Can't Edit My Google Site - Solution

Problem: Editing a Google Site in Google Chrome keeps throwing error messages.
Solution: Edit the Google Site in Firefox.

I was trying to edit embedded HTML code. I got:

   Aw Snap! Something went wrong while displaying your document.
   To continue, please reload your browser
   Code: 3c4daba
   Error: Client Error

The error code appears to change every time. I got 388abdc and 3b7f02b and 510fb2c and b3324e and 77846a. At that point, I gave up and Googled my problem. I found a forum comment about a totally different Google Site editing problem that was solved by switching from Chrome to Firefox to do the editing. That seemed counterintuitive, but I tried it, and it worked.

Humor | Enjoy

⟳ Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
⟳ XKCD
⟳ Doonesbury
⟳ Daily Kos Comics
⟰ Existential Comics
⟰ Cat and Girl
⟰ Jesus and Mo
⏯ The Daily Show - Guest Hosts
⏯ Last Week Tonight - John Oliver
⏯ Late Night - Seth Meyer
⏯ Have I Got News For You US - Roy Wood Jr.
⏯ Real Time - Bill Maher
⏯ The Problem with Jon Stewart - Jon Stewart
⏯ Montana PBS - Requires Login for Passport items
⏯ Politically Reactive
⏯ Projectr - MSU Library access
⏯ The Atlantic - MSU Library access
⏯ Full Frontal - Samantha Bee
⏯ Late Show - Stephen Colbert

Wisdom from the Master

If your touchscreen is clean, you did not need that device.

Query too complex - Possible solution

Look for suspicious query or field names in the query itself, or in any other queries leading up to it. Avoid anything in the Microsoft Access special characters list. At the time of this writing, round parentheses ( ) are not in the list, but they should be. I had a flakey "Query Too Complex" error, failing sometimes but not others. The error went away when I deleted a pair of parentheses from the name of a query a couple of queries earlier in the chain.

Presentation Update Interrupt Block

During presentations at the local, state and national level, from small classrooms to huge convention halls, I see this often. In the middle of a presentation, over the presenter's slide pops a dialog asking if you would like to update some software now. Of course not! This is the middle of a presentation.

Some people use elaborate systems of shutting down all updaters (complicated) or Internet access (not always desirable) or creating super-clean user accounts for presentations, but this should not be necessary. Presentation software, be it Powerpoint or Keynote or Prezi or whatever, should automatically block these update requests until after the presentation is over. If operating systems do not allow such a block, then they should be rewritten so they do.

When we go to a movie, we anticipate sitting through the entire film without being asked if we want to have the projector software updated. The same should be true of any presentation.

No, I am not that Bill Freese

Genetically modified foods? Yummy. Still, there is a lot to be said for an heirloom tomato.

[fa] = Former Acronym

I propose any organization that adopts their acronym as their official name add the lower case letters fa in square brackets to the end of their name so the rest of us do not waste time trying to find out the actual name of the organization. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is now just ASCD, but if they do not tell us, how will we know. Call it ASCD[fa] and all is clear. In reading the name aloud, the [fa] is silent. Now if you will excuse me, I am hungry and am going out for some KFC[fa].

Too Late

At the bottom of the e-mail is this statement:
This communication contains confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, reading, copying, disclosing or any other use of the contents of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.
Shouldn't that have been at the top?

Spend a while Googling awhile

The phrase is, "it took him a while to." Google Docs suggests I should change it to, "it took him awhile to." That seems wrong, so I Google the phrase "it took him awhile to." Google Search suggests I should change it to "it took him a while to." Google Docs and Google Search need to get together sometime for a chat.

Magnitude of Error

Yesterday I was reading a Scientific American article that said there were 1089 neutrinos in the universe. I was pretty sure that figure was low, so had a look at their HTML code. Sure enough, they had used <super> instead of <sup> as the tag to indicate a superscript. I sent them an e-mail suggesting the correction. They sent a message back thanking me and telling me they had made the correction. The article now tells us there are 10⁸⁹ neutrinos in the universe. I feel that the magnitude of this correction more than makes up for my lousy chemistry lab results when the lab teaching assistant told me I had produced the largest error in the history of the lab.

FanBox is a scam

You will receive message. It will say that someone you know (their actual name) has posted a question for you, or a photo for you to see. You click the link and are asked to enter the password for your e-mail account. If you do, FanBox will send messages to all your friends telling them that their friend (your name) has posted a question for them, or a photo for them to see. And on it goes. The real fun is that FanBox steals your portfolio photo from other websites and posts it on their website. Thus, I have never created a FanBox account, but I have one anyway, with my photo on it, so my friends will be fooled into thinking I am on FanBox and will fall for the scam themselves. So remember, NEVER type a password for anything into FanBox.

Justify Text in GIMP 2.8

Windows --> Docable Dialogs --> Tool Options

Is this information in the manual? Who knows? GIMP is a wonderful program, and also insane. The manual is beautiful and useless.

Microsoft Office Save Undo Fix

Problem: Microsoft put the Save and Undo buttons one pixel apart on the Quick Access toolbar. Thus, you go to save your work and accidentally Undo the last thing you did, in which case you have to hit the Redo button before you save. Or you go to Undo a terrible mistake and accidentally Save, in which case you curse forever the idiots who designed the Quick Access toolbar and take to drink. Well, actually you can still do an Undo after you have done a save, so all is not lost. But still, if there were ever two tiny buttons that should have space between them it is Save and Undo.

