Category: Help

Changing WordPress Usernames

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How to Change a WordPress Username

So you need to change a username and you’ve read how to the hard way (options one and three) I can shout out for the easy way (option 2) via the Username Changer plugin developed by Dan Griffiths (where would we be without the hard working members of the wordpress community!). And you can even do it for the username you’re logged into (you’ll obviously have to login again ;-))

Why?

  1. You just made a mistake when you created a user
  2. You need to change a name after someone gets married
  3. You’ve decided to implement a naming protocol for users
  4. Or you went with the default admin name for your administrator

In any of these circumstances the Username Changer Plugin makes the process painless, quick and straightforward.

Useful Tips

I have a folder of these single-use plugins so I can delete them once I’ve used them and always have a copy when I encounter the problem again.

Filed under: Help, Plugins, wordpress

Reinstalling WordPress Plugins

Wordpress Logo

The Problem

As I’ve discussed before wordpress plugins do not always play nicely and sometimes you’ll need to reinstall your plugin, but like me you probably don’t want to re-configure a plugin (particularly a complicated one) so what can you do?

How to Reinstall WordPress Plugsin the Easy Way

Thankfully Julio Potier has crafted a plugin to help you deal with this conundrum. Simply install his Force Update Plugin and you can select the misbehaving plugin and reinstall it, with the configuration intact. Perfect.

Useful Tips

I can a folder of these single-use plugins so I can delete them once I’ve used them and always have a copy when I encounter the problem again.

Filed under: Help, wordpress

ICO launches new diagnostic tool

ico

Most small businesses – charities in particular it seems – don’t spend sufficient time thinking about their obligations towards Data Protection. To help combat this the ICO has launched a new Self Assessment Toolkit you can work with online to assess your compliance and determine what you might need to do.

Check it out here.

Source: Charity Digital News

Filed under: Charities, Data, Help, Tech

Find old P32s Sage One Payroll

Find Sage One P32s

Sometimes things are just not that easy to find in Sage One Payroll. We’re doing our end of year accounts and filing for 2014/15 at the office today and I had missed a few P32s across the year (not filed or printed – bad boy) so I thought it’d be really straightforward to find… which I suppose it is if you know where to look (just don’t ask Sage Help).

Find Previous P32s

Go to the Pay tab and at the bottom of the page you will see a table with all of your payroll months, you can just click on a month and access the appropriate P32 as you would following a normal payroll run…

Find Sage One P32s

Filed under: General, Help

com.apple.lsdschemes.plist error in console

OS X El Capitan

Problems, problems, problems. Sometimes your Mac is just sluggish and when you head over to the console to see what’s up you stumble across a weird, inexplicable issue like this:

LaunchServices: Could not store lsd-identifiers file at /private/var/db/lsd/com.apple.lsdschemes.plist error in console

The fix is relatively simple, navigate to the folder:

/private/var/db/

and then create the lsd folder and it will go away (you will need to enter your admin password).

Filed under: Finder, Help, Mac

Match embedded Vimeo video to your default site width

Vimeo

So in my day job we use Vimeo for all our film projects, primarily because it enables you to credit those people involved in making a project happen and also because you can replace earlier copies of a video, which is particularly useful when you have to get approval from multiple project partners before a film is signed off. However, the advantages and disadvantages of vimeo as a video platform aside, embedding the resulting video in our site and those of our partners is an essential feature and obviously we’re running wordpress so this is made easy for us.

What the link above doesn’t tell you is that you don’t need to specify both the width and the height of your video (always a pain to work out) you just need to specify the width and the height will be automatically be generated:

(vimeo https://vimeo.com/127168308 w=960)
replacing the curly parenthesis ( ) with square ones [ ]

In Action

See it action in one of our videos, Giants in the Walls, produced for the One Planet Middlesbrough project:

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/127168308 w=560]

560 px wide – tiny!

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/127168308 w=760]

760 px wide – a bit too small

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/127168308 w=960]
960 px wide – just right!*

Jump to 3 minutes 58 seconds for my favourite part – thanks Andy Berriman, this makes me chuckle every time!

In the future hopefully this solution will also support the standard addition to a vimeo url of #t=3m58s allowing you to specify the start time, so you don’t have to rely on your readers to self select; although this is definitely a video worth watching in full!

* Find out the default size of your blog post by using the developer tool in chrome.

Filed under: Help, wordpressTagged with: ,

Switch off a Synology DS box from the Power Button

Synology DS Power Button

Can you switch off a Synology DS box from the Power Button? I asked myself this morning when I got a text from our building manager to remind me that the electricians would be in at my day job this morning and I couldn’t login via quickconnect.

This is not an easy thing to find out (if you’ve not actually switched off your box physically before) and no-one wants their box to be inadvertently powered down. But it is possible.

Synology DS Power Button
Power button circled in red. Press and hold until you hear the beep.

Fortunately I have a box at home too and can practice. The key is to hold down the blue power button until it makes a loud sharp beep and then it’ll power down gracefully.

Update

And it worked. The fabulous Dawn was able to easily shut down the server. Crisis averted. Re-wiring of our lighting underway.

Filed under: General, Help, NASTagged with:

Camera Straps ABC

Youtube when you’re feeling Dumb

So we bought a new camera at my day job last week and whilst setting it up (BTW Canon you have worst software ever! Heard of the App Store recently?) a poorly drawn diagram just didn’t hack it for figuring out how to attach the straps to the camera. Thank goodness for youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mry_7u-eA

Hope this helps if you’re also having a #commonsensefail day…

And after watching this I also stumbled across this video, which was a fascinating exploration of where to invest your hard earned cash (or your business/employers) to make sure you get the best out of your camera.

Filed under: Help

Update to Windows 10 Error 8007002c-4000d

Windows 10

This foxed me again and again today as I updated two machines at Tees Valley Arts to Windows 10 – or rather failed to update – four tries later (on 2 separate machines) and I was pulling out my hair (or would have done if I had any left).

Anyhow, a great deal of googling later (and trying of multiple “solutions”) I followed DukeSpookem on a Reddit forum and uninstalled my Avast Business Virus protection and Windows 10 installed like a dream.

This might not work for everyone but I’d try this first as I’d tried lots of complicated things before (which were much more work) and this was much quicker…

Filed under: Help

“AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on failed” causing Finder crash

Mac Finder Icon

The Problem

“AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on failed”: I’ve been plagued by this error for some weeks, which relates to waking my Macbook Air from sleep after being connected to my synology NAS at work. The console is replete with hundreds of these messages as it tries to re-connect to the server that is no longer available and there does not seem to be a routine that allows it detect that the server is no longer available and stop attempting to reconnect. As a result the finder simply ceases to be responsive and if you force quit it, it does not spawn properly again.

How to fix it

After getting frustrated with having to log out and log back in again to regain a responsive finder, I googled and failed to find a solution so I turned to the Activity Monitor where I noticed substantial activity from the “soagent” and found that if I force quit that – don’t worry it’ll respawn unharmed – then I got my finder back. Not the most elegant of solutions but quicky, dirty and more importantly successful. I hope the bug will get corrected in a future release of OS X (at the time of writing I’m using 10.10.3) but in the meantime this works.

Update

Okay that solution didn’t work frequently enough but this new one, thanks to Krysole at superuser.com does indeed work. I generally check which smb mounts are malfunctioning from the console and then go to terminal and use the following command:

sudo umount -f /Volumes/”volume name”

And bye, bye problem!

PPS

This problem has now been fixed by El Capitan… Woot!

Filed under: Help, TechTagged with: ,