CoolComputing -

I have been using a 32" 4K Monitor (HP Specter 32 Studio Display) for some time now, but have never been 100% happy with it because I had to set the scaling of text size to 125% in Windows 10 to make them readable. A 40 inch or larger screen would be much better since I would be able to set text at 100%. PC monitors of that size are usually at least $450 or more, but I've seen many 43 inch 4K TV's for less than half that price, and that many PC users have been very....

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Red Pocket Port Out Account Number & Pin

Posted by: david on Saturday/January 05/2019 - 01:09 PM
Networking

Recently I needed to port out a line from Red Pocket Mobile to Speedtalk. I went online into my Red Pocket account, and saw that the account number was listed there, under the Current Plan description and above the Product & Plan Code.

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Red Pocket Mobile Issue: "Need Initial Refill"

Posted by: david on Thursday/November 23/2017 - 09:40 PM
Networking

Red Pocket Mobile offers some really attractive deals for light phone plan users. So when I discovered them in August earlier this year, I signed up my mom's phone (a Sprint Motorola Moto-e 2nd Gen) with the 100 voice minutes/100 texts/500 MB LTE plan. This was purchased via eBay for just $60. There was a hiccup during activation- even though I provided the activation code along with the IMEI & ICCID, it would not work. We had to call customer service where the rep had to manually re-apply the code. But after that it seemed to work....

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NVIDIA Shield Tablet Battery Bulge - Great Service by NVIDIA

Posted by: david on Monday/November 06/2017 - 11:16 PM
Hardware

I bought the NVIDIA Shield Tablet K1 back in late December of 2015. Frankly I have not used it as often as I wanted to. This was mainly because my iPad Mini 2 has always been smoother and gets the job done quick. The Shield Tablet, even when upgraded to Android 7.0, always had issues slowing down & stuttering (sometimes for over 10 seconds). Recently I powered it up after not using it for a couple of weeks, and noticed that the back cover in the bottom middle of the tablet, had popped open. Right away I....

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Gmail App vs iOS Mail: Google Wants You to Use Gmail App over Mail App in iOS

Posted by: david on Friday/September 15/2017 - 05:21 PM
Internet

I've enjoyed using the built-in iOS mail app for both the iPhone and the iPad. I used to prefer the Gmail app but found the iOS mail app to be better all-in-one place for all my email accounts, including non-google accounts. Some of the advantages IMO of Apple's iOS Mail app include: VIP inbox which lets you see all the emails for designated "VIP" senders in one place. This syncs across to to the Mail app on MacOS computers as well. Pretty amazing feature that lets me annotate/sign a PDF document and send back Better privacy vs Google's propensity to....

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Fix for Logitech G Keys Not working in Windows 10 & Logitech Gaming Software

Posted by: david on Monday/August 21/2017 - 05:03 PM
Hardware

I have an older Logitech G11 keyboard plus a G13 Advanced Gameboard, and actually rely on the macros/shortcuts assigned to the G-Keys daily. Recently they all of a sudden stopped working, and it was a real pain to try and work around it, so I decided to try and solve the problem. The problem seemed to manifest itself after Windows 10 (with Creative Update) froze the other day and I had to restart without a proper shutdown. Looking around the web for solutions, I tried the common ones: Unplug/re-plug the USB keyboard & gamepad Update to the latest Logitech Gaming Software....

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Articles: Amazon Get 5% Cash Back from 3% on Amazon Chase Visa Card Upgrade

Posted by: david on Friday/April 28/2017 - 04:48 PM
Coupon News

I heard about Amazon upping the Amazon Chase Visa card cash back from 3% to 5% back for many months now. It is only for Amazon Prime members, which I am and have been for over a while, so I keep expecting to get a new card automatically from Chase. But it never happened. So today I sent a secure message to Chase customer service, and this was their reply: Hello David, Thank you for contacting Chase about your reward points. I would like to inform you that you must sign up for an eligible Amazon membership and begin earning 5% Back....

