Disable “Save to iCloud” as default on OSX.

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As a power user, I really have no interested in files being saved to iCloud. Apple’s sync tools haven’t been good to me in the past, and I would rather handle things locally or through Dropbox. That said, it is very annoying that every time I try to save a document, many apps default to using iCloud as the save location, regardless of what location I used most recently.

Google and cNet to the rescue: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57569695-263/reverse-the-default-icloud-storage-location-in-os-x/

The short version: Open terminal, run this command, then log out of your OSX user account and log back in:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Or undo it in terminal with this command (don’t forget to log out and in again):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true

You could also disable iCloud files and document syncing in the System Preferences tool, but that may not be ideal for you. Post a comment if you want screenshots.

Fixing margin issues on HP’s Officejet Pro 8600 (Plus & Premium too!)

We recently purchased a HP Officejet Pro 8600 Premium printer for our business. It came highly reviewed, has low cost ink, great features, fast printing speeds, and good print quality. If you’re looking for a midrange printer and have about $300 to spare, I really suggest looking into this one. Everyone seems to review it well. That said, this isn’t a review… I love it, but I’m not going into those details here.

Margin Problem

Update 4/30/2013: This only seems to affect OSX. I have been able to test on Windows 7 and have no such issue when printing from windows.

So everything went great until we decided to print labels for our business. We use a fairly custom size sheet of labels from OnlineLabels.com (I love them too), which always worked fine in our other printers and laser printers… Until the Officejet Pro 8600. The printer, for some reason, needs a larger margin on the bottom of the sheet of paper, and for some reason, the drivers shift the content of the page being printed to make up for it. Unfortunately, this was a big issue with our labels since things started to “hang off” the side and print onto the next label over.

Some researching online indicated that the need for the extra margin space on the bottom could be due to the duplexer needing to hold onto the page. Unfortunately, simply disabling the duplexer in my settings and/or changing drivers didn’t fix the issue. In fact, further testing showed that the duplexer was continually and automatically reactivated by either my OS or something HP has done. Turning off the duplexer lasted only a short time and was always on right after my next print. I am unsure if its activated based on a short amount of time or on each print.

So I kept digging, and finally I got it working after testing different margin settings.

The fix

  1. Settings to use to fix the bottom marginI am working on OSX Lion (10.7). The instructions are very similar for other versions of OSX. Windows users will need to adapt concepts these to their own tools and control panels.
  2. Set up a custom paper size. This seems possible/usable in Preview.app, not in Pages. Of course, in OSX anything can be print previewed into the Preview.app and/or printed as a PDF file on the computer, which you can open in Preview.
    • Use 0.13 inches for all margins. Leave paper at the default 8.5″ x 11″
  3. Printing should work as expected, when using custom paper size, which you must select on each print. I also noticed that the non-default paper tray may be unavailable for use while working with the “custom size” paper.

Image Gallery

Here are all of the dialogs I went through to get this fixed, complete with arrows and highlights of what to look for.

Tip for Android (Nexus 7) + Mobile Hotspot (MIFI, etc)

Mobile Hotspot settings on my Android powered Nexus 7

Mobile Hotspot settings on my Android powered Nexus 7

I recently picked up a Nexus 7 (Love it) tablet and have spent a while poking around in the settings and other features. Today I was worried that I used too much of my MIFI’s bandwidth, so I jumped into the Settings app to use the handy graphs and see how much data I really used. Then I discovered the Mobile Hotspot setting…

In short, Android’s Mobile Hotspot setting allows you to mark specific WIFI networks as “Mobile” so that your device and the apps on it can respect mobile connections by warning you before downloading large files and not using the network in the background. If you’re tethered to your phone, or on a MIFI like me, this can be a godsend to help keep your bandwidth usage in check.

Check it out. Here’s how:

  1. Open the Settings App
  2. Tap “Data Usage”
  3. Tap the settings button. For me it is on the upper right corner of the screen and looks three vertically stacked gray squares.
  4. In the settings menu which should have just opened, tap “Mobile hotspots”
  5. Tap the check box for any mobile networks you have already configured, such as MIFI’s or tethered phones.
    • Hint: You will have to connect to a network at least once before you can mark it as a mobile hotspot.

