Category: Stuff

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Using USB Microphone On IOS Verison of Bandlab In 2023

We love Bandlab, but it is tough not to have a better microphone or headphones available, especially with just one lightning connection on the iPHone. Well we have tried the following below from Amazon and it is working great with your Yeti Microphone and our 3.5 mm headphones.

USB 3 Camera Adapter,3 in 1 USB Female OTG Adapter with Charging and 3.5mm Headphone Audio Jack Splitter for iPhone/iPad,Support USB Flash Drive,MIDI Keyboard

Make sure to note that you if you plug in the lightning cable to power your phone (the third plug on the adapter) you will lose your 3.5 mm headphone so don’t do that when you are recording. It has been working great for us so far and good luck recording!

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iPhone 12 Not Sending Or Receiving SMS Messages On Verizon

So this is something that I did not even know what wrong with my phone as I do not have a ton of Android friends, but what happened was that I was not able to send Android users an SMS message. I was getting the Not Delivered Message on my phone, yet I could call them, so I figured it was an SMS problem. Now amazingly enough if they sent me a message they would not get an error on their end, but I would never receive the message. This was happening on my iPhone 12 with Verizon.

How it was fixed. So this is what I tried at first, I tried hard restarting the phone, I also tried to reset the network settings, I took out the SIM and rebooted and re-inserted the SIM all to no avail. I was then able to contact Verizon support and they asked me to try a few more times, but what actually fixed it was they asked me where I was right now (I was at my billing address) and they were able to send some sort of reset that was able to fix my SMS and once again I was able to text Android users. The big problem is you might not know you even have a problem at your friends wonder why you aren’t answering them back.

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How We Got Marks Off Of Lacquer Painted Furniture

We have a few pieces of custom white lacquer painted furniture in our house, including built in desks for our kids rooms. On these desks we have gotten a number of smudge marks, pen marks, marker marks and all sorts of sticky stains which we think are glue or sticker based. There are many different methods out there to clean lacquer painted furniture, but we were scared to try some of them considering that they could ruin the finish, were chemical based, or might scratch the surface. We have tried some of these things and it has caused the luster of the paint to diminish even when it did remove the stain.

One day though while noticing a marker mark that had gone through a piece of paper my son was drawing, we noticed that there was one of those drawing erasures, the good kind, sitting on this desk as well. We decided to give it a try and use the erasure to remove the mark, and low and behold it worked. It took off smudges from pencil, marker, even some other sticky based issues (maybe glue) or other things that it also removed.

While it seems that an erasure does well for surface type stains, we really did not have anything that was a large deep set in stain that we had to deal with. The erasure seems like a good first step to try when you have a stain on your lacquer painted furniture.

Remember, please try any cleaning methods at your own risk. No one really knows what may happen with any cleaning method, even an erasure may cause issues. We are not responsible for any issues, this is meant for information purposes only.

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Blueberry bushes in Northern New Jersey for my garden

This year I decided to plant some blueberry bushes in my backyard right up against the fence.  I knew I would not get the required 6+ hours of direct sunlight, as we have a very tree friendly backyard.  I figure I get about 3 or so hours of direct sunlight a day on the area I was looking to plant them.  I decided to try a few different varieties and see what actually made it.  We have a very sandy soil so all I did was mix in some fertiziler and get to planting.  The results are that the Duke Blueberry plants thrived while the rest of the varieties did not seem to make it too well.  So for me I will go out next year and fill in the spots with dead bushes with some more Duke Blueberry plants and hopefully get enough to enjoy for breakfast next year.  The nice thing is with them being so close to the fence is that I can drape some netting from the fence over the bushes and hopefully keep the birds away.  If not that is why there is always those places to pick your own.

