duck

Jun

2017

Recovery USB Sticks

One of my favourite tech tools for repairing computers is a bootable USB Stick. This lets me bypass the OS and test the memory and hard drive as well as letting me recover data off a hard drive even if I can’t get into Windows.

This guide goes through how to download, create and use a bootable diagnostic USB.

Before we get started, you’ll need a working PC (usually not the one you want to be testing!) and a spare USB stick (4gb is a good size).

Note that this guide only applies to Windows PC’s and assumes you’ve got relatively good computer skills.

Continue reading →

Jun

2017

How to Restore an iPhone

When something goes wrong with your iPhone or iPad, one of the first steps to do is to do a factory reset on the device. This involves backing up your data, downloading the latest version of iOS and then installing it.

iTunes makes it very easy to do!

You will need a computer, your device, a USB cable and upto 2 hours (5 minutes of your time, then a lot of waiting around).

Continue reading →

Jun

2017

Web Hosting and WordPress Plugins

This article is about the plugins I usually use with WordPress as well as my favourite website and DNS hosts.

Continue reading →

May

2017

Using Google Takeout

This is a guide for how to download everything from your Google Account. It’s a good idea to do this every now and then just incase something happens to your Google account (for example you accidentally delete a whole bunch of important emails, or your account gets hacked etc).

Continue reading →

May

2017

Audio Ducking on a Mac

There’s a feature that is built into Windows called Audio Ducking, where sound from one application will drop the volume of the sound on other applications down. This allows you to be listening to music and be on voice chat at the same time without having to have the music turned all the way down. I’ve hunted around and worked out the best and easiest way to do it on a Mac using a program called Audio Hijack 3.

This process works with pretty well any program, including Ventrillo, Discord, Teamspeak, Skype etc.

Continue reading →

Apr

2017

Backing up an iPhone

This article applies for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, anything that runs the iOS software. I’ll refer to it as iPhone throughout the article however as that’s what it’s aimed at. The version of the software at the time of writing is iOS 10.3 (it’s pretty similar for the earlier systems too).

iPhone backups are super easy to do, but there are a few little tricks to them. You can back up your iPhone either onto the Cloud, or onto a computer.

The Cloud backup is great in that it will back up all the time, however you are restricted in the amount of data you can save, and it also requires you to have Wifi internet access.

Continue reading →

Feb

2017

Cherokee and Chevereto

Chevereto is some image hosting software that runs on PHP/MySQL. Here’s a few quick notes for how to get it working with the Cherokee webserver.

In this situation I’m using Cherokee 1.2.103 and Chevereto Free 1.0.7 running on Ubuntu 16.0.4 LTS.

This article assumes you have Cherokee set up and already working with PHP-fpm or some other PHP interpreter.

Continue reading →

Feb

2017

Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook has a tool that lets you check on your privacy settings to make sure your profile is locked down. You should check it out (it will take about 30seconds to do).

Continue reading →

Feb

2017

Hard Drive Formats

Most Hard Drives when you buy them are built to run on Windows Machines and not Macs. To make them work on Mac, you need to format the drive first.

There are 4 main formats, each with their own pros and cons. This guide gives you a quick run down of each format and how to format a drive on a Mac and PC.

Continue reading →

Jan

2017

Using rsync on Mac to Copy Files

There’s a lack of good file copy utilities on Mac like there is for Windows (eg. Teracopy/Ultracopy). If I need to copy a bunch of files where I’m likely to come across errors copying, I’ll use rsync!

This guide covers how to copy files on a Mac using an external drive or any connected network drive. It’ll skip any errors and log all the failed copies to a file for you to check through. It’s especially handy for copying files while skipping errors, corrupted files and getting past some permissions errors.

This is a beginner to intermediate guide and doesn’t cover some of the more advanced features of rsync.

Continue reading →