Remember when I was having trouble with a horrible buzzing sound on the other end of calls from our 2012 Honda CR-V? We got it fixed. And it wasn’t a software glitch, electronic interference, or anything else they tried to blame.

After a couple of trips to the dealer to have it checked out, and after telling them that the solution was almost certainly to replace the Bluetooth microphone… They finally listened and replaced the microphone.

And guess what? That instantly solved the problem. This was back in early November, a week or after my initial post. I just didn’t get around to posting an update until now. Best of all, the problem hasn’t recurred.

Another interesting tidbit: When they finally agreed to replace the microphone, it was on backorder. This suggests to me that this is (or at least was) a fairly widespread problem and that they’ve had to replace a lot of these microphones.

It’s also worth noting that, just as I was walking out the door after having the microphone replaced, another guy was coming with the same complaint. The Bluetooth connection in his CR-V sounded great on his end, but there was an awful buzzing sound on the other end…

If you’re having a similar problem then I’d highly recommend pushing the service guys for a microphone replacement. With any luck, they’ll agree to do it and your problems will soon be a thing of the past.

Now if I could just get the new Google Now app to stop hijacking the Bluetooth connection… A guy can dream, right?

I recently updated the Google app on my iPhone and I have to say… Google Now is pretty cool. Cool enough that it’s now sitting in my launch bar. That being said, I’ve discovered an annoying bug with respect to Bluetooth integration.

To make a long story short, whenever I wake my phone or put it to sleep while the Google app is open and active, it briefly connects via Bluetooth to my car stereo similar to how the phone connects when making a call. It immediately disconnects, but it disrupts the radio or whatever else I’m listening to.

I could see how the Google app might take over the Bluetooth connection when doing a voice search (though the user should still have control over that) but that’s not what’s happening here. Rather, the idle app takes over the Bluetooth for no good reason whenever you wake the phone up or put it to sleep.

Needless to say, this is a very annoying behavior.

In fact, it’s so bad that I may stop using what has become an otherwise excellent app. Hopefully they will address this bug in a future update, though I’ve now seen reports of similar problems going all the way back to (at least) 2011. I guess I never noticed it before because the app wasn’t very useful until they added Google Now.

For the record, this is happening in a 2012 Honda CR-V.

Just had another annoying problem with my son’s Windows notebook. Sure am I glad that I (mostly) use a Mac! This time around, the Windows Taskbar had stopped auto-hiding. He had it configured properly, but it wouldn’t obey the setting.

As it turn out, he had a notification in the Action Center (looks like a little flag icon down in the Notification Center) that was keeping the Taskbar visible even though it wasn’t popping up. In this case, it was a warning about Windows Backup.

To fix the problem, I right-clicked the flag, opened the Action Center, and then unchecked the box for notifications about Windows Backup. That’s it. Problem solved.

If you run into this problem, you should first make sure the auto-hide functionality is turned on. To do this, right-click the Taskbar, select properties, check the box, and click Apply.

From there, work through all of the items in the Notification Center and clear any remaining notifications (whether or not they’re visible). If that doesn’t work and you find another solution, feel free to post it in the comments, below.

Oh, and for the record, this was with Windows 7.

While troubleshooting my son’s wifi connection the other night, I discovered that he had been infected by the so-called “Delta Search” virus. The end result was that his searches were being redirected to delta-search.com.

I checked to be sure his Avast antivirus definitions were updated. They were. I then downloaded the latest versions of Malware Bytes and SUPERAntiSpyware but both scans came up empty.

It was then that I remembered that Windows now has restore points that allow you to roll back to time points in the past. Great! Now all I had to do was figure out how far back to go.

My son said that he had been noticing (but not telling me about!) the delta-search.net redirect for the past few weeks. Hmmm. A few weeks. Not very precise.

But then I had a brainstorm. When the virus* infects your system, it installs a toolbar and some other crap (Yontoo, BrowserProtect, etc.). Knowing that, you can simply open “Add or Remove Programs” and check the date that junk was installed.

*Note: It’s debatable whether this is actually a virus. Some refer to it as “adware” instead. But if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

In our case, it was installed March 16th — surprisingly close to the beginning of that “few weeks” I was given. So I just restored the system to the closest restore point preceding that date and all was well.

