Category:ProblemSolver

Get Adobe Flash player

 
    04.01.12
0
iPad 2, D-Link DIR-615, WiFi issues
Featuring: dwayne

Had some major issues getting an iPad2 to play nicely with D-Link’s DIR-615 (Wireless N300) router. The symptoms were curious. First, when browsing updates on the App Store, some app icons would not show up (instead, replaced with a question mark.) Second, when running the CTV video app, the framework seemed to work fine, but the content for ‘latest videos’ would not show up at all. The rest of the app seemed to be okay. Third, when trying to update Apps, I’d often get a timeout with an error stating that the iPad “could not download it at this time” or something like that. A tap to retry would get the same error.

Soooo…a few random changes on the router. Tried changing the security type (WEP, WPA, WPA2) and tried adjusting firewall settings. Nothing. I’d occasionally get an app to download, but the CTV app became my ‘Canary‘, telling me that something was still wrong. Data wasn’t completely blocked, just not routing correctly.

The final fix seems to have been changing my DNS servers (set by the modem via Cogeco) to Google’s Public DNS servers. The easy-to-remember 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 became the new primary/secondary servers. After that change, things seem to be working correctly. It seems that CTV’s app was mostly an HTML page, and the content for the ‘latest videos’ section was pulled from somewhere entirely different that was not agreeing with any DNS lookups…?

Anyway, seems like this router will stick around for now.

On a similar router-related issue. It seems that you can’t rely on a routers ‘auto-detect’ for wireless channels. It seems I was having some major issues in my apartment recently, and I figured it was tied to the large number of WiFi broadcasting going on in the area. Similarly, the number of phones using the 2.4ghz range wasn’t helping. The auto-detect was not finding the best channel, and manually setting it to a channel seemed to fix the problem.








    04.15.11 tagged , , , , , ,
1
Wacom Tablet Click Stick Lag
Featuring: dwayne

Well, I couldn’t find any direct info on this problem online. My issue stemmed from attempting to describe my particular problem–and that’s a major issue yet to be adequate dealt with by the major search engines. If we don’t see major changes to algorithms to be able to decipher meanings, we’ll increasingly rely on the expertise of individual curators to give us data.

With my tablet, I was having an issue that the pointer would seem to ‘stick’ everytime I clicked on a button or link. The ‘sticking’ did not occur when clicking elsewhere, so it seems to be a driver or software issue rather than something to do with the pen interacting with the tablet itself. My hope was that others who experienced the issue would use the same terminology to describe it.

So, I searched for ‘wacom sticking pointer’ and variations of that term. The results were largely unsatisfactory. However, I noticed the term ‘lag’ was used in another problem. ‘Lag’ certainly could be used to describe my same issue. A subsequent search led me to the term ‘delay’. And then, an answer appeared (albeit, one directed at Win7 users).

Solution? Reduce the ‘Double-Click Distance’ to the very minimum.

IDEA: Google should have a built-in thesaurus. Every word that you enter, could have a dropdown of common variations of that word.








    11.28.10 tagged , ,
0
WordPress iPhone app issue
Featuring: dwayne

Recently made some changes to a wordpress blog.
Using the WordPress iPhone app, I tried to re-add it.
(iOS 4.01 | WP App 2.6.2)
It authenticated fine.
Got the “good to go” message.

Then, “bad username or password errors” whenever it tried to retrieve the blog info.

I thought the bug might have been bad cached info (first authentication was fine, subsequent may have been using old data.) A re-install of the app resulted in the same problems. Adding of other blogs went fine.

Again, tried re-adding.
I tried using http://BLOG_URL/wp-admin

But when doing that, I was now faced with a new required field: XML-RPC.

It could not figure it out on its, and gave me the error “could not find the XML-RPC endpoint of your blog.”

So, I manually entered http://BLOG_URL/xmlrpc.php

That seemed to do the trick.

Often buggy, but when it works, the app is great.








    08.17.10 tagged , , ,
0
WordPress RSS read issues – a fix
Featuring: dwayne

So, tried to load an RSS feed from another wordpress site using WordPress’ native widget.

Error message:”RSS Error – The feed could not be found”

Issue was isolated to the server….But in the process of looking for a solution…I ended up using the workaround instead of the native wordpress option.

By adding the RSS feed to Feedburner, I was able to have content better formatted for the web, and the resulting new feed worked fine in wordpress.

Solution:
Pass the wonky feed through Feedburner and use the new feed address. Then, you’ll also have access to a few more tracking statistics for that feed.










Page 1 of 3123