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How to remove Home screen Google Search widget

Here’s to remove the Google Search widget from your Lollipop v5.1.1 Home screen.

  1. Press and hold on any free space on the Home screen to bring up the desktop customiser
  2. Tap the Settings cog in the bottom right corner to bring up Preferences
  3. Within “Home Screen Settings” turn off “Show search bar”

Resources

Change Yosemite Mail Default Message Font Colour

This is a work around for setting the Message default font colour.

Create a signature with Mail -> Preferences -> Signature selecting the mail account and + button like the one below in blue or desired colour:

 Hello

Regards,

Joe Bloggs

Now when you send a new message this signature will appear. If you insert your message between Hello and Regards it will be blue.

Eliminate slow Broadband due to faulty BT Line

If you have a slow ADSL broadband the first thing to do is eliminate a faulty line coming to the building. The best way to test this is to run a Quite Line Test. This test is not the most scientific and relies on the sensitivity of the human ear. However your ear is very good at picking up noise interference when it is supposed to be dead quiet.

This test pin-points interference between the Exchange and Master socket (the demarcation entry point into the building).

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Use Windows Check Disk to Repair Your Drive

Sometimes, your computer is noticeably slower or programs “hang” when you access certain files or upgrades fail or programs just won’t run. This odd behaviour might occur because there is corruption of within the files system on your hard disk drive.

You can troubleshoot the problem by using the Windows Disk Check tool called CHKDSK.  Check Disk can identify and automatically correct file system errors and make sure that you can continue to load and write data from the hard disk. You can use Check Disk in all versions of Windows not only for local hard drives,

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Windows Image Backup

Insert your portable USB drive into a free USB port. If you have USB 3 port (marked SS Super-Speed and blue inside) use this in preference to a USB 2 port to get a much faster backup.

Windows 10

Click Start button (Bottom LH corner) and select Settings Cog just above Power icon. In Settings select “Update Security” > “Backup” > “Go to backup and Restore (Windows 7) “. This will bring up the “Backup or restore” window below.

Windows 7

Click the Windows 7 Start button (bottom left corner) and type “backup”

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Terminal History Manipulation

 BASH (Bourne Again SHell) is the default command line shell used in Ubuntu and Kubuntu and many other Linux distributions. BASH allows you view and manipulate the command line history.

The following examples are from Kubuntu Konsole

List History

user@hostname:~$ history
1 sudo restart
2 sudo restart --help
3 reboot
4 sudo reboot
.
..
...
709 history
user@hostname:~$

List last 10 lines of history

user@hostname:~$ history 10
700 dmesg | less | grep error
701 sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
702 history
703 ls
704 cd Annex
705 cd Annex 1
706 cd Music
707 cd ..

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WordPress Paste Snapshot Images Work-around

I have tried various image paste WordPress Plugins but always come across some drawback or other. Imagepaste works well but puts the image in  wp-content\uploads with an unrecognisable  random file name and does not add the name to the Media library. Image-elevator looks good but forces you to use the premium (paid for)  version to get any real value out of it.

However I have discovered a work-around in Kubuntu using the fantastic KSnapshot screen capture program. This allows you to drag and drop the snapshot image directly into WordPress.

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Windows “Checking for updates” never ends

Checking For Updates

After installing a new copy of Windows 7 SP1 the first Windows Update can take several hours “Checking for Updates…” and appears to be hung. However, don’t give up. It is processing over 200 updates! The time it takes to complete depends on the speed of your Internet connection and computer. Times can be up to 1 hr.

To avoid the frustration of waiting try to run this first update overnight. Ensure you have set Disk Sleep to “Never” within Control Panel | Power Options to avoid it sleeping mid-way through.

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