MacBook M1 fail and fix
Using Migration Assistant caused Mac AirBook Pro with M1 chip to crash. Here is how problem was fixed with a factory default reset.
Category: Tech
These are posts about various technology related topics from web development to solving hardware issues.
Softaculous Installation List Fix
How to fix a corrupted Installation list in Softaculous, a web installation management application. The underlying data file can be manually deleted, and the install list can be automatically regenerated.
TCL Roku 4K 50″ LED TV Review
Review of the TCL 50S425-CA 4K Ultra HD Smart LED Television (2019), 50" purchased from Amazon Canada.
Intelino J-1 Smart Train Starter Set Review
Review for the Intelino J-1 Smart Train Starter Set purchased on Amazon Canada as a gift for a young child, shortly after Christmas in 2020.
GeekGhost versus GoDaddy review
Comparing GoDaddy and GeekGhost web hosting solutions, done a year after switching to GeekGhost.
Social Science Action Research Group site launch
I recently worked on a new website for the Social Science Action Research Group (SSARG). SSARG is made up of social sciences and humanities specialists who provide consulting, research, writing, and editorial services to individuals, government agencies, community and not-for-profit organizations, and private businesses. You can see it at https://www.ssarg.ca/.
Twitter Ads Fraud, Not What You Think
How Twitter will allow fraudsters to hack into accounts, make bogus charges, and then make the victim pay. All without human help intervention.
Installing Laravel on GoDaddy Shared Hosting Site
A while ago I starting playing around with Laravel on my GoDaddy Hosting account. GoDaddy makes it really easy to get started with Laravel, and numerous other frameworks, and assorted web application. It has an “Installatron” app in cPanel which automatically installs a package for you, and configures it all for you. That seems nice, … Continue reading Installing Laravel on GoDaddy Shared Hosting Site
CakePHP to Laravel
As mentioned in my last post, I tried out CakePHP, which is a PHP framework for web development. I like a lot of the ideas of it, and the structure it provides. But, it seems to not have enough of a user base to have a substantial “ecosystem”, which Laravel has. So, I’m giving a Laravel … Continue reading CakePHP to Laravel
CakePHP
My latest discovery in the world of PHP is CakePHP. It is a framework for developing web applications in PHP. I’m not an expert in it yet, but so far it’s looking pretty interesting. It seems to have a significant but not huge following. The neat thing about it, is gives a strong order to … Continue reading CakePHP
Secure Site with SSL Certificate
This site now has an SSL certificate. That means any communication you, as a user, have with the site is transmitted securely between you and the host. You’ll notice the address on the web browser starts with “https”, and typically shows a “locked” green lock icon, to indicate the site is secure.
Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC
This post is about some difficulty I had in making an Apache OpenOffice Base “odb” front end work with an MySQL database backend on Mac OS X, and how I got things working. I originally had an Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Base “odb” file working on Windows, accessing MySQL with ODBC. The “odb” file had a … Continue reading Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC
Importing bank transactions
Like many, I’ve often downloaded financial transactions from my bank’s web site. The options for my bank (in Canada), is fairly typical, and limited to “Microsoft Money”, “Intuit Quicken”, “Intuit QuickBooks”, “Simply Accounting”, “Spreadsheet (CSV)”. Now, I don’t use any of the above accounting programs. I want the data to play around with, and use … Continue reading Importing bank transactions
PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters
While using PHP to display web pages drawing on a MySQL database, I’ve had some difficulty with strings in non-English characters. In my case, it happened to be Inuktitut syllabics. Most text seemed to display properly, but some didn’t. Ultimately, I found the simple solution, was I needed to enable the “mbstring” extension in PHP, and … Continue reading PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters
Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL
I’ve recently had to import a large Excel spreadsheet into MySQL. Of course, there’s lots of ways of doing this, and most of the time, it’s a rather trivial thing to do. That is, it’s easy if you have English characters and single-line text fields. Approach 1: CSV. This is often the “go to” approach … Continue reading Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL
How to keep fixed width HTML tables/columns fixed
I wrote a little PHP script that shows data from any table in an HTML table, and I had a little frustration in trying to keep the HTML table and column widths fixed. I wanted to do this, because I want very large tables to appear to load very quickly, and not have columns “jump” … Continue reading How to keep fixed width HTML tables/columns fixed
Weird Characters in OpenOffice Base with MySQL
I’m using Apache OpenOffice Base 4 with MySQL 5.6. I noticed some question marks appeared where I should have seen some non-English characters (inuit characters). I had set up the database properly to use UTF-8. But, it turned out I used the ANSI ODBC driver. Switching to the Unicode Driver easily fixed the problem.
MySQL can’t insert without default val on auto-increment
So, I had a weird error with MySQL 5.6 Win 64 server. Every time I tried to insert a record, I got an error that a field didn’t have a default value. I was using Apache OpenOffice, with an ODBC driver, but the same underlying problem occurred with MySQL WorkBench, so it was a MySQL … Continue reading MySQL can’t insert without default val on auto-increment