My Brain BLOG – Page 2 – thoughts, ideas and knowledge

Mouse drag and drop fails

Fix problem with drag and drop not working in Windows. Have you encountered the problem in which you can no longer drag and drop files and folders in Windows Explorer (if you are using Windows 7) or File Explorer (if you are using Windows 10 or Windows 8.1)?

You can click and right click on files and folders, you can select files and folders, but you can’t drag and drop them anymore. We’ve encountered this issue ourselves and after searching for many possible solutions, we’ve found one which should work in most cases. Here’s how to restore the drag and drop feature in a couple of seconds:

Convert between Local Time and UTC or Zulu time

Here is some visual basic code for you!
You receive a ZULU time and want to store it in your local time?

Dim MyZulu As New Date(year,month,day,hr,min,sec,DateTimeKind.Utc)
Dim MyLocal As DateTime = MyZulu.ToLocalTime()

Or is someone or some API asking you for the next format in return, and all you have is a DateTime with your local time in it?

*UTC + offset as (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+hh:mm)

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)

Takeway API error

Try to get a new order for your restaurant from the Thuisbezorgd API with vb.net: simple 🙂
Create a WebRequest
Add some Authentication
Add the API key
run the GetRequest()
and…. BOOM!
The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseHeader Detail=CR must be followed by LF

So what is it?

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 Date, Descending (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?

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?

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.

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.