David Thacker Blog

Today I have been pulling my hair trying to generate a simple report in either excel or google sheets. I was getting the same issue in both. The issue was the date was being recognized in some cells. but not others in the same column.  First I thought this was an export issue but opening the file in a text editor quickly but the breaks on blaming the system I was exporting from.  So I tried different date and time formats, using the format function and it was changing some cells and not others. In the end it turned out to be the language from my applications are set to English UK, I switched it to English USA and everything works perfectly. The strange thing is that the dates it was recognizing it was outputting in the correct USA format like the other dates on the sheet and not interpreting them as UK dates.  Anyway maybe this will help somebody in the future. 

Quite often you will have a formatting issue in excel either it does not understand the format or you have extra data in a column you dont need. Before it will understand what you want.  ( A side note I do not remember it being this difficult on windows, but on Mac this is the solution I found).   In my case this is the data : Apr 6 2018 12:06:21:000AM its simply a date plus a time but excel does not understand it yet. In this example I just want the date formatted correctly and I will get rid of the time. Separate out the data into individual columns Hi-light the column and choose 'Text to Columns' Choose delimited Space delimited Finish Now they are separated into the 4 columns, we can now delete the time in the last column. We now need to combine the data back into 1 column - we can do this by using a formula like this : =M2&"/ "&N2&"/ "&O2 this now gives us Apr/ 6/ 2018 but excel does not understand its a date, even if you ...

Right, so this is a quick guide which is a culmination of everything I could find on the web, to remove all the bloatware off the Pocophone F1. So when I first got the Pocophone it was great but as Xiaomi is known for putting on a fair amount of bloatware the first task I set to was getting rid of it all.  But that was a couple of years ago now and several OS updates and upgrades later a couple of new apps had snuck in and I decided they must go!  Before you start, as with anything things can go wrong, and while this is pretty safe. Uninstalling some apps such as the Security App or Xiaomi Find Device can cause the phone to get stuck in a boot loop. If in doubt do a quick search "safe apps to uninstall Xiaomi" or similar. Option 1 When I first did this I was on windows I did the following: Installed this app: https://szaki.github.io/XiaomiADBFastbootTools/ Simple follow the guide on the above link Install Java (If not already installed) Enable developer mode Enable USB debug...

Over a period of time you will collect many passwords and accounts inside google chrome if you use chrome to manage your passwords. At some point you may wish to remove all these passwords or atleast clean up a large number of them. Dealing with them inside chrome or passwords.google.com can be a longwinded pain if you want to 50+ passwords. It may not be obvious but you can bulk manage passwords in chrome /google quickly and easily at-least you can at the time of writing using chrome 78. Right so before we get started we should make sure that we will be able to re-import the passwords back into chrome once we are done. 1) go to chrome://flags and search for ‘import’ and then make ‘Password import ‘ set to enabled. ) 2) You will now get a prompt to relaunch google chrome, relaunch 3) Now make your way back to chrome://settings/passwords and you will now see the option to import where export once was. If you want to check import works first, do this now. Bulk Managing passwords into Chr...

So Normally If you want to create a shortcut in Chrome you go to Settings>More tools> Create Shortcut on the site you want and then you will have the apps shortcut but sometimes the site does not seem to have a favicon that is 128x128 pixels and ends up being all distorted. This is definitely the case for many of the Gsuite screens like the Apps page or the Admin page. As you can see below its horrible! Anyway do not worry you can quickly sort it be creating your own Chrome extension. Following the official google guide you only need to do parts 1 and 2, downloading the example manifest.json file and editing it as needed with the right links and name. Then all you need to do is install it in chrome and your good! I did this locally just for myself but as a Gsuite admin you can also give this to your organisation with a number of apps. See here for examples then all you need todo is upload and install in chrome and you can have your chrome shortcut with the right logo. ...

So this week we have been celebrating just a bit, we just released a brand new service called nerd.vision its a developer tool that allows the developer to debug their environment whether that is production or local. No matter what your skill it gives you ‘nerd vision’ get it, yeah cool right ?! nerd.vision is a freemium tool and in its initial release all features are free we are super pumped to get it out to the developer communities - to kick things off we are supporting python and java, with node, php and many other languages coming soon.  Want a feature that you do not see submit it here: https://www.nerd.vision/product/roadmap and get your friends to vote for it. Anyway, as the title suggests this is about doing things right, so in the past with past products we have continued to use ‘older’ style products which are enterprise grade mainly due to what was available at the time and a lack of need for change in the underlying systems.   Digital River for Ecommerce SalesFo...

So we love the Google Hangouts Meet hardware, so much so we equipped all our meeting spaces with them with a mixture of the Logitech PTZ and Huddly camera setups paired to the Asus Chromebox 3 and Mimo Vue touch screen display, Meet speaker etc. During a recent update the Mimo Vue touch screen display, stopped responding to touch input. We tried everything, powering down the devices pressing reset etc etc. The google diagnostic tool from the admin panel reported everything as all OK too. In the end what we did to fix it was hold the reset button on the back of the Mimo view display down for 30 - 60 seconds and the device started working again. (Will add a photo soon). I am surprised this worked as I would of expected the full powering down and unplugging of devices should of achieved a similar result but obviously something more is happening when the reset button is held.