Note, however, that I still had to go in and manually remove the search engine from the “Manage Search Engines” panel in the Google Chrome settings. Not sure why that didn’t get cleaned out during the restore, but it didn’t.

And that, my friends, is how you remove the annoying little headache known as the Delta Search virus (adware, spyware, malware, whatever) from your system.

We’re currently on vacation and my kids have been struggling with the wifi network where we’re staying. Every once in awhile their computers would lose (and be unable to re-gain) network connectivity. Very frustrating.

They’ll try to load a web page, get a message saying that their computer is unable to connect to the internet, and the only solution will be to reboot the modem.

Re-establishing the connecting doesn’t help and neither does rebooting the computer. At first I thought it might be a WEP vs. WPA2 issue but dropping it back to WEP didn’t seem to help.

Unfortunately, the Windows diagnostics didn’t help. It would go through the motions and then suggest that I do something like reset the wireless network connection adapter. Gee, thanks.

I later realized that it was a problem with the computer powering down the wireless card to save battery juice. For whatever reason, it was unable to re-establish a connection without power cycling the router.

The solution was to…

Go into your Device Manager (accessible through Control Panels). Open your Network devices, right-click on your wireless adapter, select Properties and then click on the Power Management tab.

From there, uncheck the box for Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power and click OK.

For the record, the computers in question were a pair of Asus U47A notebooks (running Windows 7) with Intel wireless cards and the router was a D-Link DIR-601.

Hope this helps.

While updating a certain WordPress plugin, I was too impatient and clicked another link on the dashboard before the update was complete. Bad move, as I was greeted with a message saying that the site was unavailable.

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

And when I tried to reload the front page, I got the same message. Uh-oh. Fortunately, the fix is simple. During the automatic upgrade process, WordPress creates a file called .maintenance at the root level of your install (in the folder containing wp-admin).

As long as that file exists, visitors will get the message above. At the conclusion of the upgrade process, that file is deleted. But if the upgrade process is interrupted, that file may be left behind.

To fix the problem, simply ftp into your site and delete the .maintenance file. Or contact your webhost and ask them to do it for you.

I previously reported that my Retina MacBook Pro often won’t recognize USB devices plugged into my Thunderbolt display when waking from sleep. Now I’m having a new problem. It won’t charge when plugged into the display.

Neither of these problems is completely crippling, but they’re extremely annoying given the cost associated with hardware in question. I’ve managed to solve the USB issues (mostly) by plugging in the power supply and waking the rMBP before plugging into the Thunderbolt display.

But, in doing this, I’ve discovered a different problem… The rMBP won’t accept a charge from the Thunderbolt display’s power cable. When I plug it in (using the provided adapter since the rMBP uses a MagSafe 2 plug) the little light on the charger stays dark instead of turning orange or green.

The battery icon in the menu does show that the computer is plugged in but, when I click on it, I’m greeted with “not charging.” Frustrating. There seems to be enough power for the computer to hold it’s charge, but it won’t add anything to a partially drained battery.

I believe that this is a problem with the Thunderbolt display itself and not the rMBP because the computer will take a charge just fine when plugged into a wall charger.

At first I thought it might be a problem of too much power drain when trying to drive both the on-board Retina display plus the 27″ Thunderbolt display (plus some peripherals). I tried unplugging all peripherals with no change.

I then tried unplugging the Thunderbolt cable while leaving the power hooked up. No change. And cranking down the brightness on the built-in display to reduce power consumption doesn’t help, either.

This is an extremely frustrating problem. My next step will be to reset the SMC on the off chance that the computer is at fault. I tried this the other day but nothing seemed to happen. This is perhaps because I didn’t have a wall plug at my disposal (instead I was plugged into the display) so I will need to try again at home.

Update: On a whim, I tried putting the computer to sleep. When I unplugged and re-plugged while asleep, the charging light came on. And when I woke it up, it stayed on (orange while charging, switching to green when full).

Given the above, it appears that the power supply in the display is barely strong enough to charge the computer and that putting it to sleep gets power consumption low enough for it to get over the hump and start charging.

This begs the question…

Is the display performing as expected (maybe it’s just under-powered) or is there something wrong and it’s putting out too little power? I’m not sure, but the tech specs say it should provide up to 85W of power, same as the rMBP charger.

