A co-worker of mine had his cellphone battery ‘die’ over the weekend. The issue was that it suddenly wouldn’t take any charge. When plugged in and turned on, the battery would never go over 1%. Basically, zero charge.

My wife has had a similar issue with her old Elixim camera battery. She wouldn’t use it for long periods of time, as we now have these fancy all-in-one smartphones. When she decided to blow the dust off and try to charge her Elixim in the cradle, the red light would blink. Solid light = charging BTW.

Back then I did a Google search and found quite a few forums scattered throughout the web that mentioned how to use a 9V battery to basically ‘reset’ the Li-ion battery.

Equipment needed: 

• a 9V battery
• 2 pieces of wire or a bent paper clip (split into two, make the pieces as straight as possible)

1. Remove your battery from your phone/camera.
2. Place the 9V and Li-ion batteries on a flat surface. You’ll want to line up the + and - terminals on each, so you may need some napkins or a thin book under the Li-ion battery.
3. Connect the + and - terminals of the 9V to the same on the Li-ion battery using the wire or paper clips. 
4. Hold for at least a minute. I usually set it for 10 mins to get a good ‘reset’.
5. Plug in your phone.
6. Replace the battery and boot up.
7. Check to make sure it starts taking charge. It may be very slow at first. Let it charge fully.
8. If it doesn’t seem to be working, try the above steps again.
9. If it does work, monitor the battery. It’s not a guaranteed, long-term fix.

I don’t profess to know the reasons or physics behind this, but it seems as tho Li-ion batteries, especially those left with zero charge for a period of time, can reach a state where they refuse to recharge from zero. This will sometimes do the trick and save you the headache of waiting for a new battery.

Let’s hope they never have to try this on the Boeing 787s!

Credit to the interwebs!

For those who have been using the handy Web Essentials 2012 extension for Visual Studio, the LESS features (and some others) have been ported into the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update. Unfortunately the author hasn’t updated the web pages for his extension to share this info directly (hey, he’s a busy guy), but you can find details via his blog.

More of a reminder for myself, as this has happened multiple times. If you try to attach to a database and you get an ‘access denied’ error, be sure to run SSMS as an Administrator. Some posts will also mention that the SQL Server service account needs Modify access to the file/folder. But the former ‘fix’ did the trick this time.

I recently started using SSMS 2012 and man was it slow when connecting to local databases. I thought perhaps it was a byproduct of it being written ‘on top of’ Visual Studio technology.

It turns out it was likely just some slow name resolutions. Be sure to use (local) when referring to the local machine/server. Credit goes to this forum post. 

I recently created a shopping cart for my wife’s website.  PayPal has always been the ‘currency’ of choice for her site, but it originally used PayPal’s cart to track items, which was a clumsy integration (my bad).  

This time around I added a shopping cart implementation to her site, and PayPal is only used to Checkout.  Passing variables is pretty easy.  A couple notes:

• quantity_X is valid for each cart item, even though it’s not obvious from the documentation
• ASP.NET only allows one FORM tag per document.  A problem with the default PayPal button.  Just create and send the vars via a hyperlink instead.

Having failed at a traditional weblog, figured I’d give tumblr a try.  Maybe it better fits my thought process.  More to come…

Ever since Chrome has added support for extensions, I’ve found myself flip-flopping between it and Firefox. Chrome’s speed is outstanding, but I still love the extensibility of Firefox as its extensions can integrate deeper within the browser. One area that’s bothered me is ad-blocking. Firefox can still do true ad-blocking where content is blocked before the URL is loaded, while in Chrome it is only possible to hide the ads after they are loaded by the browser. Which is an issue for me, as ad servers can cause delays in the loading of the main website. Plus less content means faster loading overall.

Today I wanted to drop a note about an application that I recently ran across that might have solved the ad-blocking issues for me without the need to run proxies that usually slow down the browsing process or are difficult to maintain and configure. Those who use Windows may know that you can block ads via the Windows hosts file. It’s a file that your PC uses to try to resolve domain names. If the domain name isn’t found there, the machine will then start looking to your external name server(s) (e.g. your internet provider, etc.). For years now there are people who have been using this file to block ads, and it works great most of the time. The only issues I ever had were that the file was cumbersome to keep updated, plus certain pages on the web become unusable. For example some video sites display ads before showing you the video. If the ad doesn’t not display, the video cannot be viewed.

Yesterday, though, I ran across a tool that seems to solve both of those issues, called HostsMan. It’s a tool that will help you keep your hosts file updated using online sources of ad lists. But it also supports exclusions, so that you can add in certain domains that should never be added to your file.

The only downside to using the hosts file to block ads is that you cannot white-list ads on a certain webpage, for instance. You may like a certain site but realize they are ad-supported. Unfortunately the hosts file is used separately per ‘request’ or item inside of a webpage and therefore cannot understand that you want to allow ads displayed within or alongside a certain page or domain.

But if you’re OK with that, I highly recommend this program to help speed up Chrome even more and keep your online experience (in all of your browsers) virtually ad-free.

For those who scrobble with Rhapsody using RhapsodyScrobbler, I’ve felt your pain.  Ever since a Rhapsody update earlier this month, Rhapsody’s Recent Tracks feed has been broken.  Meaning I’m missing 3 weeks of listening history.  And they’ve been slow as molasses in fixing it.  I’m sure it’s because they’re running it through the same rigorous testing that prevents bugs from making it to production….DOH!

Don’t worry, I still love you, Rhapsody…

Anyway, I just discovered via the Rhapsody forums that someone wrote a scrobbler plugin for Rhapsody that integrates with the Rhapsody player itself.  Works like a charm!  The only mixed blessing is it seems to send track info as a track starts playing, rather than waiting until it is completed.  Perhaps an annoyance to those who prefer to scrobble only after listening to a complete song, but I haven’t minded so far.

Enjoy!

It’s been over a month since it was released, and I thought I’d give my two cents worth, no matter how banal it may be.  Overall it’s an awesome initial effort from Google!  It is definitely faster than Firefox on my laptop and any slight improvement like that is a welcome plus.  The built-in developer tools and task manager, though not yet on the par of Firefly, are a great addition to an initial release.  Some of the UI effects are slick, such as the download statusbar, and its built-in support for ‘web applications’ is a neat, new feature (to me at least).

That said what I’m really waiting for is to see what happens in the future, specifically their support of add-ons, or extensions.  There were rumors early on that Chrome may support Firefox add-ons natively (similar to AvantBrowser’s Orca), but recently Google said they were going to be creating their own extension system.  A system that they hope is more stable and does not impact the browser’s overall performance.

For now I’m sticking with Firefox 3 until said extension system is completed and we see what types of extensions can be and/or are built.  You can use a proxy like Privoxy to replace Adblock Plus, and there is Greasemetal to allow you to use (some) Greasemonkey scripts in Chrome.  But they really need a vibrant extension community to pull over users like myself, as the performance of Firefox is getting better with each new release and is good enough to keep me from moving away from my highly customized browser.

Related to this, something that slightly worries me is Google’s past history regarding product development.  Don’t get me wrong I love all of their tools such as Docs, Maps, etc. but things like Gmail are still in beta after over 3 years have passed.  New features that you feel would just be built in are being slowly offered via optional Labs settings.  Though Google did an excellent job with their initial releases of Gmail and Chrome, they really need to keep the new features or innovations coming to keep users interested.  This is where extensions are so important, as no one at Google (or Mozilla) could come up with all of these trinkets on their own.