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Lemonade Kool-Aid, Dishwasher Stains and Smell

I finally remembered to have my wife pick up two packets of Lemonade Kool-Aid this week to clean the dishwasher.  I will admit I had not really read that much as to what to use it for.  Now I realize that it is really for cleaning out deposits and stains because the citric acid works on those base type stains and deposits.  Our kitchen is fairly new so I guess using this is more proactive than I originally thought.  My first initial thought was that you use it to remove some of the smell from the dishwasher that builds up over time.  It seems to have made our dishwasher smell nicer for sure, and probably did remove some of the deposits and stains that I had not noticed.  For the price it is a good proactive treatment to keep the dishwasher running clean and smooth I would think.

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Phpbb3 and 1&1 VPS email notifications not working

After moving our phpbb3 installation from a shared hosting account to a VPS account with 1&1 all of a sudden our mail notifications were not working.  We do not need a full blown mail server on our VPS so we still wanted to use the regular 1&1 SMTP servers to send out the mail for the board.  After trading a few emails to 1&1 support we got it figured out.  When we moved our domains over to the new VPS package we took one of our original accounts that was the account we were using for SMTP and made it a mail forward only.  Once we gave that account an actually mailbox and password it worked.

Two things that are odd, one that it seems the mail does not send as quickly from the VPS package instead of the shared hosting, and the second one is that I tried to change the SMTP information in phpbb3 board to an account that had a real mailbox but it never worked.  Also for some reason sending yourself test PM messages didn’t work, does the phpbb3 board know that you are sending them to yourself and then not allow you to get a notification?

Also I could never get the gmail SMTP stuff to work correctly even though I tried following what other people said.

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Cheap Foaming Soap refills

I love this new foaming soap, especially now with everyone having to wash their hands a million times a day.  The problem was that the refills were expensive and I never got around to the store often enough to get them, but I found it is really easy to make your own.  What I have been doing is using the liquid Softsoap and mixing it with very hot water in the foaming soap dispensers and voila instant foaming soap refills.  It is so much cheaper than buying the refills and one of those huge bottles of liquid soft soap could last me a lifetime by using this method.  Just remember when you put the liquid soap in with the water, the water has to be hot and keep the water flow low so it does not suds all up.  You will find the right mixture after some practice.

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2008 Christmas List for 5 year and 3 year old boys

So this year I am getting the boys the following:

Mighty World Camping Set and Rescue set – we attending the warehouse sale so thats why we opted for these, my boys love playing with things like this

NFL replica Jerseys

Vtech V-motion

Mario Party 8 – they both have fun playing the Wii

Digital Camera from Fisher Price

Q-BA-MAZE 50-pack Cool Colors

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1&1 and 500 Error after switching to WordPress from Drupal

So a few days ago we started getting a bunch of 500 errors on our website. After calling 1&1 they told us to change it so we were using php5 by forcing it in our .htaccess file. We did that and still had 500 errors. After a few more calls and helping them out a bit, it was determined that some of our php scripts were pushing us up against our threshold for a shared server with 1&1. After disabling some plug ins on our main site, we finally tracked it down to a site we switched from Drupal to WordPress. It seems since we created our WordPress theme from scratch we had some bad php coding in there causing us flood our php usage and therefore getting 500 errors intermit. It was not a constant error but something that would show up a few times an hour per user. Anyway to help you out, its most often your php scripting causing the error or going over your CPU max threshold usage as well. When I asked about a VPS from them, it seems you have to move all of your databases over yourself, not something I really want to do. Since without server access it would be real hard to track down our php error, we are just going to start from scratch and do a new theme.

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Replacement for SmartFTP

So SmartFTP is no longer a free product. That really sucks because I was a huge fan of SMARTFTP I really want to stress that, and if you can afford it, its one of the best FTP programs out there. So I began the search for a new program. I tried WS_FTP, then WiseFTP, and a few others but none really did it for me. Then I found a nice plug in for Firefox called FireFTP http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ its free and thats what I use now.

EDIT: So while I love FireFTP it is slow on large and multiple transfers and I have now switched to Filezilla. Filezilla is much faster with transfer speeds.