Month: January 2013

Facebook launched the Places feature, and as is now common with Facebook, the default privacy settings are not exactly enticing. Your friends can tag you when they check in to a location. Why not While this might sound like a great feature, this has two problems – you depend on your friends being totally honest […]

Windows Vista and Windows 7 introduced newer versions of Direct X, version 10 and 11 respectively. However, these are not backward compatible, and hence, users of Windows XP are obviously left out. Furthermore, most new games require Direct X 10/11 for best results, leading to much disappointment among gamers. Installing DirectX 10/11 on Windows XP […]

Cyberduck is a popular free FTP application for Mac OS X. As mentioned in a previous article Show hidden files on Mac OS X, you can use Cyberduck to view hidden files like .htaccess and others beginning with a period. However, there are cases where Cyberduck does not show hidden files. This is a known […]

Windows 7 Activation Update (WATu, KB971033) was released recently. It fixes many known activation hacks/cracks/exploits around genuine Windows validation technologies (typically used for piracy of Windows 7). If your copy of Windows 7 is not genuine, or you have a legit copy but encountered activation problems earlier, KB971033 update might cause trouble again. Below are […]

Mac OS X hides files beginning with a period “.” by default. One of the reasons for this is that important system files have names beginning with a period. Ideally, you shouldn’t touch such files, but there are occasions when you need to – a web developer may have to edit local .htaccess files, for […]

In WordPress, when entering posts, you might see the server error “Error 406, Not Acceptable. An appropriate representation of the requested resource /wp-admin/post.php could not be found on this server” I got this error only for a post some with code. On creating a new post without any code, it was saved without any trouble. […]

Blogging software WordPress has had a built-in auto-update feature that downloads the latest files and updates itself with a single click, since version 2.7. Sometimes, the auto upgrade functionality does not work, no matter how many times you try. In some cases, the update fails silently and the site continues to work, but the worst […]

CCleaner is my favorite crap cleaner. It does a good job of cleaning up a lot of files and software that are useless and bloated. Also, it is fairly accurate, so you rarely end up with a broken computer after running CCleaner (unlike some other aggressive cleanup apps out there). Being cautious has its price […]

MAMP is a web server for Mac. I use it for WordPress theme development. Out of the box, MAMP does not support WordPress custom URL formats (called clean URLs or pretty permalinks). While not a deal breaker, it can be irritating at times, for example, when you look at the local blog to get a […]

Eset Nod32 is a paid antivirus that includes the usual anti-malware features, and also anti-spyware. Nod32 also seems to have less degrading effect on system performance compared to other premium antivirus software. Even the cheapest version costs over $20 (converted from my local price, may vary with your locality). However, here is a method to […]