Recover a Lost WordPress Password

WordPress LogoRecently I had a client contact me and tell me they lost their WordPress password and couldn’t get into their account. I guess they had the wrong email in there and couldn’t use the ‘Lost Password’ feature either. Luckily, there’s a ‘not too difficult’ method for resetting your password (or more than likely your favorite client’s password).

I’m going to be using cPanel and PHPMyAdmin for this, but you should be able to do it with whatever system your host is using to allow you to manage your DB’s.

  1. Login to cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin
    WordPress Password Recovery
  2. Look for your database to the blog you forgot the password to on the left hand side
    WordPress Password Recovery
  3. Look for the ‘wp_users’ table and click the ‘Browse’ button
    WordPress Password Recovery
  4. Find your username/user ID and click the edit button next to it
    WordPress Password Recovery
  5. Look for the ‘user_pass’ field and change the function to MD5. Then simply type your new password in the text area. When you’re done, click the Go/Save button
    WordPress Password Recovery
  6. Finally, go and try to login to the blog using the username you chose to edit and the new password you just entered. What’s that? you forgot the password? Go back to step 1 and go to jail.

That’s it! There are a couple other ways out there to get your WP password back, including one where you upload a file to your server that basically opens WP up so you can get in and change the password. This method is by far the best way to do it, however.

Rename Multiple Files With a Few Clicks

Have you ever needed to rename a ton of files? This has to be one of the most tedious tasks I’ve ever come across in all my years of computing. About six months ago I was faced with the chore of renaming 5,000+ files for a website from .htm to .php. After renaming 100+ files, my eyes glazed over and my mind shut down. There had to be a better way.

Enter Ant Renamer. Normally the aforementioned task would have taken me hours to do (if not a couple days). After some searching, I found an amazing app called Ant Renamer. Instead of hours, this task took me a couple seconds. Here how to use it.

This is just one of the uses for it. There isn’t any naming convention that you can come up with that this app can’t do.

Check out Ant Renamer

Remove Tabs From Adobe Photoshop CS4

Photoshop Logo CS4I’m just going to cut to the chase: The tabs in Photoshop SUCK. This is coming from the guy who wants tabs everywhere. In explorer/file browser, my browser, my text editor…can you imagine how easy the universe would be to navigate if all the planets were simply tabs? Want to go to Mars? Just CTRL + Tab over to it. Simple right?

With all of this love for tabs, I am completely dumbfounded by the use of tabs in Photoshop. I really tried to like it, but it’s just not intuitive and it’s mind blowing that this was made the default for such an amazing product. Here’s how to turn them off, and actually start getting some work done again.

Go to ‘Edit’ –> ‘Preferences’ –> ‘Interface’
Turn Off Photoshop Tabs

Now uncheck the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option
Turn Off Photoshop Tabs


***Update***

Scott left a great comment about how you need to open files in order for the tabs to not show up.

“…you can successfully drag multiple images to CS4 and have them all open in floating windows IF you drop them on the top tool bar.”

***Update 2***

ridley left another great comment below on how to easily turn tabbed windows into floating windows: “you can actually just click on a tab and drag it down to the canvas and it becomes a floating window.” Brilliant!

VirtualBox VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908) Error

VirtualBox ErrorI recently installed the updated kernel in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything seemed to go fine until I tried to open my Windows XP Virtual Machine inside of VirtualBox. I initially got an error that said ‘Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows XP’. This error was immediately followed by another error dialogue box with the error:

VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908)

There’s two ways to fix this. I would try the first method first, and the second only it that didn’t work.

Method 1 – Simple Command

Simply open a terminal window and type ‘sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup‘. This will take a little bit of time, but once it’s done, you should be able to open your virtual machines like normal. If for some reason this doesn’t work, try the second method below.

Method 2 – Uninstall/Reinstall

Go to ‘System’ –> ‘Administration’ –> ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ and search for ‘virtualbox’. Uninstall whatever is installed. Once it’s removed, reinstall it.

You’ll need to remember what version you installed. I prefer the one from Sun Microsystems which you can get here. You can of course, just reinstall the exact packages you just uninstalled.