“Fix It” collection
Master the art of household maintenance with practical DIY repair guides for appliances, electronics, and software systems. These tutorials focus on cost-saving troubleshooting techniques and hands-on solutions to keep your home and gadgets running at peak performance.
HTD Tech Briefs
View all →April 2, 2010
Video & How-To Install a Hard Drive on a MacBook Pro (non-unibody): Clone & Boot Camp too!
For all of those people who are interested in breathing a little bit of life into an older MacBook Pro, this post is for you. My non-unibody 15" beaten and worn MacBook Pro had about 3 GB of free hard drive space on it. And this is even after I had upgraded it about 2 years ago with a 320…
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March 1, 2010
Locked Out of your Twitter Account? This Trick Might Get You Back In Fast!
Have you ever inadvertently locked yourself out of Twitter because of too many simultaneous logins? Perhaps one of your Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic is having some issues and repeatedly trying to log you in and out of your account. Or perhaps your internet connection is flakey and you are dropping connections causing your logins to happen over and…
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February 5, 2010
How To Upgrade an iMac G5’s Hard Drive – iFixit.com to the Rescue!
A few weeks ago, my daughter's (hand-me-down) 20" iMac G5 started acting up. It was showing the infamous "spinning beachball", was locking up, the fan was running a lot and loud and the machine was having kernel panics. I did a quick S.M.A.R.T. scan on it which is usually a good indication of the health (or lack there of) of…
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February 3, 2010
How to Fix Login & Authentication Issues on TweetDeck after Changing your Password on Twitter
Yesterday, I received a very vague email from Twitter saying that they had reset my password because of some sort of a phishing scam or attack that had taken place off of Twitter. Below is the text of the email that I received. (Do note, before clicking through links like this, please be sure to hold your mouse over the…
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January 30, 2010
20+ Ways to Harden and Secure Your WordPress Blog
Recently, some high-profile blogs that are running WordPress have been hacked or hijacked by malicious users (e.g., TechCrunch). The worst thing is having to try to recover from such an event, you not only have to repair your site, but also your reputation. So, spending a little bit of time trying to prevent or at least make it a bit…
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January 11, 2010
How to Remove an Old Microwave & Install a New Panasonic Microwave (Model: NN-SD277WR)
Most people don't think of a microwave as a gadget, but I guess if it plugs in, has buttons and a display, it excites me a bit. But before I go in a major analysis of popcorn pop timing (or burning), I wanted rewind back. Here's the story. I had a microwave that was on its last legs, the outer…
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January 4, 2010
Fix Mail.app Search Issues and Speed Up Apple Mail with This Simple Script
Today I was trying to find an email in my Apple Mail and went to my usual trustworthy internal mail search function only to find that the "Entire Message" field was grayed out for all of my accounts. Granted, I use a mixture of POP3 and IMAP account and my main IMAP account has about 8400 messages in my inbox…
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December 21, 2009
WARNING: WP-Polls WordPress Poll Plugin Can Be Exploited
Last week, I ran a giveaway which, because of a variety of reasons, I had to cancel and declare "null & void". While I won't go into the details, I did want to bring some actions to the forefront, especially if you are using the WordPress plugin called "WP-Polls" which is a great plugin that provides users with the ability…
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September 18, 2009
How To Make iPhoto or Picasa Recognize your Camera Again
Recently, I tried to download some photos from a small, older and somewhat, war-scarred point & shoot digital cameral (HP Photosmart M632) which I carry around in my backpack wherever I go. I had taken some photos and video at a tradeshow and wanted to work on a blog post for it. Unfortunately, when I plugged in my camera, absolutely…
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August 28, 2009
Fix Its: Merge Two BlackBerry Calendars into One & AT&T’s Visual Voicemail Activation for the Bold
AT&T pushed out new firmware and a desktop application update for the BlackBerry Bold this week, supposedly with a new Visual Voicemail (similar to the iPhone). But somewhere in the process of the upgrade, I found that a second calendar was activated which wasn't syncing to Microsoft Outlook. The fix that I detail below allows you to merge multiple BlackBerry…
Read more →June 23, 2009
How to Fix Apple Mail Not Saving Passwords – Keychain First Aid
Recently I was plagued with having to repeatedly enter and re-enter my passwords on some of my email accounts using Apple Mail. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I would get asked to enter when sending email from a certain account as well as when trying to receive email from a completely different email account.…
Read more →June 22, 2009
Restore Missing iPhone Applications after 3.0 Firmware Upgrade
I was excited like many others to get the new Apple iPhone firmware 3.0 update last week. Installation was not an issue for me, even after coming from a jailbroken 2G (original) iPhone. That is, until I started looking for some of my applications. For some odd reason, there were several of my applications that had just disappeared. I finally…
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