Jelly Bean (4.1) Only?

This is my first Android device, let alone one running 4.1 Jelly Bean… If you’ve seen this in a previous version of Android, please add a comment sharing your version of Android and where users can find the setting. Thanks!

WordPress

Launching WordPress: Install it!

WordPress has long been one of my favorite software projects because of how user friendly their dev team has made using WordPress. Want to install a theme or plugin? No problem! Just search it within your admin area, click the install button, and you are done a few seconds later. Updates are just as easy, which is really (REALLY!) important in today’s world of websites being hacked, defaced, used to send spam, or host phishing content, all the time. Some people still think that installing WordPress is hard, and while it might not be quite as easy as updating WordPress, the process of installing WordPress is really quite easy.

A few notes and assumptions before I get started:

  • You have SSH access to your web hosting account. (Not required, but simplifies things. Download the files to your computer, extract, and upload to the sub/addon/domain you create in step 2. Also skip step 3.)
  • Your web host is running the cPanel control panel. If not, you will need to “translate” the instructions for the control panel you have. None of this is hard, but things will be located in different places.
  • Your hosting account should support WordPress, obviously. PHP, MySQL, Apache (or Apache compatible) web server, you get the idea. The full requirements list for WordPress is found here: http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/ – If your host doesn’t meet this requirements… There are many that do, and there is no reason your host shouldn’t, unless it is some kind of specialty hosting.
  • You can download WordPress from their official site: http://wordpress.org/download/. You don’t need to download WordPress yet as it is covered in step 3. There you will also find links to WordPress.com, installation and upgrade instructions, other releases, and so on.

Step 1 – Setup a domain, an add-on domain, sub domain, or sub directory for your blog.

Domain tools provided by cPanelDomain tools provided by cPanel

If you will be installing WordPress in the “root” of your website, there is nothing to do here. If you’re intending to install on a different domain, or sub domain, you need to create it now. Make note of the path or “Document Root” to this location you have just setup. You will need it in a moment.

The tools offered by cPanel are largely simple and the defaults it provides are fine. Do not to use a “Parked Domain,” however, these simply set the domain you setup to load the content found on your primary domain. “Subdomains” or “Addon Domains” are what you want here.

Step 2 – Setup your database

cPanel MySQL Database Wizard

Use the MySQL Database Wizard instead of the regular MySQL databases tool to make your life easy.

WordPress stores all of its content and many of its settings in a database. Setting up a database and a database user is dead simple with cPanel’s MySQL Database Wizard.

Follow through the instructions and steps cPanel lays out for you.

  1. First your will name the database. Take note of the prefix it assigns (usually your cPanel account name followed by an underscore).
  2. Then you will setup a user for this database. This is not the same your cPanel user, nor email accounts, nor FTP accounts. Take note of the username (note the prefix again) and the password you chose. Be sure to pick a very strong password for this.
  3. The next page will ask you to pick privileges for this user so it can be assigned access to the database. Many people forget this step when not using the wizard. Check the box for all privileges at the top. Hit next step.
  4. Your done. Save those notes for the next step.

Step 3 – Download and extract WordPress

Time for SSH. On Windows, I suggest PuTTY. On Mac, you can use the built in Terminal.app with the ssh command. It may look scary, but learning to use it will make you much faster at dealing with some common tasks on your site. With some web hosts, you will need to request access to SSH for your account. Also ask them how to connect and what port they use for SSH.

With my host, and using Terminal.app on Mac, it goes like this:

ssh -p PORT MyCPanelUsername@MyDomain.com

You will be prompted to enter your cPanel password, and then you should be in.

On Windows, you will likely be entering your domain, username, and port into PuTTY and then be prompted for a password once it starts to connect.

Hint: Be careful not to enter the wrong password too many times as your server may block you temporarily. If you’re having issues, ask your web host with help connecting to your account via SSH.

Hint 2: If you haven’t connected to your server with SSH before, you will likely get an authenticity fingerprint hash warning. Type yes and hit enter to move on.

