Back to the Future day

If I drive 88 miles per hour today, will I get pulled over for speeding? If I do get pulled over, can I tell the cop that I am trying to go back to the future because the speed of 88 miles per hour is the exact and only speed that Doc Brown figured out based on his scientific research for time travel. Maybe, only maybe, if the cop is a hard-core Back to the […]

[Solved] Cannot have multiple items selected in a DropDownList

If you work on ASP.NET DropDownList, most likely you will encounter a situation when you need to pre-select an item in the DropDownList. You might see people using the following way to do that after the DropDownList is bound: this.ddlSchools.SelectedValue = oSchool.AdminID This works very well if you are sure that the value you assign to the DropDownList actually is one of the DropDownList items, otherwise, you will get an ArgumentOutOfRangeException. So the safe way to […]

Protect your router from being hacked

In the fast few days, you may have heard from some news source that some nice hacker(s) targeted unprotected routers with good intention. After hacking the router to gain access to user’s network, the hacker(s) installed some protective software that will look for spyware and remove it once found. The software can also install important updates on user’s computer and even force the user to update their computer so their computer will be up to […]

KB3087040 Windows Update fails with error 0x80004005 on Windows 10

If you are using Windows 10 and have tried to run Windows Update to keep your Windows system secure, then you might encounter this Windows Update error regarding a new KB3087040, which was released on September 21, 2005: It is very strange for such a high priority security fix, Microsoft didn’t seem to fully test it before rolling it out. By the time of writing this post, the issue with the automatic Windows Update still […]

Google Chrome removes NPAPI support

It’s been two years since Google Chrome announced in September 2013 their plan to remove NPAPI support and according to their plan, the NPAPI support will be officially removed from Google Chrome including the current temporary override, and no NPAPI will be loaded. Many Chrome users have been complaining about the removal since the announcement because currently many plugins are built with NPAPI and the impact of removing NPAPI support would be big, but it didn’t change […]

Amazon Underground offers completely free apps

Amazon Underground is a new Amazon Android shopping app that offers thousands of free apps and games, here “free” means completely free, even the in-game purchase is free. So if you install an free app or game with in-game purchase option, then you don’t even need to pay the in-game purchase. That sounds too good to be true? But it is true. So you may ask, “what is the catch then?” Well the only catch is […]

Estimate of time for WordPress Plugin directory surpassing two billion downloads

Jeff Chandler from WorePress Tavern recently reported that WordPress Plugin directory has surpassed one billion downloads since March 2006 and he asked readers to estimate when it will reach two billion downloads. Instead of throwing a wild guess, I decided to do some statistical analysis on the data he provided to get a statistical estimate. Here are the data he provided in his post: March 2006  191,567 2007  2,845,802 2008  15,130,856 2009  49,822,116 2010  72,342,598 2011  […]

TCP/IP properties on VPN connection not working in Windows 10

I recently upgraded my Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 by using Microsoft Media Creation tool and I have to admit that Windows 10 is really better than Windows 8.1, for example the traditional and familiar desktop style, the re-engineered Start button and start menu, and the easy and fast Search feature, etc. However, I did encounter an annoying bug in Windows 10 when I was trying to set up a VPN connection. If you need […]

Installing Windows 10 using media creation tool for free

Microsoft officially released Windows 10 on Wednesday (July 29, 2015) and as promised a free upgrade to Windows 10 will be given to any eligible current Windows 7 and 8/8.1 user as long as they reserve the free upgrade within one year. If you would like to know how to reserve the free upgrade, check my previous post, or go to Microsoft Windows web site for more information. But what if you want to skip […]

Finally you can empty trash when using Inbox by Gmail

When Google first released Inbox by Gmail, they removed a common feature in email management: empty emails from the trash, or permanently delete the emails in trash. Their intention of “delete-it-and-forget-it” was good so we can focus on more important things than emptying trash because the emails in trash will be automatically and permanently deleted after 30 days, however, they missed one important thing which make their good intention a big complaint: We, as email users, process […]