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Category: Tech

  • What to do when all your Saved Passwords Disappear from Chrome

    Ever had this happen? It’s quite a shock and a lot of dismay. Today when I went to sites I visit often I noticed the Username and Password field weren’t automatically filled out like normal. So I went to the password manager in Chrome and everything had disappeared! Well I found a solution HERE on a Google Groups discussion board. It seems to have worked.

    This is for a Mac. What you do is first quit Chrome. Then you go to Applications>Utilities>Keychain Open up your Keychain Access program and all of your passwords should be in there. Mine were. Then you re-open Chrome and all the passwords and sites are re-populated in the Password Manager in Chrome. At least it worked for me. Whew! The Passwords in Chrome are in Preferences>Personal Stuff>Manage Saved Passwords.

    Hope that helps. Let me know.

  • How To Fix Access Denied Error On Twitter Follow Button

    If you haven’t installed the new code, it’s here: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow

    Even if you have already done that, you may still get that error message instead of the button. What you need to do is clear your browser cache, and it will show up fine.

    On Chrome on Mac you click the Chrome menu button and select “Clear Browsing Data”, another menus will pop up, “Empty the Cache” should already be checked, but if not check that one.

  • How to Find the Best Device in Every Tech Category

    In the market for a new Android phone and want to know which is the best? Or how about a new Wifi Router. This site, wirecutter.com is the perfect solution. It shows you the best product in every technology category. Great resource.

    Why not just post this link in Twitter and or Facebook? Well I did, but one thing those services are is ephemeral, after some time goes by I can’t seem to find my posts or things I want to remember, which is another reason blogging, and especially having your own site is still very valuable. I think even quasi blogging services like Tumblr and Google+ still have this problem of ephemerality.

    And dang it, blogging is just plain fun sometimes!

    I’ll add this too my list of “Cool Sites and Apps.”

  • Apple’s New iPad: A Horse With No Name

    Man, I haven’t blogged in forever. I think about it too much. One shouldn’t think, one should just blog. Blog’s aren’t formal.

    Do you like the title? I was trying to think of something funny or cute since while everyone was debating whether this iteration would be called “iPad 3” or “iPad HD” Apple decided not to call it anything!
    Apparently this represents symbolically that the iPad has entered into the “Post PC” era. Regular computers such as MacBooks aren’t given special names with each new generation, they simply “just are” and simply have upgrades or “refreshes”
    every so often. This symbolizes that the iPad, and more generally, the paradigm it represents: Mobile, Intimacy, has reached a point in the amount of power that it has, to do most of the tasks that we “ordinary” people do in our normal “everyday” world:
    Edit photos, word process, browse the net, even some simple video editing.

    This new iPad certainly is a horse: double the screen resolution, double the processing and graphics. Apparently the screen is so beautiful that it looks better than a photo print. One for a second just imagines a day when reality just sort of leaps out of such a screen.
    Every nerds dream. And if John Wheeler’s “It from Bit” physical paradigm turns out to be true, such a wild fantasy may not be as “far out” as one would expect.

    The beauty of the piece, everything Apple makes is not only more functional, intimate, and ‘warm” than others, but also an “object of beauty” will sell itself. Everyone who is into technology drools when they walk into an Apple store. Which begs the question, is Apple a Pornographer?
    Maybe. True art, according to Aquinas, isn’t supposed to move you to desire, nor fear. But rather put you into a state of Aesthetic Arrest. Which you know, Apple does that too. So maybe it is true art and not Pornography.

    I still can’t believe that the amount of disk space hasn’t changed in two years. No component of computing has more price elasticity in ration to time as disk space. Technologically, disk space increases exponentially faster than even computing power itself, at least double every 12 months, yet this very iPad that came out
    today has the same disk space options: 16gb, 32gb, 64gb as the original. That’s insane. Where am I supposed to keep all my downloaded movies, especially if they’re in HD? And all that HD video I’m shooting from the iPad itself.

    But you’d be hard pressed to find one tech journalist pointing out this glaring omission. Someone on Google+ pointed out to me that maybe iCloud will take up the slack. Perhaps, but I still don’t know what iCloud is, how it works, or even what it’s supposed to do.

    Meanwhile, the Google+ app on my iPhone simply uploads all my photos to the cloud without me every having to think about it.

    Having said that, for all it’s minuses, the iPad is light years ahead of the competition on software, apps, interface and the X Factor of it making you feel safe and comforting. Apple’s whole eco system may be a prison, but it’s a safe “Country Club” prison.
    Android may make you more free, but you feel less safe, as if you are risking having to live your life ‘out on the streets.’

    The emotional factor, which seems like a dichotomy when applied to ‘computing’ cannot be over estimated. It’s leading Apple, currently as we speak, to be the most valuable company in the World, with about a billion dollars in after tax profits per week!
    That’s utterly mind boggling. And with this release, they are only going to keep growing.

    At the end of the day, even with all the things that annoy me about them, at least Apple, unlike say government contractors, are making their money the old fashioned way: They’re earning it.

  • Some Blogging Advice: Continually Update Your Old Posts

    I haven’t given any ‘blogging’ advice in a long time. And whom and I to give it?

    But I have noticed one little thing that can help get your posts a little edge. Maybe it’s this increasingly ‘real-time’ World, or maybe they’ve always done it, but Google is so much constantly crawling, that when your content changes, even on an older post, the Google ‘bot’ almost immediately notices and comes running to check it out. So in this ‘timely’ World, it could get you a spot on the top or at least on the front page of results, for your particular topic. In other words, one gets the since that ‘timeliness’ is increasingly an ingredient in the secret ‘sauce’ of Page Rank.

    Also I’ve noticed another benefit: It sort of gives you a sense of continuum and wholeness to your ideas if you’re keeping them alive in this way. In other words, if you add to them when some new material arises, simultaneously your subsconscious goes to work, ‘effortlessly’ bringing you some new creativity and synthesizing your main ideas, perhaps by doing it’s own ‘crawling’ in the otherwise overlooked areas of your mind.

  • Google+: A Threat to Tumblr?

    In response to John Battelle’s blogpost: Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr, I wrote the following: (Note such posts harken back to one of my blog posts about blogging itself: That is, if you find something you are interested in, and read blogs about the topic, often times your replies become long enough to qualify for blog posts. Also, by replying and leaving a link to your blog, it drives a little traffic as well.)

    That was one of my first thoughts when I experienced Google+ that Tumblr was in trouble

    Still they have a community. I’m on it. My impression of it is more of photo and gif sharing, but not personal photos as much as interesting photos, magazine like photos, that people are posting from somewhere else. To get attention on a Tumblr to post, the photos need to be striking, extremely funny, or otherwise “headline” grabbing.

    Like Twitter, not a lot of personal feel to it, but fun, and I like Fred’s attitude that companies don’t kill other companies as much as companies kill themselves.

    But my main takeaway from Google+ is not so much the service itself, although it is great, as like you say, it’s integrated with all of Google’s other services. Google may be Germany, but the seem to be the one company of all of these that has all the pieces. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that will be a powerful value proposition.

    It almost reduces Twitter and Facebook to applications on this vast Cloud OS, rather than platforms in and of themselves. And Apple, for all it’s wonder, doesn’t have a Cloud Syncing OS, much less a Social Network. I think Apple should buy Twitter and Facebook should merge with MSFT.

    The deep integration of Google+ with Android will be compelling and I don’t see the “app” for the iPhone as being as robust an experience as it will be on Android. This could be a long term threat too Apple as well if they don’t get their Cloud Offerings together.