Once connected, you will need to change to the document root for the add-on or subdomain you just created. This is done using the ‘cd’ command (no quotes).

cd /path/to/document_root

Now to download and extract WordPress. As of this writing, the latest version (3.4.1) is available at http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz (or http://wordpress.org/latest.zip ). What is nice is that this ‘latest’ archive is always the latest version of WordPress, so you are starting with a fully updated install and aren’t behind the game when you hit the ground. The wget command will let you download this file and save it to the current directory.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Now to extract:

tar xvfz latest.tar.gz

You’re almost done. Hang in there a bit longer. The last command created a new WordPress directory with your WordPress files in it. To avoid looking amateurish, we will move all of those files up a level into our current directory and remove the now empty “wordpress” folder using this command:

mv wordpress/* . && rm -rf wordpress/

I suggest copy/pasting that command to make sure you don’t miss anything like the period before the double ampersands.

Step 4 – Run the WordPress install.php install script.

Fire up your favorite web browser and navigate to the addon/sub/domain you created. Click the button to “Create a Configuration File”

You will see something like this:

WordPress Install Step 1

Hey! You’ve already got all this stuff ready to go. Awesome!

Click the button and you will be presented with a page asking for your database connection details. Don’t forget the prefix for your database name and database user if your control panel added them. In most cases, the database host should be left at the default (localhost) and the prefix can be left alone too (default: wp_ ). Hit the button. If you have any issues, double check the details you have entered and contact your web host if you still can’t get it to work. If you don’t have issues, it will say that it can communicate with the database, so click the ‘Run the Install’ button to continue installing WordPress.

From here, everything is set how you want. It will set the site title to what you enter, create an admin user with the password you chose. Emails from the site will also come from the email address you enter. The check box “Allow search engines to index this site,” should be left checked, unless, for some reason, you don’t want search engines to list your site. You can change this after the install, so feel free to disable it if you feel the need.

Click more buttons. And… You’re done! Congratulations. Now feel free to use the button to log into your admin area where you can add pages and posts, themes, plugins, change settings, and generally play with your new blog/website.

One last step

Add a comment below and tell me where I can visit your new blog.

Any problems?

Chances are you made a typo and you might need to redo a few steps. If that doesn’t work, you still have a few options:

  1. Check the “Common Installation Problems” page on the WordPress.org site.
  2. Contact your web host and see if they can help. Some do, others don’t, many have experience with WordPress.
  3. Post a comment on this page the problem/error you are seeing and I will help if I can. (Be sure not to post any sensitive details like passwords.)

 

(Really) Free Credit Report

Given that I am tired of FreeCreditReport.com and other annoying (not) “free” services, I thought I would link everyone to the real, free credit report every American is entitled once per year, for the three major national credit reporting agencies.

First things first, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also links people to this, so I’ll give you their link first: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/freereports/index.shtml. If this doesn’t lend credibility to something, I don’t know what does.

And with that, you will see that you can go here to request your report: https://www.annualcreditreport.com

Enjoy.

Twitter: RT vs @reply

I recently decided to follow a few “social media types” on Twitter. Very quickly, my stream was overflowing with lots of junk I didn’t care about, plus a lot of duplication as an article that everyone found interesting was broadcast by everyone, to everyone, and then the ensuing conversations followed. I could deal with this… I simply created what I called the “3 tweets rule.” See, my stream is pretty active, so if ever someone has more than 3 tweets in a row, my stream was either dead at that time (unlikely), or someone had too much to say. I quickly unfollowed a few of of the new “social media types” based on this rule.

But today, after I thought this was resolved, I saw something new… Here’s a video: (It’s very short) http://www.scottswezey.com/ss/2012-06-30_2349.swf

All I can say: Wow! Please guys, keep in mind the difference between an RT and an @reply. Everyone sees an RT, the other (@reply) only the person you are replying to sees. I don’t begrudge you the right to post what you want, have conversations, etc… But if every time you should @reply, you RT instead… You will lose followers. You can do it a little, but this many times in a row. Unfollowed.