How to change the Yahoo Mail default notification sound on Android? [FIX]

I recently upgraded to an Android 11 smartphone and for some reason my default notification sound had changed and I could not change the default notification sound in the Yahoo Mail app settings.

I found a way to fix this temporarily until Yahoo issue a fix themselves (assuming it is not a Pro feature option only now).

These instructions are for Android 11 specifically but these may be the same for Android 9 and 10 (I cannot clarify as I don't own a device with these versions of Android):

1) Go to "Settings"

2) Scroll down and tap "Apps"

3) Scroll down and tap "Yahoo Mail"

4) Tap on "Notifications"

5) Under "Other" tap on each listed option below and then tap on "sound" and select the sound you wish to hear. They will be set to "Default notification sound" but you can change them to fix it for now :)

- Emails from people

- Deals emails

- Travel emails

- Parcel delivery emails

- Other emails

- Reminders

- General alerts

- Miscellaneous

- Account security alerts

[any] Hard Drive won't insert into [any] Hot Swap drive bay (FIX - Picture Guide)

WARNING: Always "ground" yourself before using sensitive electronic devices! i.e. Touch a radiator or use an anti-static wrist band connected to your PC case.

Introduction

This is a picture guide on how to fix an issue if you have issues with a hard drive getting stuck or not being able to be inserted into a hot swap drive bay:

The Problem / Issue ...

In this example I am trying to insert a HGST Deskstar 8TB NAS hard drive into my Orico Hot Swap Drive Bay (model 1106SS). However, I've had similar issues with Western Digital Gold Enterprise hard drives as well.

The problem is the hot swap drive bay's roller mechanism gets stuck in a hole at the rear of the hard drive; illustrated below:

The hole in the hard drive:

Evidence to support the claim above:

Solution:

To fix this is relatively simple. You only need a bit of sturdy tape. I HIGHLY recommend using Electrical tape, sometimes known as insulating tape. It is cheap to buy and available at any DIY store. Mine cost me £2.99 from my local store. You don't have to use black as they normally come in a selection of colours to chose from.

1. Work out where you need to place the tape on the hard drive. To do this, analyse where the roller mechanism is catching the rear of the hard drive. Just as I did above.
   
   
2. Apply tape, making sure not to cover the PCB (the green board).
   Try not to touch the SATA and Power connectors on the drive as you could get moist or dust on them which is not recommended.
   
   
3. Make sure to apply two layers of tape for extra strength. This is so that the roller will not cause the tape to sink into the hole when inserting the drive. Look closely at how I applied the tape. Looking from the rear of the drive, with the PCB side facing up; I applied two pieces of tape, vertically, parallel to each other. Then I applied a horizontal piece of tape on top of these two pieces; a total of two layers.
   

Testing

The test proves to be a success and the hard drive now inserts without issue:

Hard drive fully inserted:

Final Notes

You may need to replace the tape if you heavily swap your hard drives. For me it will take time for the tape to wear down as I only use mine for backups.

I highly recommend being gentle when inserting the hard drives into any hot swap drive bay so that the tape can withstand the pressure applied by the roller mechanism.

The end ...

No Safely Remove Hardware or Eject options (missing)?

I hope this guide was useful to you. If you have issues with getting the hard drive to appear in the "safely remove" icon in your taskbar, see my solution to that in this blog post. 

ANY Hot Swap Drive Bay / Caddy, no Safely Remove Hardware or Eject options (missing) FIX!

Hi all,

I recently installed an Orico 5.25" Hot Swap drive bay for 3.5 inch hard drives (Orico 1106SS).


Issue:

Once I loaded a 3.5" hard drive into the bay and powered it on, my Windows detected it fine and I was able to initialise it and use it without issues.

However, there was no option to "Safely Remove Hardware" option in the system tray. Nor was there an "Eject" option when right clicking the hard drive in "My Computer".

After many hours of checking that: (a) the "Plug n Play" service was working, (b) re-installing Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver and (c) checking my BIOS settings; I finally found a solution which works just as good, if not better!


