After the pain that I have had in the past establishing SMB or Outlook connections after Apple OS upgrades, I was little gun-shy to install Mavericks this morning.  But, after searching the internet for people having problems (and not finding any) I decided to take the plunge.

SMB Connection in Mavericks

Well, I’m very happy to be able to report that I have had no problems connecting to our server at work via SMB and no problems getting Outlook to connect either.  (insert huge sign of relief)

So, what’s the reason for this post?  Well…my searches this morning didn’t yield people having issues, but I also couldn’t find success stories either, which left me a little uncertain.  I’m posting this so that people can see a success story, and maybe have a platform for people to discuss issues that they have had in the comments.

Have you had problems connecting to SMB or Outlook after the Mavericks upgrade?  Leave a comment…maybe we can all figure it out together.

The post SMB and Outlook Connections in Apple OS X Mavericks appeared first on FatWalr.us.

Send to iPhone Missing in Apple Maps?  You’re not alone.

At the top of the new Apple Maps app, you should see a little arrow allowing you to share directions from Maps straight to your iPhone.  The link (if it’s working) looks like this:

Send Apple Maps to iPhone

However, when I first fired up Apple Maps, I didn’t have the option to share with my iPhone.  And how does Maps know what I wanted to send it to in the first place?

The Solution

It turns out that the solution was pretty simple.  All I needed to do was log out of iCloud on my Mac and then log back in.  Once that is complete, your gadgets associated with your iCloud account should show up in the sharing menu of Apple Maps.  To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open iCloud Settings
3. Click “Sign Out” (You are going to have to confirm the deletion of each category that you have associated with your iCloud account.  Don’t worry, this info should repopulate when you log back in.)
4. Sign back in to your iCloud account
5. Quit Apple Maps
6. Open Apple Maps
7. Tweet, Like, and Comment on this post (…ok, technically speaking, this step is optional)

Once that is done, your different Apple devices should show up when you want to share directions from Apple Maps.

If this helped you, please share:

Have any other problems or advice setting this up for your machine?  Leave a comment to help everyone else!

The post Send to iPhone Missing in Apple Maps appeared first on FatWalr.us.

I gave the new tabbed Gmail a try.  A very brief try.  But, after the 3rd or 4th time that it mis-categorized an important email as a promotion, I decided that enough was enough.  It was time to revert my inbox back to the old version.

The tabs that we need to get rid of

So, lets see how to do this.

Step 1: Settings

First, click your gears in the upper right and choose Settings.

Gears, settings

Step 2: Inbox

Next, choose the “Inbox” section.

Choose Inbox

Step 3: Uncheck the Boxes

At the top of the page, you will find all the tab options.  Uncheck all the boxes other than “Primary”.

Uncheck the boxes

Step 4: Save

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes.”

Save Changes

And just like that, we’re done.  Go back to your inbox to ensure that everything is back to normal.

All Done

Ahh…there’s that important email about my check re-order.  Back in my inbox.  Where it belongs.

What do you think about Gmail’s new tabbed Inbox?  Love it?  Hate it?  Let me know in the comments.

The post How to Revert Your Gmail Inbox appeared first on FatWalr.us.

iPad storage not adding up? I have a 16GB iPad that should have had plenty of space on it.  However, when I tried to download a movie, iTunes said that I didn’t have enough storage to complete the task.  Sound familiar?  I bet it’s an issue like that one that brought you here.

Sadly, the fix that I’m going to show you was not as simple as clicking a button, but in the end, it did solve my problem.

Here is what sparked my curiosity into the issue.  When iTunes told me that I didn’t have the storage space, I went into…

Settings > General > Usage

…and noticed that the numbers didn’t match up.  Adding up all the used Apps only got me to 2GB.  I had no photos and no video installed.  Where was the other six 6GB?

iPad storage not adding up

The answer to that question would be found in iTunes.  But…the answer is stupid.

Other iPad Storage Space

What in the world is all this “Other” storage?  Well, after reading most of the internet, the answer to that question could be just about anything.  It can be temporary files or just garbage that won’t go away.  In my case, it was a movie that I had previously attempted to delete.  I know that because I happened to get a screenshot before deleting the movie.  You’ll be able to see the similarity in storage usage…

This video space turned into Other space after deleting

See what happened there?  A 5GB video that was on the iPad just turned into “Other” storage after I deleted it.  And there was nothing that I could do to get that to go away.  I tried restarting the iPad, Restoring from a Backup, nothing seemed to be working.  In the end, I had to do the following:

1. Click the button to Manually “Back Up Now”
2. Click the button to Restore iPad (not Restore Backup…you’re going Factory Default here)
3. After it restores, choose to restore it from a backup:

Choose to restore from a backup

Only after completing the restore process with a restored backup did the “Other” storage space go away:

“Other” iPad Storage finally gone

So, as you probably figured out.  This was much more tedious of a process than I had hoped for, but in the end, it did the job.  I’ll be curious to see if the next movie that I delete gets hung up in Other storage as well.  Here’s to hoping that when I delete something, it actually goes away…

Have you had a similar problem?  Did a different process fix your problem?

The post Fix: iPad Storage Not Adding Up appeared first on FatWalr.us.

I love my Apple TV.

My kids love our Xbox.  Okay…maybe I do too.

But I recently thought that they were all breaking at the same time.  The Apple TV was skipping like a scratched DVD.  The Xbox wouldn’t work.  Even my Blu-ray player wouldn’t play disks.  It was like an entertainment Armageddon.

