Serious iPhone sync issue

Just got a new iPhone SE and have been making tracks in Garage Band for about a week.  Plugged into the PC and iTunes ask something about do I want to authorize the purchases on this device or something like that.  I cancel out, change nothing on the phone, then unplug. 

After this I notice several icons are missing, including Garage Band.  After re-installing it all 30+ of my Garage Band tracks are gone.

Windows 10 - Toshiba Satellite e55 running hot

In Win8 I watched my temps closely and was usually around 38 to 44 c under a normal load.  However since upgrading to Win10 I noticed my normal idle temps were around +45c.  Even if the computer was untouched for several minutes and the task manager said CPU usage was below 5% the CPU temps would remain high and the CPU frequency would remain high.

After installing some Toshiba drivers and switching the battery / power mode to the Toshiba's "eco" mode the temps and CPU frequency dropped immediately.  As I make this post my CPU ghz is at .78 and my temp is 40c.  Before changing to Eco the CPU mhz were constantly around 1.3+ ghz even at idle.  So even when the CPU was doing nothing Windows 10 was not scaling down the CPU freq the way it should.

Centos 7 trouble with Grub and dual booting Windows 7

Just installed Centos 7 and realized Windows is not in the boot menu. Searching turns up a lot of advice saying to edit this file

/etc/grub.d/40_custom

and to add some code, and then run this

grub2-mkconfig --output=/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

In my case this does not help. The Windows installation is still not detected even though I can see it on fdisk -l and have triple checked all of the commands and partition numbers. But the utility Grub Customizer is able to see the Windows partition!

 When trying to make the list I got an error about no such file, to fix this I clicked

File > Change Environment

and then changed the references to fedora to centos (confirmed via console).

 In summary :

 - for some reason sometimes grub2-mkconfig can't see Windows

 - but if you install Grub Customizer it can

 - if it gives you an error make sure the paths are right in File > Change Environment

NOTE : if you get the error and have to fix the file paths be sure to click check box Save Configuration, restart Grub Customizer, then try again

Ubuntu / Mint : "error: symbol 'grub_efi_find_last_device_path' not found"

A few months back my working Ubuntu / Windows setup suddenly stopped working.  Ubuntu boots fine but trying to open Windows gave an error like this :

"error: symbol 'grub_efi_find_last_device_path' not found"

The cause here is a bug in grub2.  To fix force a downgrade to the previous version of grub2.

Some info here :

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+question/280812

World of Warcraft won't open - rundll32 high cpu usage

Very recently WoW stopped opening for me. I click the icon, my CPU usage goes to 100% but the game never loads. When I check task manager it says rundll32 is what's causing the high cpu usage. Recently I installed "360 Total Security" with has a Game Booster mode. I tried to exit the AV but still had the same problem. After I uninstalled 360 Total Security and rebooted World of Warcraft opens fine again.

Win 10 EQ settings ignored

This has been happening for some time, and is supremely annoying.  For a while it seemed the Windows 10 equalizer wasn't working.  My speakers are very bass heavy and I live in an apt complex, so I want to drop the bass out by like 95%.

I found that manual adjustments to the EQ sometimes do not register.

This can be worked around by making your own custom EQ setting, saving it, then switching to it.

But sometimes this doesn't work too - however the stock EQ presets will still work.

To recap - sometimes Windows 10 ignores your custom EQ settings.  Pick a pre-set that's close to what you want and use that.

Javascript : Chrome console doesn't show difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16

Last night I spent about an hour trying to figure this bug out.  The problem was this :

- javascript downloads text file from server, file is full of urls

- js then compares document.URL (currently address the browser is at) to the text file (via storing the entries in a variable object then using indexOf).

so basically

if (current.URL exist in file) then {Do Stuff} else {return error}

Well I kept getting back errors and it made no sense.  So I got real basic and tried

if (current.URL == urlVariable) { return true }

Yet even this failed.  I forget why but I went into Firefox and in its console it is very clear the URL coming from the text file is very different than the URL string.  But in chrome they look the same.

Because the Chrome console doesn't properly indicate the text encoding is different I spent about an hour or so trying to "solve" why A does not equal A.  I thought I was taking crazy pills.

In short : Chrome console doesn't properly indicate when text encoding has changed.  And changes in character encoding can cause your "if equals" logic to fail in a confusing way.  If you're in FF console the issue will be obvious right away.

Array in Chrome

Array in Firefox

Dropbox : some files and folders not syncing

This one drove me slightly mad for a few hours.  For me the fix was simple, open the Dropbox preferences, go to Account then click Selective Sync.  Check the boxes of the folders not showing up.  I have no idea how this happened as I highly doubt I set these items to not sync in the first place.

Chrome : slow "resolving host" and err_name_not resolved

Noting this problem happening a lot more recently, even on my very fast internet + using Google DNS.  Tested the same slow/problem pages in Firefox and all is well.

This seems to have fixed it for me.

Copy/paste this into a new tab

chrome://net-internals/#dns

click "Clear Host Cache"

restart Chrome

At first it may throw another err_name_not resolved but after that it should be ok.

Linux Mint + Toshiba laptop : can't adjust brightness with Fn keys / keyboard

This is not an uncommon problem.  For me if I try to use the Fn + brightness up/down keys a popup appears showing the battery status.  After some Googling I found several results, which worked for many people but did nothing for me.  My fallback trick of adjusting the brightness before the OS boots didn't work either.  Fortunately I found this command in buried in the comments somewhere and it works fine.

SUDO'd

echo 160 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness > /dev/null

That's pretty dim.  For slightly brighter pick a higher number

echo 260 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness > /dev/null

While you're at it might as well install GTK Redshit to save your eyes some at night.

ROOT

dim 

echo 160 | tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness > /dev/null

brighter

echo 260 | tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness > /dev/null

This also seems to work on Debian and CentOS.