How2NotFail

Remember when computers had handly little flip switches in the back, or on the side, that you could toggle to power your computer on and off? Most desktops today just have those push-buttons on the front. If you’ve been wondering how to get your computer to forcefully power down, here’s how:

- Simply push and hold the  power button down until your computer turns off.

Most computers will power down after about 5 seconds, but some will take as long as 10. While this method isn’t recommended, because it may result in unforseeably problems (like corrupt files), a slightly safer alternative is to simply tap the off button once. If windows hasn’t completely frozen up at this point, it will start to close out all of your programs before shutting down.

If you ever need to find something on a site that doesn’t have it’s own search function, Google has a feature that allows you to specifically target a single site for search results.

All you need to do to use this search feature is type site:example.com before your search string and your results will only show pages from example.com.

You can try this out now by searching for “site:how2notfail.com tips” which should show the tips catagory of this site.

This can be a useful feature to know when a site you are visiting doesn’t allow you to search all of it’s pages, doesn’t search specifically enough, or doesn’t have any search at all.

If you’ve ever had to close many instances of a program at once and task manager just isn’t cutting it, there’s a simple command you can use to close them all at once, even if they are not responding.

If for example you have multiple instances of Notepad.exe running:

1. Open your Start Menu and click “Run” or just hit windows key + R
2. Type in “taskkill /im notepad.exe” and hit enter
3. If the program is not responding, you may need to type “taskkill /im /f notepad.exe” to forcefully end it.

The great thing about this command aside from allowing you to end many things at once is that it can also be executed from within a batch file or php command to help you automate various tasks on your computer and even allow you to control applications remotely via a web interface.

If you ever need to register an account somewhere and you don’t entirely trust that the site you are registering at wont send you spam, there’s a simple trick you can use if you have a Gmail account (and some other email providers) to help you organize and weed out any spam you receive down the line.

Whenever you are registering on a site, you can enter a + sign followed by a tag after your Gmail user name. For example if you are signing up for a car newsletter and your actual address is example@gmail.com you can instead enter example+car@gmail.com, the mail will still be sent to your normal inbox however if at any time down the line you notice spam being sent to this extension, you can not only tell where it originated from but simply filter all mail sent to example+car@gmail.com directly into your spam folder.

If you discover a site has spread your email to advertisers, simply:

1. Go to the Settings link at the top right of the Gmail homepage
2. Click on Filters, then Create a new filter
3. Type the tag you used (+car)  into the “To:” field
4. hit Next Step

From there you can set Gmail to simply delete all emails you receive addressed to that particular tag.

Most websites and programs have hidden features in them for users to find called easter eggs.  Often these will not be documented and are there for users to discover on their own. Sometimes people will purposeful go out looking for these easter eggs on popular sites for fun. Here’s one you can use on any Facebook page:

When logged into your Facebook account, on any screen hit this combination of buttons on your keyboard:

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, (Enter Key)

Now when you scroll around, click, or type things you should see a cool easter egg that was added to the Facebook site.

Who would have though that one of the largest social networking sites on the internet would have hidden content on it?

We all know that commenting code is a good practice, especially when working in a larger development environment. Unfortunately HTML is rendered client side, so any comments you leave, may be visible to any onlookers that glance at your source. An easy way to cover your tracks is by leaving the comments inside server side rendered script tags. For example, with PHP it’s as simple as:

<?php /*
Put as many Comments
As you want, in this space!
*/ ?>

or, for quick one-liners:

<?php # One line comment! ?>

While the notation may be tedious at times, it still provides an excellent method for being thorough and discrete.

If you are ever in a bind and need to access an FTP server but don’t have any FTP programs installed, here is a quick and easy way you can use almost any browser as a basic FTP client. First make sure you know the connection details of the server you want to connect too, you will need:

• Server Address
• Username
• Password

Now just open up the browser of your choice and type in the address bar “ftp://username:password@server.com“, replacing the information with your own and your browser should connect to the FTP.