My setup is that I have all three plugged into the same TV but in three different HDMI ports.

After experimenting with different setups, however, I finally found the cause of the problem: the Apple TV conflicts with all the different units.  If the Apple TV was turned on at the same time as the Xbox, neither one will work properly.  If the Apple TV was turned on at the same time as the Blu-ray player, neither one will work properly.  If the Xbox was turned on at the same time as the Blu-ray player…everything is fine.

So, I decided that it was the Apple TV.

The solution?  It’s very complicated:

Turn off the Apple TV when you’re not using it.

If you don’t know how to turn off an Apple TV, read this post.

Or, you can do what my wife does: unplug it each time.

Had a similar problem, or am I the only one?

The post Apple TV Conflicts with Xbox and Bluray appeared first on FatWalr.us.

Since the Apple TV doesn’t have a power button, the solution, though simple, is not as intuitive as you might assume.

So, how do you do it?

1. With the Apple TV on, press and hold the Menu button on your remote until you are at the home screen.
2. Press and hold the Play button until the Apple TV turns off.

Not complicated, but not intuitive.

The post How Do I Turn Off My Apple TV? appeared first on FatWalr.us.

There was one thing that was bothering me, though.  Whenever I wrote my CSS colors in hex format, if I changed the hex value, Firebug would convert it to RGB when making the change.  I like RGB, especially because of RGBa, but when it’s written one way, I wanted it to stay in that format.

To get Firebug working the way that I wanted it to was actually incredibly simple.

1. Click the CSS tab within Firebug.
2. Click the dropdown arrow that shows up in the tab once it has been clicked.
3. Choose your preferred method of displaying color values.

Have another helpful Firebug tip?  Have a better way of doing this sort of thing?  Let us all know in the comments!

The post Stop Firebug From Converting Hex to RGB Color Values appeared first on FatWalr.us.

Can you put Google ads in a <div> with “position: fixed”? Giving your Adsense fixed position would be nice, but, sadly, it’s against the rules.

I was recently asking that question and found the answer rather hard to find.  So, when I finally did find an official answer on the subject, I thought that I would pass it along.

So, what’s the answer?  The answer is: no.  No, you can’t do anything to manipulate the aesthetics of an ad to call attention to it more than any other aspect of the page.

So, even though the tactic of position:fixed is common (Facebook, Gmail, etc), you cannot use this tactic yourself as it relates to your ad.

The post Adsense Fixed Position … It’s a No, No! appeared first on FatWalr.us.

Sidenote: The Jetpack comments were working until I messed with the comments.php file in my theme.  Once I saved it, WooThemes took over, and I couldn’t find a way to get Jetpack to take it back.  So, this is kind of a fix for my own stupidity, but it should also work if your version of WooThemes comments is just beating out Jetpack in your site’s comment battle for priority.

My site info:

• My version of WordPress: 3.5.1
• My version of the Woo Framework: 5.5.3
• My version of Canvas: 3.2.1

To get Jetpack’s comments to take over, this is what I did:

1. First, I had to open the comments.php file in my theme folder.  I used my FTP program to find the file in the typical theme location ( wp-content/themes/canvas/comments.php ).
2. Once open, I made a backup of the file by renaming and saving it.  If you make a mistake, you’ll wish that you had this backed up, so don’t skip this step.  Close the backup file.
3. Back in comments.php, find the chunk of code that looks something like this (for me it was from lines 80 to 115):

   <form action="<!--?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?-->/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform">
   ...
   </form><!-- /#commentform -->
   

4. Delete that entire chunk of code.
5. Replace that chunk with:

   <?php comment_form(); ?>
   

6. Save comments.php and refresh one of the pages on your blog.

And that’s all it took for me.

Did this work for you?  Please send me a Tweet, like the post, and let me know in the comments.

The post Use Jetpack Comments with WooThemes Theme appeared first on FatWalr.us.

I have tried laying the apps in a frequency-of-use order, which didn’t work for me because it was too subjective.  I then tried to put as many as I could into conceptual folders…which I hated because I was constantly digging through similarly titled folders.

But, I think I’ve found an organizational structure that works for me…and it’s not what I would have guessed:

Color Coding.

Color Coded iPhone Apps

Yes, my iPhone looks like a rainbow.  And it has made my life a lot easier.  Here’s why:

I was finding that no matter what method I was trying to use to organize them, I was drawn to the apps based on their visual elements…which is what a large app icon is made to do.  The icon’s dominant color became the driving force in my mind.  If, however, the apps are all mixed up, my eyes would jump from one colored icon to the next, getting distracted along the way.  For example, if I was looking for Evernote, my mind would know that I was looking for a dominantly green app.  But Hulu, the phone app, and many others just look too much like Evernote.  The result was that I would end up stopping at each green app along the way as I searched for the correct one.  Organizing them all by color allows me to quickly jump to the green section, and then do a quick scan to find the correct green app.

So, I organize them by the colors of the rainbow for all the apps that I feel are moderately common, and then switch to folders for the much less common apps.

When my wife saw my phone, she decided that she needed to organize by color as well.  But she’s doing it because it’s “pretty.”

Not quite what I was going for.

But, hey, what organization method do you use?  Let us all know in the comments.

The post My Method For Organizing My iPhone Icons appeared first on FatWalr.us.