FIX:

Download and install the software, HotSwap! by Kazuyuki Nakayama.

"It does the same thing as you can remove device from Device Manager but it provides much friendly user interface as you remove the removable device from the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the notification area. It also ensures that all data are written and flushed to the disk before the device to be hot-swapped, so you can use SATA/eSATA drive as a removable device much alike USB/IEEE1394 drive."

LINK = http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm


IMPORTANT NOTES:

Please visit the above link to learn how to use the software!

If you are using Windows 2000, use version 2.0.0.0.

If you are using Windows XP or Server 2003, use version 5.0.0.0.

Showbox loading videos in default android player, not in VLC / MX player (android) FIX

Showbox, you may prefer to play the content in the VLC player app but Showbox sometimes loads the content in the android video player. 

You can always use a different player such as MX player.

To fix this issue, take the following steps:

NOTE: The steps provided below are for Android v6.0.1 (marshmallow). Other versions will have settings located in slightly different places. Please Google your android version for aid in locating certain settings mentioned.

Step1) Clear APP defaults:

On your android device go to Settings > Apps.

In here for each APP listed below, click on the APP, scroll down and click on "Open by default", then click on "clear defaults":

a. Gallery
b. Showbox
c. VLC player
d. Any other player you may have (such as MX player)

Step 2) Reboot your device after these settings

Step 3) Open Showbox, select the content you wish to play. On the quality selection popup (e.g. 360, 480, 720), click on the "3 dotted vertical line" (options) and make sure that the player selected is "OTHER PLAYER...". Server and subtitles can be set at your discretion.

Step 4) Play the content by selecting the quality as mentioned above (e.g. 360/480/720) and click on "Watch Now". When prompted with "Open with", select your player (in my case VLC) followed by "ALWAYS" in the bottom right of this popup window.

SUCCESS! All your content for Showbox should now play in your selected player.

Note: You may have to select the VLC > ALWAYS on more than one occasion. Annoying but at least it plays in my preferred player :)

Android Smartphone device won't connect/display in Windows Media Player 'x' [SOLUTION]

Today I was wanting to transfer my music from my Windows Media Player to my Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 (GT-18160) Android smartphone.

Yet after connecting my smartphone via USB Cable to my PC; it wasn't recognising it as a device. It was recognising it as a camera and I was able to view the files within Windows Explorer so it wasn't a connection problem. However the device would not show within Windows Media Player (version 11 in my case on a 32 bit Windows XP system).

After Googling around I discovered majority of people are having similar problems.

The fix for most cases is you have to install Samsung's software called "Kies". Also install the codec option - really important bit!

After a reboot and connecting my device this time around Windows Explorer recognised the device fully AND Windows Media Player also found the device.

I was then able to sync my music from within Windows Media Player library (see here for aid on syncing your music with Windows Media Player).

OTHER FIXES:

- You need to make sure you have Windows XP SP2 or above!

- You need to make sure you have Windows Media Player 10 or above! Get the latest version here.

Cannot download Flight Plan in vroute? [Solution]

Hi all,

Not sure if any of you out there are flight sim enthusiasts; probably some of you are!

If like me you've recently had problems whereby you've chosen a flight; selected export, chosen your flight time and aircraft, date etc ... then clicked on the button which creates the FP ... only to have internet explorer open and suddenly close ... there is another way to download the flight plan :)

Simply right click on the link within vroute and select 'Save target as ...'; then save the flight plan to your flight plan folder and away you go as normal.

hope this helps someone because it irritated me for hours today.

Transform Windows XP / Vista into Windows 7 =)

Have you ever wanted to have Windows 7 features for Windows XP / Vista?

Features such as: aero snap, aero peek, aero shake, Windows 7 boot screen, Windows 7 login screen, Windows 7 sounds, Windows 7 cursors, Windows 7 taskbar, Windows 7 wallpaper, Windows 7 sidebar, Windows 7 progress dialogue box, Windows 7 shutdown / log off / restart dialogue box, Windows 7 about windows box, Windows 7 system properties dialogue box, Windows 7 volume control window PLUS loads more mods!

