Author Archives: nils

ASUS P5QD Turbo Mainboard Not Recognizing USB Keyboard During Boot

Posted on by nils
Reply

Today I re-installed my old PC for my sister. First obstacle? I obviously had changed the boot order to put the CD Rom Drive after the harddrive, making booting from my Windows install DVD hard, to say the least. I couldn’t change it because, for some reason, the BIOS refused to recognize my USB keyboard. And unfortunately I seem to have no more PS/2 keyboards.

After a bit of trial and error, it seems that only one of the USB ports on the rear is recognized during POST. And on the Asus P5QD Turbo mainboard it’s the port directly next to the on board NIC port:

So if you have this issue with any Asus board, try that USB port first. Of course if you have a PS/2 keyboard handy, that’ll do the trick as well.

Subversion: Insufficient NODES rows Error

Posted on by nils
6

Trying to upgrade an svn repository, I got the the error:

vn: E155016: Insufficient NODES rows for

followed by the path to a file. This can be solved by deleting a certain file type:

Find them:

find . -name dir-prop-revert

To delete them:

find . -name dir-prop-revert -exec rm {} ;

If you’d like to make backups instead:

find . -name dir-prop-revert -exec mv {} {}.backup ;

Now try the upgrade again:

svn upgrade

No more error messages. 🙂

iPhone not recognized by iTunes – Can’t Sync

Posted on by nils
8

For a while now I’ve had the issue that, sometimes, my iPhone would not be recognized by iTunes and wouldn’t sync. Sometimes there  was an error message; sometimes not. Most recently, I would just get the Windows’ sound you get when you connect a USB device twice in a row. The iPhone then charged, but did not sync at all.

Last night it got to the point where it just simply did not work at all anymore, so I had to look into it. Much to my surprise, the relevant article on the Apple Support Site, iOS: “Device not recognized in iTunes for Windows”, actually helped. In my case, I had to remove and reinstall the Apple Mobile Device USB driver.

Specifically:

Reinstall the Apple Mobile Device Driver

  1. Right-click the Apple Mobile Device entry in Device Manager and choose Uninstall from the shortcut menu.

  2. When prompted, select the box “Delete the driver software for this device” and click OK.

  3. In the resulting dialog box, click OK.

  4. In the Device Manager window, right-click Universal Serial Bus controllers and choose Scan for hardware changes from the shortcut menu.

At this point, the Apple Mobile Device entry did not reappear. Checking in the “Computer” window – the one which has your drives listed – showed an “Apple iPhone” device. I found it in the Device Manager under “Portable Devices”. I had to then update the software:

  1. Right-click the Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, or Apple iPod entry in Device Manager and choose Update Driver from the shortcut menu.

  2. Click “Browse my computer for driver software.”

  3. Click “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.”

  4. Click the Have Disk button. (If the Have Disk option is not present, choose a device category such as Mobile Phone or Storage Device if listed, and click next. The Have Disk button should then appear.)

  5. In the “Install from Disk” dialog, click the Browse button.

  6. Use this window to navigate to the following folder: C:Program FilesCommon FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers.

  7. Double-click the “usbaapl” file. (This file will be called “usbaapl64” if you have a 64-bit version of Windows. If you don’t see “usbaapl64” here, or if there is no Drivers folder, look in C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers. instead).

  8. Click OK in the “Install from Disk” dialog.

  9. Click Next and finish the driver-installation steps. Open iTunes to verify that the device is recognized properly.

This worked – as soon as I clicked “next”, the iPhone’s screen lit up and it started synchronizing.

This was on Windows 7 64bit, do check the article for other versions and more detailed descriptions.

Negative Time Values In Excel

Posted on by nils
Reply

I was trying to set up a simple time sheet in Excel. I know that ready-made ones exist, but it’s more fun and educating to make your own, right? And I came across a nasty problem: Excel doesn’t like to display negative time:

Turns out there’s a simple solution for this: Enable the 1904 dating system. There is also a workaround formatting the result as text, but Microsoft states that this then can not be used for further calculations – not a viable solution for a time sheet!

To enable the 1904 dating system, go to your Excel options. It can be found under “Advanced” – you need to scroll quite a bit down:

Enable the option, and lo and behold – it works:


WordPress Error “please fill the required fields (name, email).”

Posted on by nils
1

I have been having a problem with one of my WordPress blogs that had me stumped: Whenever I would comment on it, being logged in as my WordPress user, I would get the error message:

“please fill the required fields (name, email).”

This started happening out of nowhere, without any connection to an update as far as I could tell. I even went so far as to check the code of my child theme – nothing. And I could not find any matching posts on the WordPress forums either…

It turned out to have a very simple solution. I disabled Jetpack, re-enabled it, and authorized Jetpack with WordPress.com again and lo and behold, the problem is gone.

No idea what the actual cause was, but this was one solution I did not try for some time – so I hope this helps anybody who is similarly stuck. 😉