Thursday, August 20, 2020

How to avoid the dreaded "Last seen days ago" status on Skype

When you see the status  "Last seen days ago" for a Skype contact then you know there's trouble if you spoke to that contact recently. Your messages to that contact will be delayed by 20-30 minutes while he can send you messages instantly, making chats awkward.

This problem annoyed me too in recent months, but I stumbled on a solution: if you send your computer to sleep then always exit Skype first. If the computer goes to sleep while Skype is running then next time you awake it the "Last seen days ago" bug usually occurs.

So the solution is simply this: always log out of Skype before you sleep your computer.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Importing lots of data (SQL, etc.) into App Engine Datastore

Create a task queue with Cloud Tasks and a task handler in you app engine app which inserts the items in the database, then run a script on your local machine which reads the database and adds items into the task queue for insertion.

The queue can be configured, so your app engine app can handle the rate of tasks given to it.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Solution for ERROR: gcloud crashed (LookupError): unknown encoding: cp65001

I found that in the same command prompt where this worked before, suddenly I get this error.

If I close the command prompt and start a new one then it works again.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Point subdomain only to appengine app

  • go to appengine app settings, custom domains
  • use main domain
  • in the box type the subdomain
  • if you want to point only the subdomain then ignore the A and AAAA records and add only the CNAME record :
subdomain  points to  server given by google

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

CPanel Domains vs. Add On Domains difference

They are just different views. Domains show all kind of domains (alias, sub, add on) in one place while the Add On domains panel only shows add ons.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Adding Putty SSH key to Github

If you get an error then try this:


Here are some steps that are not at all clear when copy/pasting your public key. (For the record, I used Putty Key Generator for my keys.)
  • On the first line, enter ssh-rsa.
  • Make sure you add one space after ssh-rsa
  • When you copy/paste the key into the Key textbox it should preserve the \n characters (x0A). If you are using Notepad on Windows, you won't see these new lines until you copy the text to Github.
Notice on this screenshot, there's a space after ssh-rsa (See the cursor.) The public key text also includes three \n characters, so you can see the public key text bumps down to the next line three times in the textbox.SSH RSA Key
source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17051410