Don't you find it very annoying that towards the end of a YouTube video you watch, a bunch of recommended video thumbnails cover up most of the player screen and obstruct the ending part of the clip?
Well, here's how you can fix that:
Go to YouTube web page and click on you avatar icon to open the menu. Click Settings with the gear icon. Next click Playback and performance from the menu on the left, and you'll see something like the image below. Uncheck Show annotations and in-video notifications. Make sure to click the SAVE button. That's it!
Another battle fought and another battle one. Moving on to the next battle!
This fix is also super valuable if you find yourself keep clicking those thumbnails to watch clips after clips late into the night... BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com
Slack is a popular instant messaging app that many companies (especially among tech companies) use for internal team communications and collaborations. The company actually just had its IPO earlier this year (June 20th, 2019, to be exact) and peaked at an evaluation of over $20 billion.
Example Slack App Screenshot
To be honest, Slack is great for the communication part, but it can also be super distracting with all the notifications from all the channels you are in (some channels you just don't want to mute). And I actually sometimes intentionally turn it off for hours at a time if I need to get into the zone and focus on coding, troubleshooting, or designing.
One feature in slack is that you can edit your own messages in case you had a typo, forgot to @someone, or need to add additional info. But you might find that sometimes you can just right click on the message and select "edit message" to make your changes:
But some other times, when you right click, the edit option is missing from the menu and can't be found in the "More message actions..." screen either. WHY???
Turned out this is a setting your Slack admin can set, which governs how much time you have if you need to make edits. If you wait for too long, then you will lose the permission to edit. This help page below shows you how you can adjust that permission setting if you are the workspace owner or admin:
I opened my Google Adsense home page as usual today to see Google's Stats on my ad units. Then I got the following error message:
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.
Tried several times and still got the same error message.
If you are also seeing this message, don't let it fool you. This is a blatant lie!!! No Google engineer is looking at this to resolve it for you, because this is just a static message they display when certain scripts are blocked from running on their web page. You can wait till you drop dead and no Google engineer will help you!!
But I will!! 😁 And I don't work for Google!!
Normally, this error happens if you recently installed an ad blocker extension to your Chrome browser (or other similar things such as NoScript on Firefox). But I haven't installed any new extensions at all. So what is going on?
Turned out it was the uBlock origin extension I've always had that was causing this problem. My guess is that it just had an auto update or downloaded new database or something. All you have to do is to click the icon from the tool bar and then click that big power button to disable it for the current page you are on.
So the lesson learned here is that, again and again, auto updates might break things. Check your Chrome extensions. Something must have updated if the page worked perfectly for you for a long time and suddenly stops working when you have not made any changes to your computer.
We live in a world where things no longer work reliably in trade for the convenience of getting new features automatically. Just enjoy it, because there's nothing you can do. BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com
Chromebooks are cheap laptop computers that run the Chrome OS, a lightweight OS developed by Google, that uses Chrome browser as the main UI to basically run browser apps (linux-based kernel).
Because of the lightweight OS design, many things become much harder to do on a Chromebook laptop, such as printing to your home printer, especially if it is a printer that's a few years old, like my Brother HL-2170W Laser Printer.
This printer has been serving our needs well. It is wirelessly connected to our home network. All our computers can send print jobs to it, except the Chromebook.
Google's online help page made it sound really easy to get your Chromebook set up to print to your home computer.
Your first option is to connect your home printer directly to the Chromebook via an USB cable. But seriously who does this? Most likely the printer is shared among multiple devices, and plugging it into a laptop each time you need to print sounds terrible when home printers today are pretty much all capable of wireless communications.
You can also set up the printer as a local wireless printer according to Google. You just make sure your Chromebook is on the same network (subnet) with the wireless printer, go into the settings page, search to find printer settings, and then add a printer by selecting the auto-discovered printer nearby, or manually specify settings such as the IP address of the printer and the IPP protocol.
Sounds pretty easy, right? I was able to quickly add my printer using the find printer nearby method (auto-discovered), but when I tried to print a test job, nothing came out of the printer. Also tried the manually add method by specifying the IP address of the printer. I know my Chromebook can see the printer on the network because I can ping its IP address and can also view the printer status in a browser when I enter the IP address. But still, nothing comes out of the printer when I ran a test print job.
The next option is to set up the printer as a cloud printer. One benefit of this approach is that you can print to the printer even when you are not on your home network. Some newer printers are cloud-ready, meaning they are automatically accessible from outside your home network. My printer, unfortunately, does not have this capability. So in order for it to be discoverable in the cloud, I have to install a Google Cloud Print connector on a computer that has to be always on and always connected to the same network as my printer and always logged in with your Google Account. You have to install the Google Cloud Print connector on this computer and this computer basically serves as a print server that will bridge the communication between your Chromebook and the printer.
In the Lannyland residence, unfortunately, I don't have such a computer dedicated to the printer just that the Chromebook can print. Even though Philip and Jane are always on (BTW: Philip and Jane are two physical existences of my smart home butler Philip Jane), their main functionalities required them to be on a different network from the regular home network the printer is on. And trying to make them multi-homed (meaning connecting to multiple networks at the same time) creates more problems.
But if you have such a computer laying around, this might very well be your solution. When I tested it, I was able to print from the Chromebook. Just make sure the computer never goes to sleep and always stay connected to your home network.
Read the linked articles below for details on how to set up your printer for your Chromebook in details.
So how does my daughter print from her Chromebook? I tell her to email me the doc, and I'll print for her from my computer. 😅
[Update on 11/21/19:] Google just quietly "announced" that Google Cloud Print will be officially deprecated by the end of 2019. Google, shutting down another Beta product and leave your users hanging. Hooray, You did it again!
Video of the Day:
Whale Lifts Kayakers Out Of Water
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com
Wyze cameras are probably the cheapest wireless indoor cameras you can find that offers quite a bunch of features such as live streaming with 1080p video, person detection, 2-way audio, and continuous recording (DVR) if you add a microSD card. For example, the Wyze V2 (top) sells for $25.98 on Amazon and the Wyze Pan (bottom) sells for $37.98 on Amazon. The Wyze Pan camera allows you to pan and tilt the camera with your smart phone app to look at all 360 degrees left right and up down.
Every once a while, the Wyze company will send out firmware updates to these cameras to add new features. And sometimes, unfortunately, the update might get stuck in a bad state rendering the camera unusable.
In such cases, the easiest way to resolve the problem is to first power cycle, and if that doesn't work, factory reset the camera as described in this article:
I actually had to factory one of my Wyze cameras. But following the instructions didn't work and the camera was still a brick. Took me many hours of trial and error, but eventually I found the solution.
Turned out you need to remove the SD card from the camera before you factory reset for it to work!!!
Probably the easiest way to pop that microSD card out is to use a pen.
That's it for today. Hope my post has helped someone to win their daily battles!
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com