If you do this in a Windows Explorer address bar, you will be able to drag and drop files as if the directory was a local folder on your computer, most other browsers however will allow you to navigate and download any of the files on that FTP server.

This happened to me a long time ago, when I first started using windows, and I had NO idea how to fix it. All you see is a nice compact little border around your tasks, with no way to get back to the higher functions of your task manager. The File, Options, View, etc are gone, and you can’t even click the close button. It’s actually not broken! That, as with all ‘fun’ windows quirks, is a feature.

How Do I Fix It?

Double click any grey area in your task manager that isn’t a button or a menu item. This will toggle your window mode back and forth between the original and compact view.

If you have ever tried to take a screen shot of a video or movie playing in Winamp or Windows Media Player you may have found that after you save the file you are left with nothing more than a black square where your video used to be, even screen capturing utilities will often be unable to capture a screen shot from video playing on one of these media players. If you follow these simple steps according to the media player you prefer you’ll be able to save screen shots with Windows screen shot function or with third party programs just fine.

Windows Media Player

1. From the menu, go to Tools -> Options
2. Click the Performance tab
3. Slide the Video Acceleration setting as far as it goes to the left (None)
4. Hit OK to apply the settings
5. Take the screen shot you intended to take as you normally would
6. Slide the Video Acceleration option back to where it was

Winamp Media Player

1. From the menu, go to Options -> Preferences
2. Click on the Video menu
3. Un-check the box labeled “Allow hardware video overlay“
4. Hit OK to apply the settings
5. Restart Winamp
6. Take the screen shot you intended to take as you normally would
7. Check the “Allow hardware video overlay” box again to return it to normal

Everyone is always talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Pay Per Click campaigns. Trying to use that secret sauce to get onto the front page of google. To be quite honest, there are a lot of things that you can do, that don’t require any fancy know-how to greatly impact your success rate with getting indexed and ranking high in search engines. Here’s a few simple rules of thumb, that are easy to remember and implement.

1. Create Keyword Rich URL’s

Having the keywords you want directly in the URL is a great way to add more weight to those terms. A lot of CMS’ tend to like to give you some obscure URL ending in something like ?p=19&i=wt. I seriously doubt anyone will be searching for that. Many of the more popular Content Management Systems allow you to setup Permalinks (ex. WordPress). This lets you control the URL by hand. If your page is a walk-through for a popular video game, for example, consider something like /world-of-warcraft-guide.

2. Stay True to Your Site Structure

Using things like header tags (ex. H1, H2) and strong tags properly can make a world of difference. A good rule of thumb is to use one H1 tag per page, and follow up keyword rich titles with H2 tags. Always make sure that you never drop those header tags out of order. You never want to have an H3 tag before an H1 tag, and so on. The point of those header tags is not to provide a selection of font styles that you can attach to text, but rather to make search spiders better understand what your page is about.

3. Meta Information

Many people believe that Meta tags are going out of style. While they may not be as important as they used to be, they are still looked at. Always make sure you have a proper Doctype, Meta Keywords, Meta Description, Content Type / Char Set, and Title.

4. Valuable Link Text

The text you put inside achors is very important. Always make sure that your links are keyword rich. “Read More About Asbestos” is not nearly as good as “Read More About Asbestos” ( the bold here representing where you’ve placed your anchor ). Also, always include a the title property in your anchors (and the alt property in you images, for that matter).

5. Don’t Try to Trick Search Engines!

Trust me- don’t. You think you might be so clever using those terms of yours over and over again throughout the page, but let me tell you something- filling up 5 paragraphs with the words “Alaskan Trout” (if that’s the keywords you’re going after”) 300 times isn’t going to get you into high society. Trying to hide extra keywords all over your page by hiding them with styles.. naughty naughty. Google is designed to understand the natural imprint of a well put together page. And while there are many ways to improve your visibility by being more ‘clear’, cheating may very well get you blacklisted.

And remember kids, SEO is not an exact science. If you’ve read something here that doesn’t rub you the right way, don’t worry. We all bring our own experience to the table, and usually end up developing our own secret sauce, that flavors a combination of many different things.