Hmm...

I seem to be having some technical difficulties.  Lately, whenever I post something here from Storify, it seems to display fine for a moment and then reverts to an older Storify story for some reason.  The reason I started posting Storify stories here was so I could link to them on Twitter without having to deal with the weird stuff that was happening when I link directly to Storify on Twitter.  But it looks like the original issue has been fixed, so for now maybe I'll just go back to keeping my Tweets of the Week posts on Storify.  In the meantime I should probably come up with something to blog about here once in a while to keep this place from gathering dust.

Supply and Demand

Comcast has a great feature called On Demand that lets you watch shows whenever you want... well, it's great when they happen to have what you want to see, not so great when they don't.  They have tons and tons of shows listed in the On Demand menu, most of which I never even heard of, and yet there are many times when very popular shows aren't listed.

And what gets listed changes all the time, with very little rhyme or reason to it... one season House is not available, the next it is.  Chuck was available, but then it mysteriously disappeared from the On Demand menu after a mid-season break.  You just never know what shows are going to be available or for how long... it's very frustrating.

Are all cable providers this flaky about their On Demand shows, or am I just unlucky?

Sorry

I've been working out some computer problems, so haven't been posting as much lately... I'll try to get something new up here soon.

How to reset the PRAM on a Mac

I was having some trouble with my Mac Mini after doing a firmware update.  After trying to reboot there was no video at all, just a black screen with a white box.  It would make the chime sound when I tried to restart it, so I knew it was still alive, but I couldn't see anything... and it's pretty damn hard to do anything on a computer when you can't see anything.

If you are having the same problem I was having, you may need to reset your Mac's PRAM.  You will lose some settings but that's a small price to pay for having a working computer again.  What you need to do is try to boot up the Mac and as soon as you hear the chime sound press Command+Option+P+R if you have an Apple keyboard, or press Windows+Alt+P+R on a Windows keyboard... and once you press those keys keep them all pressed until you hear a second chime.  If you have no video, it can seem like nothing is happening, but be patient... don't let go until you hear that second chime or this won't work.  Eventually there should be a third chime, and then you can just boot normally.

Depending on what problem you are trying to fix, if resetting the PRAM doesn't help, then you might want to also try resetting the System Management Controller.  There are different ways of doing this depending on what kind of Mac you have and how old it is

And if that doesn't work either, you are probably screwed... at that point I think you will pretty much have to make a trip to an Apple Store to get it fixed.

Ugh

Been wrestling with Twitter widgets all day. Made a bit of progress thanks to some good tips posted at ONWEBDEV, but a couple of the widgets still aren't working properly.  Twitter hasn't made a @mention widget available, so you have to use the search widget to search for @mentions... which would be fine, if only the search widget would display the results in chronological order.  Hopefully they will fix that problem someday.