A few months ago, we heard some scrambling and scratching in attic above our bedroom. It went away for awhile and we promptly forgot about it, but last night and this morning it was back, scrambling and scratching around.

I have no idea what it is, so I’ll have to go up and check it out. Unfortunately, it’s on the far side of the house from the attic access, but it needs to be done.

We previously had mice in garage — I sealed the gaps around the garage door and trapped them out — but this sounds bigger than a mouse. Maybe a squirrel?

Oddly enough, we had the attic sealed against such invaders in the past so there shouldn’t be any gaps to allow things to get in/out. That being said, it doesn’t take much of an opening for a determined critter to gain access.

More soon… Assuming I survive. Depending on what I find, this may wind up being a job for a professional exterminator.

Update: Well, I was just up in the attic and all I could find evidence of was mice. I guess mice sound a whole lot louder when they’re in your attic.

Hmmm. The more I used my MacBook Pro (the new one, w/a 15″ Retina display), the more little glitches I discover. The latest is that the trackpad will just go crazy every once in awhile, making it nearly impossible to control the cursor.

I first noticed this last night when the cursor seemed to develop a mind of its own and I could barely control it. The problem seemed even worse on the right side than on the left side, but it was bad just the same.

Unsure of what was happening, I chalked it up to (maybe?) having dripped a bit of condensation from my drink onto the trackpad. It seemed dry, but perhaps a little moisture got into the crack(s) around the edge resulting in erratic behavior.

I decided to put it to sleep for the night and go to bed. When I awoke this morning, it was back to its old self. Problem solved? Not quite.

After using it off and on for a couple of hours, my trackpad once again went haywire. In this case, it was even worse then before with the cursor repeatedly “bouncing” off the bottom of the screen even though I wasn’t touching the trackpad.

I responded by closing the case and then re-waking the computer. That solved it and it’s been okay in the half hour or so since. Very strange.

Like the difficulties recognizing USB devices via the Thunderbolt display, this problem has been well-documented in various discussion forums. Unfortunately, there are no clear causes or solutions.

Troubleshooting intermittent problems like this can be very difficult. One possibility is to press down firmly on the upper corners of the trackpad. Apparently this can help to re-seat the trackpad and restore normal performance.

Have you ever wished you could move the “Microsoft User Data” folder out of your “Documents” folder? It holds a variety of settings associated with Microsoft Office apps and thus doesn’t really seem at home amongst my actual documents.

You used to be able to move this folder to ~/Library/Preferences and go happily on your way, but with Office 2011 this fix no longer works. Rather, you’ll just get a new “User Data” folder when you next launch an Office app.

You could probably move the folder and leave a symlink behind, but that doesn’t really solve the problem as you’ll still have to stare at what amounts to a preferences folder amongst your documents.

(Yes, I know. I’m anal. It’s a curse that I deal with on a daily basis.)

But fear not. I have a solution. Instead of moving it, you can just hide it. To do so, open a terminal window and issue the following command:

sudo chflags hidden /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

Be sure to replace “username” with your username, or… Just drag and drop the folder into the terminal window after “hidden” (plus the space) and it will auto-populate the path for you.

Well, this sure is frustrating… I got a shiny new Retina MacBook Pro along with a 27″ Thunderbolt display to replace my dead mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It’s a great combo except that it has trouble recognizing USB devices plugged directly into the display.

More specifically, I have a USB keyboard (Apple), trackball, and external hard drive plugged into the USB ports on the display (actually, the trackball is daisy-chained off the keyboard) and none of them work when I first connect the MacBook Pro to it using the Thunderbolt cable.

Rather, I have to fiddle around with it plugging and unplugging the devices before they’ll be recognized and functional. This is obviously quite frustrating, especially since I disconnect and re-connect on a daily basis.

I’m running the latest version of Mountain Lion (currently 10.8.2) and have checked all of the relevant firmware. Yes, I have all the latest versions, so it can’t be chalked up to old firmware.

And guess what? If you Google it, you’ll learn that I’m not alone. Lots of people are having problems with their USB devices not being recognized by

I’ve read that bypassing the built-in Thunderbolt cable with a separate male-to-male cable is a possible workaround, but that’s completely unacceptable for such an expensive display.

