How to exclude YouTube videos from Google Search Results
Sometimes you google something, and all you get is a huge list of YouTube videos. In many situations, that’s just not what I want. Thankfully there’s an easy way to exclude YouTube videos from your Google Search Results! All we need to do is add ” -youtube” to our search query! That’s without the quotes, but with the leading space to separate -youtube from your search query. Google accepts various parameters within the query string. The often overlooked ones are + to include a search term, and – to exclude...
read moreHow to type a £ British Pound sign on a US keyboard (Windows and Mac)
I no longer have a UK keyboard on most of my everyday computers, so there’s no obvious way for me to press the British Pound £ sign anymore (much like the € Euro sign). Thankfully there are reactively easy ways to make this happen without having to resort to switching keyboard drivers. I’ll undoubtedly forget 10 minutes from now, so I thought I might write it down somewhere sensible. If you fear the same, bookmark this page now macOS On a UK Mac keyboard, SHIFT + 3 brings up the £ British Pound sign. I was excited to see that on a...
read moreHow to activate your PayPal Debit Card (web interface)
I’ve been sent a new PayPal US Business Debit Card. I’ve been using it for many years, and this one was a replacement for the previous one that had expired. PayPal conveniently give you the option to activate it via the web browser (on desktop), and in previous years this was a very easy process. Now, in October 2020, after the interface has been redesigned what feels like every week, I had trouble funding where to do it, and thought I’d share what worked for me. PayPal included a sticker on the card explaining that...
read moreHow to install Unreal Engine 4 on CentOS 7
I usually write about Unreal Engine over on my other website, because it tackles more 3D related topics – but compiling the engine from source is a bit more “blood and gore” thing so I thought it best placed here with all the other Linux topics. Anyway… Today we’re installing Unreal Engine on a CentOS 7 system. The latest version at the time of writing is 4.22.3 to be exact. Linux knowledge and a GitHub account are required, and your GitHub account needs to be linked against your EPIC Games account. While the...
read moreHow to ignore a folder in GitHub Desktop
I had a whole folder that I didn’t want to include in my project. Although I like the desktop client, I did not like the idea of having to select several files and have the app add them all to my .gitignore file. There had to be an easier way, like there is from the command line. And of course there is, I just didn’t know what it was. If you’re in the same boat, then you’re in luck – because here’s how you ignore a whole folder in the GitHub Desktop App (works on Windows and macOS). On the main menu at the...
read moreHow to install an rpm file on CentOS
On extremely rare occasions (LOL) we get precompiled binaires we can install on our Linux systems. Depending on the distributions, we may end up with an rpm file. I always forget how to install them when this happens – probably it happens so very rarely. Here’s how we can do that. Installing rpm files with yum Yum can deal with both local and remote precompiled rpm files. For files already on our system, we can call this: yum localinstall yourfile.rpm Instead of a local filename, we can also pass a URL like so: yum localinstall...
read moreDid you know: Windows 10 has an Emoji Picker? 😮
I’ve often wished that I could bring up an Emoji Picker in Windows just as easily as I can use it on macOS, where it’s been available for years. All I need to do there is press CTRL + CMD + Space, and I’ll get a window with little graphic icons. iOS even has a whole Emoji Keyboard that can be added and used just as easily. But Windows? Not without additional headaches. Well until that secret Emoji Picker arrived with an update in 2018. How did I miss that? Either way, all we need is to press WIN + . (as in the Windows key...
read moreHow to cancel you Amazon Prime Video Channels
I really like the how Amazon let you add new channel subscriptions to the existing Prime Video library. Julia and I are having great fun channel hopping through various British catalogues and catch up on UK telly. So far we’ve had Acorn TV, PBS and Britbox. What we don’t particularly like is that certain shows seem to move without notice from one provider to another. Programmes that were available on Channel X last week are now only available with a subscription to Channel Y. Bizarre – but that’s how it goes these...
read moreHow to calculate elapsed years from the current time in WordPress
I’ve implemented a neat feature on the front page of my other website: it calculates how long Julia and I have been married. Rather than this being one of those items I will certainly forget to update in the future, it uses a shortcode in the regular page text to calculate this value. The WordPress function current_time() returns the value of “right now”, and the rest is PHP maths under the hood. Here’s how I did it: <?php function guru_yearsmarried() { // dates to be calculated $dateMarried = strtotime(...
read moreHow to amend built-in WordPress Queries before execution
I wanted to update the order of posts shown on a regular category/tag archive page. At first I thought I’d have to write my own custom query for that, which would have meant a great deal of fudging an existing template that worked fine as it was. All I wanted to do was to amend a single parameter of the existing query WordPress was generating under the hood. Lo and behold, there’s the beautiful hook we can use for this very purpose: pre_get_posts(). This is fired after all parameters for a regular WordPress query are setup, but...
read moreLive on Twitter
@ConcernedApe Found a small bug in 1.5.3 today (Steam): when it rains on Ginger Island and you leave the professor’s tent, the audio effect stops. It’s still raining visually though, and the occasional animal noises remain. Hope this helps! 😍
