What I Search the Web For » Stuff

Blueberry bushes in Northern New Jersey for my garden

whatisearchthewebfor — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:48:15 +0000

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.

Lemonade Kool-Aid, Dishwasher Stains and Smell

whatisearchthewebfor — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:50:05 +0000

I finally remembered to have my wife pick up two packets of Lemonade Kool-Aid this week to clean the dishwasher. I will admin 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.

Phpbb3 and 1&1 VPS email notifications not working

whatisearchthewebfor — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:02:11 +0000

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.

Cheap Foaming Soap refills

whatisearchthewebfor — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:11:35 +0000

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.

2008 Christmas List for 5 year and 3 year old boys

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:31:20 +0000

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

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

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:30:46 +0000

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.

Replacement for SmartFTP

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:27:03 +0000

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.

phpbb3 conversion timeout and things of note, mods, etc

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:24:54 +0000

So here I am ready to convert my phpbb2 board to the nice new phpbb3. Well I try to run the conversion and I am using 1&1 hosting and it just times out. Do not have a big board either like 44,000 posts. I try again and the same thing. So I start doing some research and find this

http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/offline-conversions/

Ok that sounds like it may be my only option but it sounds like a lot of work. I continue to search and luckily I then found the following.

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=985935

I changed the values as stated in the install_convert.php and it seemed to work. It took a pretty long time as what happens is it does a few then gives you something like

Filling tables
Filling table phpbb3_posts:
skip_rows = 31341:

Each time you do it the number will go up and once you get to the number of posts you had in your forum you are all good.

After you go to phpbb3 though remember to resync everything in the control panel, I thought I was done for after all my posts said they were from 1969 but a resync and I was good to go.

Also remember if you make any changes to the design you have to purge the cache in the admin panel first to see them. Also as of right now there are not a ton of mods that are fully developed so you might want to look before you convert.

Good luck!

RIDGID 12V Right-angle Impact Driver Model R82233 Review

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:58:33 +0000

This is a brief review of the Ridgid Right Angle Impact Driver.

I got this device for father’s day and I must say it is one of my favorite tools already.

The Good: Variable speed is easy to control, battery charges quickly, the unit is powerful. Fits in places a regular drill or screwdriver could not.

The So So: None so far, other then the unit is a bit heavy, but it is a mans tool so it should be. Ok it is a unisex tool, but it is built sturdy. I would have loved a second battery in there as well.

…

Amcor Portable Air Conditioner KF9000E NanoMax Review

whatisearchthewebfor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:56:15 +0000

So I have central air, but I have an office on the top level of a split house and it just gets too hot regardless of the central air (my house has 5 levels). So in my quest for a portable air conditioner, since I have replacement windows that do not open up enough to have a regular window air conditioner, I bought the under 300 dollar Amcor and here is the brief review.

The good: It is cold, as my one son said, “Daddy it’s like winter” when he stood in front of it. Easy to setup, quick to move, cool down the room quickly. Price is cheap. Looks easy to drain.

The so so: Single exhaust. There is a tube that disperses out the water, but I still have water slogging in the unit after 4 days of it working, I thought the water would evaporate or be pushed out the tub better. Loud. Exhaust hose gets real hot, but I guess that is too be expected.

Overall for the price a good unit, I do not know how it would fair as an overall house unit, but as an additional unit for replacement windows in a house with central air it works great.