I have also read that using a powered USB hub can help. This makes sense since my wall-powered devices (an external hard drive and a ScanSnap scanner) work fine. It’s just the unpowered devices that have trouble.

I’ll be troubleshooting this in the coming days to see if I can narrow down the problem and (hopefully) come up with a solution. Otherwise I’ll be contacting Apple for a replacement.

Update: Some have reported that you may be able to avoid this problem by waking the computer before plugging into the Thunderbolt display. Sadly, that hasn’t helped in my case.

About ten days ago, my beloved MacBook Pro died. It was working fine when I got up to grab some chow, but when I returned it was dead. It had powered down and was completely and utterly unresponsive. What a bummer.

Note: For the record, this was a mid-2009 15-inch model with a 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM (MB986LL/A, model A1286).

I hit the power button. Nothing. I hit the battery status button on the side. Nothing. The green indicator lights stayed dark. I plugged it in. Nothing. The light on the MagSafe plug stayed dark.

I switched batteries. No change. I switched power adapters. No change. I reset the SMC (I looked up how with my iPhone). No change. I swapped the RAM sticks between slots. No change. I tried the RAM sticks one at a time. No change.

After a bit of online research, I learned that my beloved MacBook Pro had likely suffered a failed logic board. That was the bad news. The good news is that I didn’t lose any data — though, if I had, I have local and online backups.

Even better: I now had an excuse to upgrade to a shiny new MacBook Pro with a Retina display. I had been planning on doing so, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

Once the order was placed, I opened the case of my old computer, removed the hard drive, and popped it into an external hard drive. I was thus able to limp along and get things done with an even older MacBook Pro that I had laying around.

The new computer has since arrived and it’s fantastic.

For any Moneydance users out there who are frustrated by poor performance (lag or delays) when entering transactions, I have two simple tips:

1. Disable the cha-ching sound by going to Moneydance > Preferences and unchecking “Beep when Transactions Change” on the General tab.
2. Turn off the status graphs (“Budget Status” and “Net Worth Graph”) in the title bar by unchecking View > Hide Status Graph.

With any luck, these changes will solve the problem, making transaction entry nice and snappy for you. They worked for me.

As an iPhone owner, there’s no worse feeling than picking up your phone and have it refuse to turn on. You hit the “home” button and nothing happens. You hit the “power” button. Same result. What’s going on?

I’m not sure of the cause, but the solution (more often than not) is surprisingly simple. Assuming that your phone actually has a charge, simply hold down the power and home (i.e., the top and front) buttons for simultaneously for 12-15 seconds to reset/reboot your iPhone.

With any luck, the Apple icon will show up on your screen and your phone will proceed to boot up. Problem solved. Just to be on the safe side, you might want to run a quick backup so you can restore your data and apps if your problems get worse.

If the two-button trick doesn’t work, your first move should be to plug your phone in so you can be absolutely sure that it has a charge. If your phone has a charge but remains incommunicado, it might be time for a trip to the Apple store.

For the record, this same fix applies to both the iPhone 5 and to earlier generations.

While ordering pizza for dinner tonight, I got to wondering… Which gives you more, two large pizzas or three medium pizzas? Fortunately, I’ve had sixth grade math so I was able to dust off a bit of that knowledge to figure out the answer.

The answer, of course, depends on the actual size of the pizza. But once you know the diameter (and hence the radius, r) you can calculate the area of the pizza:

area = πr²

So… A standard Domino’s or Papa John’s large (14 inch) pizza covers:

area = 3.14 x (7 x 7) = 153.9 square inches

And a standard medium (12 inch) pizza covers:

area = 3.14 x (6 x 6) = 113.0 square inches

So two large pizzas is just under 308 square inches, whereas three medium pizzas is 339 square inches — three mediums are about 10% larger.

As for which is a better deal… The right answer depends on pricing, of course.

Bonus points: An extra large (16 inch) pizza covers roughly 201 square inches.

Whew. After a boatload of troubleshooting, I think I’ve finally narrowed in on the cause of our internet woes. In short, our AT&T FastAccess DSL was periodically losing connectivit and failing to load pages. But then it would start working again.

The symptoms were various, including DNS errors, page not found errors, and/or “connection was interrupted” errors. The common thread is that it would interrupt our surfing, streaming, or whatever experience. Annoying.