And you can put that space there. Just right-click one of those buttons and select Customize Quick Access Toolbar. In the resulting dialog add a few separators between Save and Undo. I find five produces an aesthetically pleasing spacer. You have to do this for each of your Office programs, but unlike so many useful Microsoft workarounds, this one carries over from one document to the next. Do it once for Word 2010 and you never need to do it again. Would that all Microsoft design flaws were so easy to repair.

Comma Turmoil

In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a comma walks into the sentence three words before its cue.

"In all, the internal turmoil particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges."

I did a Google search for the phrase "internal turmoil particles," and learned that in the Special Illustrated Edition of Mr. Bryson's book, the sentence has been corrected.

"In all the internal turmoil, particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges."

I prefer the uncorrected version. Internal turmoil particles must be the molecules that cause anxiety, confusion and indecisiveness. If internal turmoil particles are indeed picking up electrical charges, we might be able to deflect them with magnetic fields. Perhaps those folks who have strapped magnets to their wrists and their pipes to ward off arthritis and lime scale will actually receive the benefit of inner peace.

Default Settings on Excel 2010 under Windows 7

How to set row height and column width, or font, or whatever, to what you always want, and get it automatically every time.

Create an ideal Excel spreadsheet, blank but with all the settings you like.
Control Panel --> Folder Options --> View --> Show hidden files, folders, and drives --> Apply
Save your ideal blank spreadsheet, selecting Excel Template (*.xltx) from the Save As Type: pop-up menu. Save it into C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART.
Control Panel --> Folder Options --> View --> Don't show hidden files, folders, and drives --> Apply
(Unless you like having the hidden folder visible.)
All new Excel spreadsheets should have your desired features automatically.

MacBook Pro Trackpad Failure Catch-22 Solution

The battery in a MacBook Pro swells. This damages the trackpad so that the computer thinks you are permanently holding down the left mouse button. Since you are already clicking, you cannot click. The computer behaves as if your left mouse button did not work. An external mouse does not help, since the trackpad is still sending the blocking signal, preventing the mouse click event from being accepted. The solution is to turn on "Ignore trackpad when mouse is present" in the System Preferences. However, the way you turn this on is with a left mouse click, the one thing you cannot do. Catch-22.

The deeper solution is to open Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities/Terminal. At the $ prompt type in this command exactly as written:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.ignoreTrakpadIfMousePresent 1

Notes: That is a single space between items, a single dash before the g, com.apple.mouse.ignoreTrakpadIfMousePresent is all one word with three periods in it, the last item is the number one. (If it was a zero, it would turn the trackpad back on.)

Hit return. Quit the terminal program. Some sources say to log out and back in, but that did not work for us. We had to shut the computer down and restart it. And then, as long as an external mouse is connected, the computer works just fine. The modern word for miracle is "workaround".


Added note: However, despite the setting, on the MacBook Pro we were trying to fix, any touch of the trackpad overrode the setting and the mouse locked up again. Perhaps something thin taped over the trackpad would prevent this? The owner opted for a new laptop. He was due, anyway.

Google is the Manual and the Manual is Google

In program after program the online manual is missing or useless, often so badly organized that available information is unavailable. I almost convince myself that the answer does not exist, but then I remember that Google is the Manual for every application. I Google the question and find a discussion or blog post or video tutorial put up by someone who suffered through my problem last year and found the answer. For every hundred questions I get answered about software, the manual or help feature provide five answers, and Google provides the other ninety-five. To save time, I now try to remember that the Manual is Google and always start there. The actual manual and built-in or online help are weak supplements to be used only in desperation.

Apple Preview PDF Fixes

The Apple Macintosh Preview program will allow the user to fill in and save a PDF form, with a couple of oddities. If text is entered into a field and the form is saved before the field is closed, either by tabbing or clicking out of the field, the text is not saved. So, be sure to click outside the last field before saving.

If the filled form is opened in Acrobat on Windows, the text entered into fields will not appear unless one clicks into the field. A script that fixes these forms can be found here. In Acrobat Pro X, rather than adding a menu item, I extracted the heart of the script and made it an Action. (Tools --> Action Wizard --> Create New Action --> More Tools --> Execute Java Script --> Options and enter the modified script.) Now when I open a completed form with missing text in the fields, I click the new action to activate it, and a moment later all the text is visible.

Google Docs Keyboard Shortcut Problem Workaround

Google Documents sometimes ignores keyboard shortcuts. This happens when the computer shifts its attention to another program. For example, copy a block of text from a Google Doc, switch to another program and paste. Or hit the key command to have the text block read aloud. On returning to the Google Doc and selecting another block of text, the keyboard shortcuts may not work. In the menu bar, the copy command is disabled, as if no text was selected. Sometimes the menu command or even the keyboard shortcut works, but not consistently.

The workaround is to click in the Google Document window, type a single letter and then backspace over it. This gets Google Docs attention, and menus and shortcuts work as usual.

Workaround for Hotmail Keyboard Shortcut Problems

When I try to copy and paste something out of a Hotmail document, I get an error message that says "Hotmail was not able to complete this request. Microsoft may contact you about any issue you report." Same thing happens when I select a block of text and hit the key command to get my computer to read that passage aloud. Apparently Hotmail is unwilling to accept key commands from my computer while I am reading a message.

There are two workarounds. The copy and start speaking commands in the menu bar still work, so one can use those in place of the key commands. Alternately, one can hit the reply button. This opens a window including the entire original message quoted. Since this window expects you to be typing, it allows key commands.