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Transferring Away from TPO Wireless - Getting the Account Number

Posted by: david on Wednesday/March 08/2017 - 10:28 AM
Networking

So I've had service with TPO Wireless, aka the People's Operator, for nearly a year. On the 14th of last month I decided to switch out. This was mainly because after my 4G LTE data is used up, there is zero data usable, not even at reduced 2G speed. But I found out it too late to cancel as they had already billed me for the next month. For some reason my TPO billing date changed from the 17th to 12th for the last few statements. Very annoying, but whatever- so I decided to....

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Time Warner Cable Slow Down Vs. Advertised Speeds

Posted by: david on Thursday/June 23/2016 - 12:56 PM
Internet

I've had Time Warner Cable for broadband Internet Access for years now. About 3 years ago I got my own cable modem in the form of the Motorola 6141 Surfboard so to remove the monthly lease charge that Time Warner accesses. BTW Motorola sold its cable modem business to ARRIS, so the ARRIS 6141 is pretty much the same model. And for about 3 years now I have Time Warner's "Extreme"/"Ultimate" Internet which is supposed to give 100 Mbps downloads. It was working nicely, but starting at around 8 months ago, I started to have problem....

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Articles: Solution for T-Mobile "You have switch your SIM Card" Error for Tablet Free 200 MB Plan

Posted by: david on Monday/April 18/2016 - 03:57 PM
Networking

I had T-Mobile POST-paid phone service which I recently switched from. I had an iPad Mini 4G LTE attached to the account, and when I called to cancel the phone service, the rep told me that I would be charged $10 a month if I wanted to keep the tablet data plan going. I asked how come because it was supposed to be a free 200 MB for life plan, but she said that I was getting a $10/month discount to offset the cost. So I told her to cancel it, but she offered to convert it....

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Articles: Fix for Canon MX922 Google Cloud Print Problem

Posted by: david on Monday/March 14/2016 - 02:27 AM
Windows Tips

The Canon Pixma MX922 Multifunction printer does it all- print, copy, scan and fax. It even does Google Cloud Print (GCP), which to-date is the only way to print from a Chromebook. We had gifted both to a relateve (Steve), but unfortunately he could not the Chromebook to print. Steve even bought a USB cable, but obviously he didn't know about the severely limited printing functionality for Chrome OS systems. So when we visited Steve recently, I decided to try and get the Asucks Chromebook. Ooops I meant ASUS- a slip of the tongue, stemming the extremely poor customer service....

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Articles: Apple TV 4 (2015) Blank Screen on Computer Monitor Issue Solved

Posted by: david on Tuesday/January 19/2016 - 11:42 PM
Cool Devices

Recently I had purchased a refurbished Benq RL2455HM computer monitor via a sale by Benq Direct. Although the highly-praised screen is made more for gaming with its 1ms response time, we had used it with an Amazon Fire TV Stick as a TV for the kitchen. The RL2455HM works well for that purpose, but unfortunately it is a real pain in the butt to change the volume as you have to literally press different buttons 10 times reach the menu to do it. Overall, even though that was a pretty nice setup, obviously the new Apple TV....

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Bing Rewards Redemption Pricing Discrepancies for Different Accounts

Posted by: david on Monday/January 18/2016 - 11:08 PM
Internet

Bing Rewards is pretty nice way to earn small prizes (or chances to win big awards) while doing what you would normally do anyways on a daily basis- use an Internet search engine. Since Google is so dominant, Microsoft has had to resort to the Bing Rewards system to entice users to use Bing more. The strategy has worked, at least for me- I've set Bing as the default search engine on all the browsers I use. I even set the Bing Dashboard as one of default/home pages when I launch Firefox, to take advantage of their....

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Articles: Easily Create a Swift Array of Days of the Week/Month, Localized as Well

Posted by: david on Wednesday/January 13/2016 - 03:22 PM
Swift Xcode IOS

I wanted to create an array in Swift that contained the names of every day of the week, e.g. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. Obviously, I can do something like the following: let daysOfWeek = ["Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", Saturday"] But the problem was that I also wanted those names to be localized into other languages without having to manually create one for each. I knew that iOS Objective C/Swift supported automatically translating date names using NSDateFormatter, but I wondered if there was a way to achieve what I want without passing and converting actual, specific dates such as....

