Tag: Mirrored: Tech Tips

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Over the years I’ve written a lot of troubleshooting posts on my blog, describing problems I’ve run into and how I solved them in hopes that other people with the same problems might find it helpful.

I’m starting to collect them on a mini-site that’s not a blog: Hyperborea Tech Tips.

Several things came together to inspire me to reorganize those posts:

  • Tinkering with IndieWeb.
  • Building a Gemini capsule.
  • Opening the developer tools on one of my WordPress-powered blog pages. There’s no reason a 500-word article should need 400KB and a dozen connections!
  • Keeping multiple WordPress blogs up to date with security fixes.
  • Reading about the garden and stream metaphor. (via)

The essence of the garden and stream is that we’ve gotten used to a constant, time-based stream of information, but some things are better handled as an idea-based, organically-growing and cultivated collection. Sometimes you want to post a status update to social media (into the stream), but sometimes you want to update a Wiki page (taking care of the garden).

A lot of stuff isn’t here because it belongs in a stream. It’s here because it became more convenient than copying a template, writing the page, adding links and uploading everything over FTP.

I’d already mirrored some of these troubleshooting posts on my Gemini capsule, so I figured they’d be a good place to start.

My goals with the sub-site:

  • Deeper dive into Eleventy, the static site generator I’d used to archive my Les Misérables commentary.
  • Dig into IndieWeb.
  • Light as possible. One CSS file, images only for content, system fonts, no JavaScript unless I have a specific thing that needs it. (And if I do have to add JavaScript, only include the parts I need, not half a megabyte of some framework or another.)
  • Look somewhat decent (and legible!) on screens from cell phone up to widescreen desktops.
  • Create a reusable template, both for my own projects and for other people.
  • Be at least as useful as the original blog posts, if not more!

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This doesn’t seem to be a very common problem, given that when I searched for it I only found a single result on Google, but in case someone else out there runs into the same issue, I thought I’d write it up so they can find it.

I tried to register a Wacom Intuos drawing tablet. The way you do this is you open the Wacom software and click on the registration banner, which then opens your default web browser to the registration page on Wacom’s website, pre-filled with a serial number and some authorization token. If you’re already logged into a Wacom account, it should just register it immediately. Or you can create an account first.

The problem: I got a banner at the top with the error, “Profile ID Missing.” I went back to the Wacom Desktop Center, which popped up the registration banner again. Clicked again. Same problem.

Google search for Wacom register "Profile Id Missing" with one result, and the we've omitted similar results message.
Technically there was another result…which was another view of the same reviews.
The only reference I found when searching for wacom register "Profile ID Missing" was a German-language review review on the Amazon.de listing for an Intuos tablet. “Was zum Teufel ist eine Profile-ID?” They solved it by uninstalling and reinstalling the Wacom software, and for whatever reason, the registration link worked that time.

Before I got to that point, I tried something I didn’t think would work: I clicked in the URL bar on Firefox and hit Enter, causing it to reload the page. (I forget whether I’d already tried hitting the reload button.) Weirdly enough, it worked, and it registered the tablet. Finally!

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To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up:

  • Will I need to act on it? (Likes/favorites are nice, but I don’t need to respond.)
  • How time-sensitive is it? (“Your ride is here” is more time sensitive than planning a get together for next weekend.)
  • How important? (“Server down” is more important than a project update. A conversation is more important than a newsletter.)
  • Is it actually for me, or is it an ad for the app service?

Then I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.

So I hear when a text or instant message comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.

It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.

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I recently upgraded my computer’s motherboard and processor, and spent the next few days trying to work out which glitches were hardware related and which were coincidental. One problem I had was that the GRUB bootloader menu would not appear when the computer started. It was clearly there. It would boot to the default operating system after 10 seconds. If I hit an arrow key it would stop and wait for me to choose an OS. It just didn’t show up. All I got was a black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner.

On top of that, when Linux started booting, the screen was messed up as if the character set had been run through a meat grinder. You could tell what the letters were, but there was a ton of extra garbage. Then, when init set the character set, the gibberish cleared up and the screen looked normal again.

I had been dealing with other problems that looked like video card or driver issues, but I eventually realized that the problem had nothing to do with the hardware upgrade.

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