Shaney Says…

This is an easy one.

1. Click on the tab in the upper right hand corner that lets you go to your Chrome settings.
2. Click on “Settings”.
3. Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Show advanced settings…”.
4. Under “Privacy”, click on “Clear browsing data…”.
5. The following four items should have checkmarks:
• Clear browsing history
• Clear downloaded history
• Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data
• Empty the cache

The following four items should not have a checkmark in them (unless you want to clear this information too):

• Clear saved passwords
• Clear saved Autofill form data
• Clear data from hosted apps
• Deauthorize content licenses
6. The default setting will be to delete the browsing data for the past hour, but if you have had this problem of not being able to use Google Search in Chrome for longer than an hour, you can change the setting of “Obliterate the following items from…” to a longer period. If you are not sure, leave this as “the past hour” for now. If this solution doesn’t work, try increasing this and doing it again.
7. Click on “Clear browsing data”.

This should fix it, especially if the problem has just started recently. If it doesn’t do the trick, please say so in the comments.

When I tried to connect my Jambox to my Windows 8 machine, at first it didn’t recognize it at all. Then it recognized it as a phone device and asked for a passcode (but wouldn’t let me enter the passcode that Jambox suggests, which is “0000″). I tried connecting the device again and again, in various ways, but had no luck. I looked up some solutions online, but they were fairly complicated and I am of the opinion that there is usually a simple solution out there if you look hard enough. I decided to go back to first principles and shut everything off, and then turn everything back on, one by one. This is what finally worked.

First, make sure nothing else is connected to your Jambox, such as your phone or mp3 player. If anything else is connected, first disconnect it, then continue with these instructions.

Turn your Jambox off. Then, turn your computer’s bluetooth connection off. Then turn your computer’s bluetooth connection back on again. Turn your Jambox back on and set it to search for devices to pair with. Then search for new bluetooth devices.

By doing this, I was finally able to connect the Jambox without resorting to any complicated fiddling. I think that this is one of those problems that is not actually a problem. It just requires both devices (the computer and the Jambox) to be both ready and “clean” before the connection will work. If you are having trouble connecting your Jambox to your computer, I recommend trying this first before seeking out more complicated solutions.

If the above doesn’t work, maybe try turning your computer’s bluetooth off, then turning your computer off, then turning your Jambox off. Then restart your computer, turn your bluetooth back on, and turn the Jambox on. My guess is that should work in most cases.

Please report back on your success or lack thereof in the comments.

Note also that if you pause what you are listening to for a certain amount of time, you may lose your connection with your Jambox. In that case, just turn the Jambox off and on again and it should sort itself out.

For some reason, Google Chrome doesn’t seem to like YouTube videos, regardless of whether you play them on the YouTube site or embedded in another site like Facebook. I first noticed this on a low-spec netbook, so I thought maybe it was a problem with the graphics card. Then, I noticed it on another computer that had a better graphics card, so I thought maybe it was my wireless connection. However, I finally figured out that it was not a problem with the graphics card or the network, but with my browser (Chrome).

Here is a quick fix that should work to get rid of the choppy playback.

1. In the address bar, type “about:plugins“.
2. In the top right hand corner of your screen, you should see something that looks like “+Details“. Click on it to see more details about the plugins.
3. Under Adobe Flash Player, you should see one file called “pepflashplayer.dll“. (The full path will be something like this:
   C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\23.0.1271.64\PepperFlash\pepflashplayer.dll)
4. Disable this file by clicking on the blue word “Disable“.
5. Close Chrome and open it again. Test out your video and be wowed by the non-choppiness!

I bought a new laptop that was custom made. It had Windows 7 in English, but the keyboard was Japanese (i.e. quotation marks ["], rather than the at sign [@], above the 2). However, the keyboard mapping wasn’t correct. When I pressed shift+2, I got an at sign instead of a quotation mark.

I looked around for ways to fix this problem, but couldn’t find anything useful. Almost everyone said to change the keyboard settings, but that didn’t work. Some also said to change the registry, but that didn’t work either.

What did work was using a different driver for the keyboard:

1. Go to device manager and find the keyboard driver. Double click on it.
2. Update the driver. Driver tab –> Update Driver.
3. Click on “Browse My Computer…” and then “Let me pick…”.
4. Deselect “Show compatible hardware” so you will see more options.
5. Scroll up or down until you see “Japanese PS/2 keyboard (106/109 key)”. Click on it, then click “Next”.
6. You will probably receive a driver warning. Click on “Yes” to ignore it.
7. Follow any other necessary steps and then restart the computer.

Hope this fixes the problem for you too!

I had trouble sharing my iTunes libraries across two Windows 7 machines. I tried reinstalling iTunes, restarting both computers, and using the Apple Application Support (Control Panel –> Add or Remove Programs –> right click on Apple Application Support) to repair my Apple programs, but nothing worked. I wondered if it was caused by the fact that one of the computers used a wired connection and the other was wireless, but I figured that couldn’t be the main problem because who uses wired connections for every device they own these days?

What did eventually work was shutting both computers down, shutting my modem/router down (by pulling out the plug from the wall), waiting two minutes, turning my modem/router back on, waiting two minutes, then turning the computers back on. The computers both had some issues getting reconnected to the internet, but opening up Network and Sharing and click on the “X” seemed to solve that problem on both computers. Once they were reconnected, I opened up iTunes and both computers found the other computer’s library. Problem solved.

At least for now. I will report back if this doesn’t end up being a permanent solution.

(P.S. I hate iTunes, but Home Sharing is nice when it works. But I still hate iTunes.)

P.P.S. This worked once, and never again. Annoying.