Have you noticed that your Windows 10 computer keeps disconnecting from WiFi? So whenever you want to use your computer, you have to manually connect it back to your home WiFi network?
I had this problem with one of Philip's many physical existences. (Philip is my Smart Home Assistant that consists of a bunch of microservices running on a bunch of low-grade throwaway computers.) It was a laptop with a cracked screen (wife dropped it).
This gets a bit annoying because every time I want Philip to print something, I have to manually connect the computer to home WiFi. So I did a bit of research and found the solution.
Turned out Windows 10 automatically puts the WiFi network card in power-saving mode, which then disconnects it from my home WiFi, even though I leave the computer plugged in all the time.
So here's how you can resolve the problem:
First right-click on your WiFi icon in the taskbar at the bottom right corner of your screen and select Open Network and Sharing Center.
Once in Network and Sharing Center, select Change adapter settings on the left panel.
In the next screen, right-click on your home WiFi network and select Properties.
In the properties popup window, select the Power Management tab, and then make sure to uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Don't forget to click OK to apply your changes.
That's it. Your computer should stay connected to your WiFi network from now on. Hope this helps!
Picture of the Day:
Google AdSense sent me a violation report. Turned out my web page can not mention the word "Weapon." So what am I going to do with a web page showing my translation of the famous Chinese Martial Arts novel named "Seven Weapons" by Gu Long? These are swords, sabers, and spears. How ridiculous. What kind of world do we live in today?
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com
When looking at a folder of MP3 files in Windows 10's File Explorer, it is super annoying that Windows 10 would choose to display all the files as if you are looking at an Audio CD, where you see info such as title and contributing artists, instead of seeing the file size and when the file was created.
There is a way to fix that. It's just not very obvious. Let me show you how:
In File Explorer, go to the parent folder containing all the MP3 files. Rightclick on the folder and select properties.
You should now see a window that looks like the one below. Go to the Customize tab and then click the dropdown box under Optimize this folder for. Select General items instead of Music.
You can also go up a few levels with your folders, do the same thing and then check the checkbox called "Also apply this template to all subfolders", so you don't have to do this once for each folder.
Then click OK to apply your changes.
Once you make this change, your folder content will look normal again like this:
Hope this helps! Moving on to the next battle!
Video of the Day:
Can you tell the difference between cheap and expensive pianos?
Make sure you read the comments!
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com
Happy 4th of July, the Independence Day of America!
Since the pandemic is still going and has no trend of getting any better soon, I thought I just share some random nice things to boost the spirit up!
1. The Finch Story
A pair of finches made a nest next to our garage door window, so I put a Wyze camera there and recorded some clips. Finally put everything together into a nice little movie. So enjoy. The background music I used was from Night Coming (a great story by Maoni), composed by Roc Chen.
2. My Indoor Pepper
I planted a pepper plant in a flowerpot late last year. I had not expected to get anything out of it because people normally plant peppers after Memorial Day, so I was like half a year ahead of the time. But the plant actually produced a pepper! I'll be fine during the summer with respect to veggie supply now!
3. Mozart's Sonata
My daughter has been practicing this song for over 6-months. She finally got to a level minimally presentable. Very happy for her! So enjoy!
4. Around the World
I set a goal for my kids to be able to do Around the World by the end of summer. They asked me to also do it. So here it is (although this one is really the reverse around the world), the first time I've ever done anything so fancy. Feeling pretty good about it! Of course, I'll still have to master the real around the world by end of summer.
5. My Bookshelves
Someone on Twitter asked people to post photos of their bookshelves. So I snapped a picture of mine. I like my bookshelves (I also share the shelf space with kids), because I love books, in case you haven't noticed. See how many different collections you can spot from the photo.
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com
I was trying to find something I retweeted on Twitter a while ago. Turned out this task is super hard on the Twitter website. First, you have to go to your own account page and then scroll and scroll and wait. Then at some time, the web page will stop loading any more tweets in history, so all your time has been wasted.
If you have run into the same kind of problem, here's good news for you! There's a web tool called All My Tweets, that will allow you to easily search through all your tweet history, especially the retweets.
To use the tool, first, go to the website at http://www.allmytweets.net and then log in using your Twitter credentials. You will be asked to authorize this web tool to access your Twitter account.
Once that's done, you will see all your tweet history in text format that looks like this:
Now you can simply use the browser's search function to find any old tweets/retweets easily. All the retweets would start with the text RT.
Why are humans smarter than other animals? Because we know how to use the right tools to get things done easier. BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com
I have been following the COVID-19 situation very closely for the last 5 months. Thought to share with my readers some useful websites, so you can get up-to-date information on the Coronavirus.
Lanny's Predictive Model
First, let me shamelessly promote my own predictive models that I update daily when real official data gets in, and then tweet them to my Twitter account. I have two predictive models.
So for the entire United States, you can see that on July 2nd, we just had a new record of 52,981 new cases in one day, when my model predicted 50,972 new cases. Not too bad from the model perspective. Very bad from the virus containment perspective. Following this trend, we would exceed 4 million cases on July 20th if no extreme measures are enforced. That means over 183,000 in death toll by August 1st. I use numbers reported by CNN at midnight Eastern time each day (link in the section below.
For the Utah State, I predicted 668 new cases for July 2nd, and the official number was 554. Because the number of people tested each day can vary dramatically, the daily positive rate line is the more interesting indicator of how well Utah is doing.
CNN COVID-19 Live Feed
I don't want to search for COVID-19 related news every day, so I simply follow the news live feed from CNN. When new information becomes available, I get prompted to see the new updates automatically, which is nice. However, you do have to manually change the date in the URL manually to stay update to date. For example, replace the 07-02-20 in the URL below with today's date to get the latest info.
CNN also has a page showing more detailed information by each state with maps, tables, and graphs. They are doing a pretty good job updating total numbers using the Johns Hopkins website data. That's why I just use their numbers for my daily update to my US model.
This website is a great tool to compare different countries and different states. You can sort by total cases, daily new cases, total death, or daily new death. The numbers they report are always more than the ones reported by CNN and Johns Hopkins data feed. I don't know why. Maybe they track data more aggressively? But anyway, still great to see trends.
This website focuses on computing the Rt value, a metric on how fast the virus is spreading. It ranks different states based on the Rt value. You can also go into each state and get more detailed information.
I used to use this website a lot for up-to-date COVID-19 data. It is one of the most famous data-hub websites. However, the website is very buggy. It takes forever to load and tends to crash my Chrome browser frequently, so once CNN started using data from this website, I stopped visiting it. You can use this website to look at worldwide data, and can also drill down to one country or one state to get more information.
Hope these can be useful for you to get more information about the spread of the COVID-19 virus so you can be prepared accordingly. Best luck to all of us in this long fight, but we will prevail!
Video of the Day:
I will survive and you'll survive if we all wash our hands frequently!
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com
