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I recently purchased a cool new 4 TB external WD hard drive for backups.  When I plugged it in and rebooted my computer, I got a black screen and never saw windows boot up. I spent some time looking at various posts but never found anything useful so I thought I'd post my solution here.

Note.  the drive worked fine when I plugged it in.  I only found a problem when I rebooted the computer.  This is a problem as I plan to leave the drive plugged in so my system can make a daily backup each evening to the external drive.

My beloved Firefox has been doing something strange when it tries to view websites that have certificate problems such as expired certificates.  For some reason my desktop computer would pop up a bland dialog box whining about the site uses an invalid security certificate.  My laptop doesn't seemt to do this.  Apparently no-one on the internet has ever experienced this problem so I felt it would be useful to share the solution with folks. 

Here is the alert box:

I use a device called an OBI100 with google voice to make and receive phone calls when at home.  This allows me to use the same phone number for voice/cell/texts etc. It only cost me about $30 btw. Recently, I hit a snag. 

I'm struggling with a peculiar little problem.  My old faithful windows 10 computer will never eject the USB thumb drive.  It doesn't ever show any errors.  Its quite puzzling.  I have several usb devices currently working including a 4TB usb hard drive, usb keyboard and mouse and a Fujitsu USB scanner.  When I plug in the usb thumb drive, Windows makes the familiar boing noise and I can view the contents of the drive, but when I click the bottom right icon to eject, all goes well but explorer still sees the drive.  I can manually remove the thumb drive from th

So I noticed recently when I ran ps -edalf on my mac that there were a ton of processes that look like this:

Using Drupal 7, I needed to programattically add a useragent field (webform calls these components) and a url field to my webform nid 7477.  The url field is a hidden field of type: Hidden element (less secure, changeable via JavaScript.)  If you leave off the extra array in the url definition, it will be the normal hidden type.  You can see this when you click the edit button for this component.  I hope someone finds this useful.

My eight year old recently got his Mbot robot from http://makeblock.cc Unfortunately there are pretty much no docs so this is my first effort to document what I learned.

I recently found a very cool service called Wuala which is a cloud backup/sync solution.  I think it is really cool because it gives you 5GB free storage initially and all files are fully encrypted on your computer before they go to the cloud.  I've been testing it for a while and I think I'm going to give it a try at some of my clients too.  It allows you to share a folder with someone dynamically.  Very cool!  Check it out.www.wuala.com

Recently, I remarked on Facebook that I needed to thin down my flock of (then) 28 Ameraucanas because the cost of chicken feed was encroaching into the human feed budget. My friend Lorien Hoover sent me a link for Fermented Feed: http://naturalchickenkeeping.blogspot.com/p/fermented-feed.html

Recently, one of my clients let their subscription to AVG anti-virus lapse and all 8 computers on their network were complaining about the subscription having expired.  I purchased a new license key and went about putting it into the AVG's that were running. Strangely, the field for the license number was grayed out so I couldn't paste it in. 

Hi All,

We had a great organizational meeting this past Saturday, after the work part of our day, at Posse East in Austin, Texas. 

Our objectives for meeting were to, 1) make sure we keep up our gardens after they are installed, 2) create work teams and team leaders for upcoming permablitzes, 3) plan the August permablitz, and 4) visit Kealing Middle School and begin the design process for the September permablitz.

I was mourning the fact that I wasn't in Portland for the Drupalcon and then I found this. 

If you check Drupal 7 module updates and you get messages indicating no available releases found for modules that you know are legitimate.  It usually looks something like this.  The URL is ../admin/reports/updates  There is a quick fix:

What a great utility Drush is.  If you don't know, it is a command-line utility for use to do all sorts of amazing things to a Drupal system.  You can easily make a quick database backup with the following command:

drush sql-dump >dbdump.sql

Recently I suspected I had a problem in my mysql databases on my webserver, so I ran the following command:

mysqlcheck -u root -p'put-your-database-password-here' --all-databases

I got a neat list of databases and tables and messages saying some tables are OK and some not. Notice that I cleverly replaced my database root password with the phrase put-your-database-password-here, so you should replace that with your password if you want to try this.  BTW it seems you can ignore the warnings about client using or not closing tables.