Techerator

About a year ago, I wrote a guide to filtering the noise from your Facebook News Feed that worked for the old version of Facebook.  The News Feed can get really messy when a lot of your friends are playing games like Farmville, Mob Wars, etc., and the old version of Facebook provided you with a simple method to view status updates only. Facebook has since released a new version which rendered my ...

With Valentine’s Day happening this Sunday, hopefully you have thought ahead and purchased your special someone a gift already.  If you haven’t purchased your Valentine a gift yet, then continuing reading to get some ideas for what to get them this year. E-Book Reader (Him and Her) Chances are that your special someone likes to cozy up at night with a good book.  Instead of purchasin...

After upgrading your system to Fedora 12, you may notice that some of your Adobe AIR applications no longer load properly.  The problem may persist even after you have reinstalled both Adobe AIR and the individual Adobe AIR applications. An error you may receive when installing the AIR applications is shown below: Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV The above problem is caused by an inv...

A recent Windows Update (KB973879) has been causing a “blue screen of death” (stop error) in many computers running Windows Vista 64-bit edition.  Many of the affected computers are HP Pavillion dv Series laptops (such as dv4 and dv6 models), but we have had reports of other manufactures having the same issues.  The problem occurs shortly after starting the computer. The specific err...

Update: This problem has been resolved in VirtualBox Version 3.0.8. Remove the following fix before upgrading to 3.0.8 to take advantage of the update.  For help on installing VirtualBox on Fedora 11, checkout our guide. I have come across one problem with VirtualBox on Fedora 11 – USB devices are listed in the device manager but are grayed out and cannot be enabled.  To see if this probl...

Update 06-16-09: Mozilla has announced in Firefox 3.0.11 that “Several issues were reported with the internal database, SQLite, which have now been fixed by upgrading to a newer version.”  So if this guide works for you, be sure to upgrade to the newest version of Firefox. It can strike when you least expect it – Firefox amnesia.  The symptom: Firefox no longer keep...

Although Ubuntu has fantastic driver support in recent editions, I had some initial difficulty getting the Nvidia graphics drivers (for my GeForce 8600GT) properly installed and configured in Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”.  The built-in video drivers supported multiple monitors, but I was only able to drag windows halfway across the secondary monitor before they would become “s...

For many websites, the Featured Content Gallery for WordPress provides the centerpiece and main focal point of the front page (Techerator included).  This plugin has the ability to display posts in a specific category as well as a graphic and accompanying text for a great preview of articles on the site. The Problem When doing some cross-browser compatibility checking, I noticed that the Featured...

It is all too easy for the Windows operating system to become damaged and render your computer unusable, stranding you from your critical applications and documents.  Events such as power outages, electrical surges, or even an improper shutdown can damage or corrupt important system files which may cause the operating system to fail when loading. This guide will show you how to use the Recovery C...

Software Involved: Mozilla Thunderbird, AVG Anti-Virus 8.0/ 8.5 Problem/Symptoms: All incoming emails in Mozilla’s Thunderbird appear as if they have attachments, regardless if they have attachments or not.  The attachment icon disappears immediately after opening the email (as long as the email did not legitimately have an attachment). Solution: AVG automatically attaches an email certific...