Category: HowTos

Stuff that was hard to find & fix

  • How to: Migrate from Outlook.com to GMail / Fix connected accounts

    Microsoft / Outlook.com have silently removed connected accounts from outlook.com on July 1st, 2024.

    TL;DR: Connected accounts are gone and cannot be fixed 🙁

    I only got aware of it as some people told me that my eMails were marked as “unverified sender” on their side. And indeed, eMails were suddenly sent via the outlook email server. Before I sent the mails through the SMTP server of my hosting provider.

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  • How to get rid of Cookie-AdTracking – easily

    TL;DR: Delete cookies when closing the browser, allow-list only the sites you want to stay logged in. It’s really that easy.

    I recently checked my browser settings and was “surprised” to find more than 3.000 cookies. Most of them from sites I didn’t recognize, many from obvious ad-tracking companies. These companies, with whom I have no business, were all able to track my online activity. Seriously? 3.000 companies being able to track me? Okay maybe some of them were not valid anymore – but still – that’s just ways too much.

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  • How to filter / hide / ignore News in an RSS feed

    Recently I realized that there are certain topics in my news / RSS feed that I ALWAYS scroll over. I’m just not interested in them. Like news about certain brands, manufacturer or products. I wondered, if there is no easy way to simply NOT see them in my feed. I mean I filter by only looking at keywords in the title. Really super simple.

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  • How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T volume too low / decreasing

    Problem: Recently I faced the issue with my Jabra Elite InEars that while I was using them, the volume started to continually decrease until I had to max out the volume on the phone. Yet the sound was still barely loud enough to hear it. After not using them for a while, sound was okay again (still quiet but better) until volume started to decrease again while using.

    The internet is FULL of advice about Bluetooth settings, resetting the phone, entering developer mode etc. Yet it was ways easier.

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  • How to Exclude OpenAI GPTBot from future crawling a website

    In order to tell OpenAI to stop crawling a website and thus not use the content for training GPT, OpenAI now supports to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

    The Information can be found on the GPTBot – OpenAI API website:

    Completely disallow GPTBot:

    User-agent: GPTBot
    Disallow: /

    Allow/disallow certain parts of a website:

    User-agent: GPTBot
    Allow: /directory-1/
    Disallow: /directory-2/

    For WordPress sites, I can recommend the Virtual Robots.txt – plugin.

  • How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T different volume of in-Ear headphones

    I often just use one of the in-ears of my Jabra 75T. Recently I figured out that when I use both in-ears headphones, the right one was significantly louder than the left one. After a quick hearing test, I was convinced that it is not a problem with my hearing but with one of the headphones.

    After some back and forth, the easiest solution was:
    Simply hard reset the headphones in 2 simple steps.
    If resetting does NOT solve the issue permanently: Try cleaning a specific part!

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  • How to change File Creation time using Windows Powershell

    I don’t want to blame the time shift 2x a year. At least as long as I do not forget to change the time on my camera as well! As I am doing most of my photography on hikes and geo tag them afterwards, It makes quite a difference if the file creation time is right or wrong.

    This year I forgot to change it on the camera and needed to bulk-change the file time later. Luckily this is pretty easy using Windows Powershell and the Windows PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment):

    $files = Get-ChildItem "C:\Users\[....]\*.arw"
    foreach ($f in $files){
        $d1 = [System.IO.File]::GetCreationTime($f.FullName)
        $d2 = $d1.addHours(1)
    	[System.IO.File]::SetCreationTime($f.FullName, $d2)
        echo $d1 
        echo $d2
        echo ---
    }
    

    Just copy it into the ISE, execute, done.

  • How To Quickly delete large folders in Windows

    Deleting folders with a huge amount of files can be tedious in Windows Explorer: You might end up in watching a progress bar preparing and deleting a lot of files. Even if you don’t want the files to be moved to trash.

    If the files should just be deleted, this can be done easier with the command line:

    cd foldername
    DEL /F/Q/S *.* > NUL
    cd ..
    RMDIR /Q/S foldername
    

    That’s it!

    A lot of explanation / evaluation and even a Context-Menu-Shortcut can be found at this Ghacks article.

  • How to fix: Samsung Soundbar does not connect to SmartTV

    When you own both a Samsung Soundbar (HW-[something]) and a Samsung Smart-TV, you would assume that they work in nice harmony. Which they usually do! Just once in a (seldom) while, the both just don’t connect any more and it seems there is no way to connect them again.

    Recently we ran into the same trouble. It required a lot of forum reading, searching, reading support pages. Especially as it requires sound-resetting both devices and does not require hard-resetting the TV (loosing channel list, favourites et. al). As it was a real pain to figure it out, I wrote down my process.

    The following steps worked for me the last time I had to try it.

    1. Soundbar (maybe this is not required?)
      • turn off
      • press (and hold) the stop button until the soundbar displays “init, ok”
    2. TV:
      • Remove soundbar from the config:
        Menu > System > Device manager > Soundshare > remove Soundbar
      • turn off the TV
      • disconnect from power
      • wait ~3 min
      • reconnect & power on
    3. Soundbar:
      • Power on
      • switch to TV mode and wait for connection
      • MAYBE reset soundbar: press & hold “play” until it displays “reset”

    Hope this helps! Leave a comment if it helped you or if there’s a faster way to reconnect both devices.

  • Google Maps SDK does not show map in Release Build (works in Emulator)

    I’ve been waisting some hours by hunting a stupid “bug”:
    I am using Android Studio and was following the “Maps SDK for Android > Getting Started” guide. Of course I also ran into the issue of a wrong API key. But this was all solved by Googling and StackOverflow.

    The map still showed up in the Emulator but NOT if deployed as stable release into the (beta) release channel to the PlayStore! LogCat was also silent … After a while I realized thetiny hint in AndroidStudio:

    The light grey “(debug)” tells us that AndroidStudio placed the XML in “src/debug/res/values/” instead of “src/main/…”. Simply moving the file did the trick …