Head Tale

I consider myself pretty computer savvy but occasionally there are weird glitchy things that happen in the world of computers, technology and online services that I either can’t figure out (or if I can find a quick workaround, I realize it’s just as easy to use the workaround as spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix the problem.)

I know you’re probably thinking “Why don’t you just Google the answer?”  Sure, that works sometimes but you’d be surprised how many times you get all kinds of results that aren’t relevant or from people who have the same problem but their solution doesn’t work for you or the question has been posted but no one has a solution.

Anyhow, here’s a list of some of the things that are on my list of things I need to figure out…

1. Part of what inspired this post is that my blog has been crashing quite a bit lately.  I haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out why but suspect that maybe a plug-in is causing some problem.  I’m usually on my site enough (or my mother-in-law lets me know!) so that these outages don’t last very long.  If I had a huge readership or advertising dollars rolling in, I’d probably worry more about it.  But instead of spending time un-installing and testing every plug-in the site has, I’d rather spend time with my kids! 😉
2.  A recent Thunderbird update means that a few of my filters don’t work anymore.  Most of them still do and if I manually run the filters, everything goes where it should so I haven’t spent much time trying to figure it out.
3. I have no idea why this happened  but recently, iPhoto stopped auto-splitting events when I import new photos (yes, the “Auto-split Events” button is checked.)  The new pictures are auto-split when I look at them as Events but previously, they’d also show as separate events in the “Last Import” window which is where I’d rename them.  I can still do so in the Events or Photos view but since I often import from different devices at the same time (Shea’s iPhone, my iPhone, our iPad, our regular camera, our waterproof camera) it can be a pain scanning through the full list of Events to find ones that aren’t titled.
4. Speaking of Shea’s phone, she’s got an older model and I made the mistake of updating to the latest version of iOS 7 which has really slowed down her phone a lot.  I’ve tried a couple tricks to speed it up again but still regret ever doing that.  (She’s due for a new phone anyhow but is trying to hold on until Apple releases the iPhone 6.)
5. I use IFTTT for a variety of automated functions and for the past few months, I get regular e-mail updates that an IFTTT recipe that auto-saves my Facebook statuses to Google Drive has been shut off.  I have no idea what triggers this – definitely nothing I’m doing intentionally.  I click through when I get the e-mail, re-activate the recipe and I’m on my way again.  But so frustrating when you have absolutely no idea why something like this is happening.
6. Going back to iPhoto, it just seems *really* slow to load in general.  I’ve taken it to the Apple Store in Winnipeg and the Apple Store in Edmonton and they haven’t been able to figure out why.  Their best advice is to add more memory or only run iPhoto when other programs aren’t running but both of those solutions are less than ideal.

Those are a few off the top of my head – I’m sure there’s a bunch of others that are so minor, they don’t even register most of the time.  It’s mostly when it’s something I work with regularly – e-mail, iPhoto, my smartphone and blog – that gets glitchy that you get frustrated.