Well here is a post which can help you do just that !

You can pick what features you have. I personally only use a few.

To learn how, follow this XP tutorial / Vista tutorial by VG. I take no personal credit for this tutorial and did not see the need to do my own as the latter is just that good =)


IMPORTANT NOTES:

You can install Tuneup Utilities to easily apply the login and boot screens; then once applied you can uninstall Tuneup Utilities and the screens will stay ... however best test that they work / you want to keep them before uninstalling Tuneup Utilities ;)


ISSUES / FIXES:

1) QT Addressbar does not work well with the Windows 7 themes due to activation of the x-mouse features ... read below to understand and even fix this issue.

There is a bug in which the QT Addressbar does not work correctly when installed along side the Theme(s) ... i.e. When you select the first option and then scroll over the drop down menu for the directories, the mouse pointer 'focuses' the window and brings it to the front (i.e. activating it).

TO FIX this install Microsoft PowerTool Tweak UI and under the mouse settings; X-Mouse ... untick 'Activate follows mouse (X-Mouse). Click 'Apply' and the setting should be instant; if not simply restart =)

This then allows you to have the proper functionality of the QT Addressbar.

You can always use the ALT + TAB feature to change focus to a window of choice =)

Cannot send emails using Thunderbird (with a Yahoo email address) FIX !

Well, if like me you are using Thunderbird and Yahoo mail; you may well be having some issues sending emails out and getting the following two email errors:

1) An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Transaction failed: Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information. Please check the message and try again.

Followed by another error message ...

2) Sending of message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to the SMTP server smtp.mail.yahoo.com was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again or contact your administrator.

Cause: Unknown ! Something to do with Yahoo mail servers / Thunderbird itself? There is a lot of controversy around on the web about who is to actually blame for this.

Temporary fixes: until this is solved by either Thunderbird or Yahoo:

Go with which ever solution you feel most comfortable with.


1) The first change you can do is within Thunderbird go to Preferences > Advanced > General > and click on 'Config Editor'.

2) Find/Search for the setting "msgcompose.background_color". Set the value by double clicking on the value box from #FFFFF (white) ... to ... #FFFFFE (tiny bit darker than white).

Now I found that this worked; however if you still find yourself having problems there is one more setting you can change to send the mail successfully:

3) You can send the composed email as a Rich Text (HTML only) or a Plain Text only email. During the composition of a message (or forwarding of a message), select the 'Options > Format ... ' and then select either Plain or Rich Text. Try sending as HTML first to see if it sends. If not then you will need to send it as a plain text only email.

NOTE: If you are finding you have to send all your emails as 'Plain Text Only'; you can set Thunderbird up to send all emails (including those that you forward) as plain text.

To set this in Thunderbird open 'Tools > Options > Composition > General > Send Options > Set the drop down menu to 'Convert the message to plain text'. Click 'OK' on both windows and then restart Thunderbird to make sure the changes take effect straight away.

Any problems please comment. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

Also ... a lot of people I found whilst researching this switched to a GMAIL account.

Resources used:

Yahoo Answers

and ...

MozillaZine Forums

SOLUTION: Systray \ System Tray icons missing on taskbar in Windows XP?

Have you ever found that one of your system tray icons is missing when you boot up Windows XP?

The system tray (in short systray, also called taskbar notification area) is the icon strip located to the far right end of the task bar, next to the clock. Some Windows XP installations have a defect, in that some systray icons disappear or, rather, do not appear, when the system is booted when a user logs on. The problem is even more common on systems with autologon. The most frequently affected icons seem to be the speaker icon (sound volume) and the power / energy icon if on a laptop (notepad).

I had my sound icon missing for a while on my desktop but recently I found a very easy way to correct the problem. Very annoying as when ever I wanted to increase or decrease the volume I would have to go into Control Panel; Sounds and Audio Devices.

To fix this, simply download and run (on the affected computer) the installer below (after unzipping it using 7zip or what ever you use to unzip zip files):

http://nars.aloj.net/download/shell32patch.zip