My Brain BLOG – Page 15 – thoughts, ideas and knowledge

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.

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:

Minecraft Key Controls

It’s the season to play more games again… quarantine, holidays, nothing on TV, whatever the reason is. I have my own Apps and Games, but sometimes I like to indulge in a little MineCraft Building Splurge running on my own private server. Let’s insert a little disclaimer here: All rights reserved to Mojang for Launcher code and Minecraft. Please purchase the game and support mojang by visiting The Official Minecraft Website for future updates and development of the game!
Anyway; because I do not play that frequent I always have to look up the keys and mouse buttons again to know which key controls what funtionality in the game.

Google AdMob policy violation ADS AND CONTENT OVERLAP

It starts with a warning, which I seem to receive several times a year: Google stops displaying the ads in my App. Even though there is no violation, they just do this. I will copy some e-mail content below, so you can see the steps and know what to expect and how to react. Also of course for my own reference, since I have written this response several times now, but the reaction is always the same.

HP LaserJet Pro M280 M281 Printer series 20200612 firmware downgrade

The source of the solution is here, my problem was real!
After a firmware upgrade for my HP M281fdw all-in-one printer, it suddenly started complaining about communication problems with one of the supplies. “Supply problem.” on the screen and “The indicated supplies are not communicating correctly with the printer. Try reinstalling the supplies. If the problem persists, replace the supplies to continue printing.” in the help-text. Uncertain about the level of toner in my K container I simply ordered a new one. Of course no one wants to pay ridiculous prices, so I go for the home-brand of 123inkt.nl
Since I knew my CMY had been low for months I decided to change those three at the same time. To my surprise this suddenly gave errors on all four supplies, making me go ‘hmmmm’.

I started googleing and getting more frustrated about my printer not doing what it is supposed to, I remembered I clicked something about a firmware update and forgot about it. Then I found this article which gave me the option to downgrade… AND IT WORKED! My toner was actually still at 90%

So, HP, Hewlett Packard, you F@!^%#$-ing B@#&$%ards, blocking non-HP toners is so stupid, low-blowing and unbelievable, I am thinking about calling my lawyer to see if that is even legal, blocking me to use the more enonomical printer-supplies-brand I prefer and costing me a day of waiting for a newly ordered toner and a couple of hours of aggravation before I could solve this issue with finally a firmware downgrade.
Anyway, below the solution, which I copied and corrected from the other website:

How to Fix the Collation and Character Set of a MySQL Database

Sources: mostly here and not so much here.

Something about MySQL being swedish and having a default character set of latin1 and a collation of latin1_swedish_ci which is no good if you need to save utf8 data.