That's one SASSY laptop!
Back in the day, it was easy to select a portable computer. There was only one size: big suitcase. At that time, Apple’s portable computer was called the Macintosh Boulder, and it only weighed 1,264 ounces. Running through the airport with one of these “portable” devices was a lot of fun. Yes, life was good.
Fast forward a few decades, and laptops were just lower-powered portable computers. Then, a few years ago, something odd happened: everyone started demanding “desktop replacement laptops”. In short, everyone wanted a laptop that could do everything their desktop machine could do. The end result was a wide variety of laptops which were very powerful, but they suffered from poor battery life given the myriad of high-powered features packed inside them, like graphics chips that could let you play games on your laptop.
Enter the netbook: small, light, with up to 10 hours of battery life. But, they’re a bit on the slow side.
And today? Well, today we are on the verge of seeing a whole slew of new laptops with CULV processors. They’re going to be thin and light and have “long” battery lives… or so we’re told.
So, what the heck are you supposed to buy? Well, that depends on what you need and want. But hopefully, it will all be a bit more clear in a few minutes…
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Scottie Computers laptop, netbook
NetworkWorld has an interesting article entitled How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data. The article discusses a presentation that will be held at the Black Hat USA conference later this month.
The deal is that two researchers are supposedly going to demonstrate how keystrokes can be read from a remote computer using either a laser, or signals transmitted over the ground line coming from a nearby computer.
While these techniques might be interesting to know about, somehow I think we have bigger things to worry about.
Read on to see what I mean…
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Scottie Spare Me! security
Let’s say you’ve just installed Windows 7, and you notice that Windows Photo Gallery is now missing. That’s because it was pulled out of the OS and plopped into the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite.
Well, that’s not so bad, because Windows Live is free. You need to download the Live installer, which will then allow you to download only the apps you want. The problem comes when you have to do this on multiple machines with a limited internet connection.
Windows updates can be downloaded in standalone form, so why not Windows Live? It’s just not very convenient. Surely there is a standalone installer that you can download once and install later on multiple machines??
In fact, there is. It’s just a huge pain in the arse to find it, especially on Microsoft’s web site.
Not to worry! I found it for you. Watch out, though: it’s 209MB! You can still install only the apps you want, but no internet connection is required and it’s perfectly friendly for low-bandwidth connections.
Have fun!
Scottie Computers microsoft, windows