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Articles: Fix for PageSpeed Module Causing High Server Load

Posted by: david on Wednesday/December 09/2015 - 04:05 PM
Linux Tips

Google's PageSpeed Module has had a lot of praises heaped upon it for its ability to perform a myriad of performance optimizations to help web servers deliver content quicker. I had tried it in the past on my servers (running CentOS & Apache) but was always hit by heavy, unacceptable server loads. So I've always had to just go back and disable it. That was actually a couple of years ago, so recently I gave it another go. I downloaded the latest beta version (mod_pagespeed version 1.9.32.10-7423). Installation was easy, though I ran into a....

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Articles: Xcode Swift Localization Problem Solved

Posted by: david on Friday/November 20/2015 - 04:46 PM
Swift Xcode IOS

So I was working on Xcode 7.1.1 (using Swift 2.1) on my new app, and decided to localize it. I'm relatively new to Swift and iOS development, but so far. so good. I wanted to share a couple of "gotchas" I ran into while trying to internationalize my app. My biggest first stumbling block was not naming the localization strings file correctly. It has to be named: Localizable.strings When I created my strings file, I had named it "localization.strings", and was wondering why in the world the NSLocalizedString() was not converting the key value to the translated one as specified in my....

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Prevent International Data Charges on T-Mobile Simple Choice Plan

Posted by: david on Friday/September 18/2015 - 02:59 PM
Networking

T-Mobile's Simple Choice Plan is a terrific option for those who travel out of the country a lot on business or vacation. For instance if you go on cruises you will find it quite indepensible to have access to Google or Apple Maps while roaming around exploring a foreign port city, trying to access your pre-planned points of interest. Also the fact that T-Mobile recently added twenty additional countries to this plan. One new one I've noticed include Croatia which was not there last year. For the past two years, after returning from Europe cruises, I've noticed that....

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Articles: Fix for Broken Yum on CentOS 5.x with Python Error Message

Posted by: david on Thursday/August 06/2015 - 10:45 PM
Linux Tips

So I was looking to upgrade PHP on one of my servers running CentOS 5.7 from PHP 5.3.x to PHP 5.5. I wanted to get it to 5.6 actually but unfortunately there is no such package available on Webtactic.com. But anyways I began the process by running the command: yum install yum-plugin-replace Which resulted in a shocking error message: There was a problem importing one of the Python modules required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was: /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so: undefined symbol: opyAlgorithmID_Util, version NSSUTIL_3.12 Please install a package which provides this module, or verify that the module is installed correctly. It's....

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Tomato/EasyTomato Router High CPU When Downloading 100Mbps+ Fix

Posted by: david on Monday/July 20/2015 - 04:03 PM
Networking

I have an ASUS NT-16 Router which has EasyTomato 0.8 (the newest version) installed. EasyTomato is pretty much an easier-to-use, enhanced version of the popular Tomato/TomatoUSB router firmware. It works well for the most part, but I have noticed that if there are high-speed broadband downloads that are near or exceeding 100 Mbps for several minutes, I could no longer browse the web. It has been an annoyance for months so I decided to really investigate and then hopefully find a solution. I noticed that firstly the error message I get when browsing the web all stem from....

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Articles: Android X86 Black Screen Fix (Wake Up from Sleep), + Tips & Wishlist

Posted by: david on Saturday/March 14/2015 - 10:50 PM
Linux Tips

The Android-x86 Project works fairly well. I installed the 4.4.4 version (KitKat) on a virtual machine (VM) created using the free VMWare Player. A beefy Windows 8.1 PC is the host PC. A couple quirks were that I had to delete the default SCSI hard drive device, and then add a replacement IDE drive to the VM. It works great for the most part, except that the mouse is occasionally laggy, and for some reason after a specified amount of time, all I get is a Blank Screen. Researching the problem, it seems that it....

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