It’s official – video cards on a MacPro have a life span of about a year. A couple of days ago, my machine had another fit all to familiar : random crash with hyper-active fan turn on. A few days later, the issue happened again. I didn’t waste much time in troubleshooting this time. After a dusting and a disk…
Category: Tips
Wrong default user name for remote drive access on MacOS
I have gotten used to relying on accessing shared drives on my desktop machine from my laptop. Somehow, between OS upgrades, the default user name used to connect remotely changed from my usual account to ‘Guest’. I first started noticing this issue when file transfers from one machine to the other suddenly started returning several errors about insufficient access rights…
Admin toolbar missing in WordPress theme
Funny how you don’t notice something is missing until you actually need it. I realized today that the WordPress admin toolbar was missing on one of my sites, after days working on it. Fortunately, the solution was simple in this case – wp_footer() was missing in the Footer.php file of the theme I am using (WordPress Anniversary) : xbfish.com/tag/wordpress-top-admin-bar-missing/
Adblocked
Note to self – when troubleshooting the display of AdSense ads on web pages, make sure AdBlock is not running in the browser !
Query multiple tags with WordPress 3.2
A small clarification when it comes to querying WordPress posts with multiple tags – tags in the URL are using Slugs …. not full values. If your query is missing items or is returning empty, make sure you are using the right value for your tags. It is probably obvious to developers but it took me a bad attempt at…
Final word on MacPro crashes
No random crash since the replacement of my video card a few months ago. Based on past observations, here is what I believe happened : 1- For some reason, the external USB drive I was using for my monthly offline snapshot backup caused random shutdowns. Looking at the logs, it seems most crashes happened right after a Time Machine backup…
Uninstall old applications
My Macbook was sluggish, freezing for about two second every few minutes or so. It was especially bad with streaming videos. Turns out fragments of an old application (Desktoptopia) were causing a timout every few minutes. CleanApp took care of it beautifully.
Mac Pro overheating
Twice in the last two days, I found my desktop unresponsive. The second time also had the fans running wildly. So far, everything points to something causing the CPU to overheat. Coincidentally, I noticed the latest version of Chrome getting stuck with 100% CPU on my laptop, also running MacOS. Google searches [1] and [2] pointed to occasional reports of…
jQuery error in Internet Explorer
One cause of error at least. Watch for stray commas at the end of an array. For example : [code] var array = [ ‘zero’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’, ]; [/code] That comma after ‘four’ will be silent in most browsers. In Internet Explorer (lower than 8 at least), this will throw an error.
Spotlight keeps on indexing forever ?
Seemingly randomly, Spotlight indexing goes on and on…. seemingly forever. It was painful to hear the hard-drive cracking away in the background. A quick search on Apple’s suport forums gave me the solution – add your bootcamp drive / partition to the exclusion list of Spotlight (in System preferences). Indexing stopped instantly !