At first (way, way back) I chalked it up to DNS issues and switched our old D-Link router to “Advanced DNS Service.” This improved things, but the problem eventually started getting worse.

I tried resetting both the DSL modem and our wireless router, updating our router’s firmware, changing to OpenDNS for DNS service, etc.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I was eventually able to narrow down the problems to:

1. a failing (or at least struggling) wireless router,
2. a router/modem conflict, and
3. a failing DSL modem causing intermittent losses of DSL sync

Amazingly, all three things seemed to have an effect.

To solve this, I bought a new router along with a new DSL modem and then set it up with the modem in “bridge” mode and the router in PPPoE mode. Previously, they were both trying to route our traffic.

I haven’t written all of the details up yet, but I will likely share the most relevant tidbits in one or more futures posts.

After eleven months of uneventful operation, we just had another error code on our LG Tromm front-loading washer. We previously had an OE error code and a tE error code. This time, it was a UE error code.

The good news is that this appears to be no big deal. The UE error code is for unbalanced loads (it’s and “unbalanced error” and it’s especially common on small loads, in which case it’s hard to have the load distributed evenly around the drum.

In this case, my son was washing the jacket he received for Christmas so he could wear it to school in the morning. The jacket was the only thing in the washer at the time and, when wet, is quite heavy. Hence the unbalanced load.

We spread it out in the drum and ran a quick spin cycle before tossing it into the dryer.

For reference, our washer is model number WM2487HWM.

Okay… After a firmware update and changing over to OpenDNS, we’re still suffering from DNS issues. I’ve checked with my neighbor who has the same ISP as us and his connection is rock solid, suggesting that we have a hardware issue.

Assuming that I’m right, it has to either be our DSL modem or our router. While the DIR-655 has always done a decent job, I’ve never been crazy about it. The signal strength is good but not great, and I’ve run into a few glitches here and there in the two years since I first set it up.

Thus… I decided to start with a new router. I went with the ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless N900 Gigabit router. It’s not cheap, but it gets high marks on Amazon and in all of the reviews that I’ve run across.

It should arrive tomorrow and I hope to have it up and running shortly thereafter.

I’ve long wanted to change the e-mail address associated with my Google Adsense account. Unfortunately, it wasn’t allowed. If you were using a Gmail address, you could. But if not, you were out of luck. Until now, that is…

This is still technically the case, but there’s now a workaround. While noodling around in the Adsense interface today, I discovered a new (beta) function in the “Access and authorization” section under the “Account settings” tab.

It’s called “Users with sign-in access (beta)“, and it allows you to provide others with access to your account, either as standard users or with administrator privileges.

To invite a new user, simply put the e-mail address in the field immediately below this section and click the “Invite” button.

The new user (or you, if you’re trying to change e-mail addresses) then needs to click a link in the resulting e-mail to accept the invitation.

The beauty of this approach is that you can assign admin privileges to the new user, accept the invitation, then log in as the new user and remove the old user. The end result is that you can now transfer an account from one address to another whether or not you’re using a Gmail address.

Of course, you don’t have to completely break the linkage. Rather, you can add the new address and leave the old one in place. Whatever you prefer.

For the record, this same approach works (and always has) for transferring Google Analytics from one e-mail address to another.

Okay, the D-Link DIR-655 firmware update didn’t end up solving my DSL problems. Thus, I decided to disable the “Advanced DNS Service” and switch to OpenDNS. If this doesn’t help, then I probably have a hardware problem.

You’ll notice that I didn’t revert to my ISP’s (AT&T FastAccess DSL) DNS service. The reason for this is that I previously had DNS problems that were, for the most part, solved by switching away and using the D-Links “Advanced DNS Service.”

Hopefully, by switching to OpenDNS, my problems will be a thing of the past. To make the switch, I pointed my browser to 192.168.0.1, logged into the router’s admin interface, and then went to:

Setup > Internet > Manual Internet Connection Setup

From there, I unchecked the “Enable Advanced DNS Service” box. I then went down and updated the DNS servers, as follows:

Primary DNS Server: 208.67.222.222
Secondary DNS Server: 208.67.220.220

Save the settings, click the button to reboot your router, and you’re done.