Recover a Lost WordPress Password
Recently 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.
- Login to cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin
- Look for your database to the blog you forgot the password to on the left hand side
- Look for the ‘wp_users’ table and click the ‘Browse’ button
- Find your username/user ID and click the edit button next to it
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
I’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’
Now uncheck the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option
Quick Google Reader Subscription Update Tip
The biggest problem I have with Google Reader is how it acts sometimes when you have a ton of feeds (I’ve got 200+ feeds I read daily). I’ll go through them all, then the feeds will update, but the ‘new’ ones are actually after the ones I just read. Yesterday I came across a feature in Google Reader yesterday that makes updating your feeds a little easier, and will hopefully solve this problem (fingers crossed).
Click on the actual ‘Subscriptions’ text in the left hand side
This should run the ‘Refresh’ action that you can also find in the small drop down arrow next to Subscriptions, this is just nice and quick.
I’m testing this by making sure I click this everytime before I read my feeds to see if it clears up the issue I was having. Anyway, just a nice quick tip to make Google Reader even more useful.
Creating a One-Time Use Credit Card With PayPal
If you do a fair amount of shopping online, you’ve probably thought about what happens with your credit card information from time to time. Most of the time, it’s ‘conveniently’ stored for you so the next time you shop with Company X the transaction will go even smoother. This is a terrible idea. What happens when (not if, when) the site is compromised? What if the company is a fly-by night? What if you have a keylogger installed on your computer?
There are a ton of bad things that can happen when you submit personal information from your computer. This is why I love the one time use credit card option that PayPal offers. I’m going to show you how to set up the PayPal Firefox extension, and help you generate your first one-time use credit card!
VirtualBox VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908) Error
I 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.
Google Ad Fail
Came across this video on YouTube the other day…but the thing that caught my eye was the name of the video combined with the giant Google Ad to the right.
How To Kill An Unresponsive Process In Ubuntu
While this doesn’t seem to happen near as much in Ubuntu as it does in Windows, sometimes an application or process just stops responding. Luckily, however, killing this process in Linux is much easier than in Windows. Here’s how to do it.
- Open a terminal window and type ‘xkill’
- Your cursor will turn into an ‘X’. Simply click on whatever application isn’t responding and it will stop immediately.
Tweak Out Your Ubuntu System
One of my favorite aspects of Linux has over other operating systems is it’s infinite ability to be tweaked. Sometimes however, you need some serious l33t hax0r skills to do this. Enter Ubuntu Tweak. This piece of software makes it dead simple to tweak just about anything you would want from a File Type Manager to managing your thumbnail settings. Let’s get tweaked! …that came out wrong.
Setting Up Repositories and Installing
You can simply download the .deb file and install it that way, but I prefer to setup repositories so it keeps Ubuntu Tweak updated along with all my other software. Here is a direct link to the .deb file if you still want to do it that way.
- Open a terminal and type: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
- At the bottom of your souces.list file, copy and paste these two lines of code:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main
