System.NullReferenceException: ‘Object reference not set to an instance of an object.’

A happy error while coding in visual basic, vb.net
It is not the line where you get this error, but something that happened before, that made one of your variables invalid and unusable.

Read this. (@ NullReference Exception — Visual Basic)

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Descending Sort Order Thunderbird

I prefer my most recent emails at the top of the list. Unfortunately Thunderbird (and many other mail clients) do this different.
So how do I change the default sort order?
Change the advanced options!

If you want to sort all mail by DateDescending (newest at top), change the preferences in the config editor to:

mailnews.default_sort_order:    default     integer      2
mailnews.default_sort_type:     default     integer     18

So, what does that 2 stand for? And why 18?

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Teamviewer Connect greyed-out and disabled

What a week… sometimes things just keep going wrong for no reason. Today it was Teamviewer not giving me the option to connect to a remote PC to simply view their desktop and help the person with an issue they were facing. The option ‘Connect’ was just greyed out, not being able to enter an ID. Even the box on the top ‘insert partner ID’ did allow me to enter a number, but expecting that number to be added to the list, the ‘Connect’ option there did not do anything either.

The “Ready to connect (secure connection)” you see at the bottom of the window is also a little misleading there, because it does not want to connect at all!
So… what is the solution?

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WordPress 404 errors

How To Fix Broken Permalinks In WordPress.
WordPress is a powerful CMS. Sometimes a slight tweak can make your website inaccessible. Another common problem that most WordPress users face at some point is WordPress posts returning a 404 Error. In this article we will show you how to fix WordPress posts returning 404 error.

Usually in this scenario a user can access their WordPress admin area, their blog’s main page, but when accessing a single posts they get a 404 Not found error. First of all, don’t panic most of the time your posts are still there and completely safe. This usually happens if your .htaccess file got deleted or something went wrong with the rewrite rules. What you need to do is fix your permalinks settings. There are several sites describing this, below is the summary of what you actually need to do.

UPDATE JULY 2021: “Still haven’t found what I’m looking for”… so I wrote my own htaccess_keeper plugin. It runs on the normal homepage of the website to save the htaccess to a backup file (when changed), and restores it when a zero bytes file has been detected. It also shoots of an e-mail to the admin that it had to jump to the rescue again!
Interested in this plugin? It is for sale, just contact My Brain.

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Types of UTP cables

Last time I bought a UTP cable, the only choice was CAT5 or even better CAT5e, which was for the faster networks at the time. The name UTP stands for ‘Unshielded Twisted Pair’.
Since I wanted to replace some older cables I started browsing and found a whole range of new options, so below is what I found as descriptions for these mumble-words: F/UTP, S/UTP, SF/UTP, S/FTP, F/FTP, U/FTP, U/UTP, plus also I found CAT6, CAT6a and even CAT7.
So, here is the update:

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