How to Fix Your Android Phone If the Google Play Store Won't Install Apps

I was recently talking to someone who was complaining that his Nexus 5 wouldn't install an app. He said that the progress bar just sat there, not showing a percentage or changing the status to install. It turns out that this is a common problem that many people have had while using their phones.

If you are experiencing this problem, there is usually a very simple way to fix it. Most of the time, people installed an app that was quite large, and didn't realize that they set it to download on WiFi only. To fix this, you must either connect your phone to a WiFi spot or go and cancel the download.

1. Open the Google Play Store
2. Click up at the top left to open the side menu, and go to the "My apps" option
3. Look under the "Downloading..." section, and manually click into each of these apps and click the X beside the status bar to cancel them.

And there you have it. Doing this will remedy the problem for the majority of people. If this does not fix your problem, another solution many people do is to go into the app settings and force close the Google Play store and uninstall the updates. This is just a bit more complicated, and since I've never had to do it on my Nexus 5, I'll leave it at that and let you do the research if you have to try something else.

Crunchbang Linux: Enabling Tap-to-click For Synaptic Touchpads

I recently installed Crunchbang Linux on an old laptop, and realized that the tap-to-click on the touchpad wasn't working properly.

It is quick and easy to enable this option. First, we want to copy some files before we edit them or the system will likely end up writing over any changes in a future update. So, open the command line and enter:

cd /usr/share/X11/

Now, enter:

sudo cp xorg.conf.d/ /etc/X11/ -R
cd /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

sudo nano 50-synaptics.conf

Now, in the part of the file that looks like this:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"

we want to add Option "TapButton1" "1"

like this:

# Example xorg.conf.d snippet that assigns the touchpad driver
# to all touchpads. See xorg.conf.d(5) for more information on
# InputClass.
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, your distribution will likely overwrite
# it when updating. Copy (and rename) this file into
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d first.
# Additional options may be added in the form of
#   Option "OptionName" "value"
#
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "TapButton1" "1"

# This option is recommend on all Linux systems using evdev, but cannot be
# enabled by default. See the following link for details:

.

.

.

To exit nano, just hit control-x and then type y and hit enter.

Now all that is left to do is restart the X11 system. You can just log out and log back in to restart it (or control-alt-backspace, not sure if that works on this distro).

Have fun breathing new life into your old computers with Crunchbang Linux!

Formatting A Flash Drive with an HFS+ Filesystem and Putting it Back to Fat32

Recently I tried to use a flash drive that I had used TransMac on in the past. Since TransMac had expired, I could not format the flash drive from within there. Luckily, Windows has Diskpart, a command prompt tool that makes getting my flash drive back to fat32 relatively painless. Here is how to do it. (Warning: Do at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damage you may cause):

Step 1: Go to run, type in cmd, and then, when Command Prompt opens,
type:diskpart

Step 2: We must now find the disk # corresponding to the flash drive. To do this,
type:list disk
There will be a number of disks that pop up, depending on how many hard drives you have. If your usb drive is plugged into the computer, one of the numbers will be your USB drive. It shouldn't be hard to identify since it is probably much smaller than the rest of the hard drives. Just really make sure it is your USB drive (make sure the size corresponds to the size of your USB drive).

Step 3: Now that we have your USB drive disk number,
type:select disk #

Step 4:To see the partitions on the USB drive,
type:list partition
If you don't know what  a partition is, you probably should not proceed. Anything past this point could result in the loss of the data on your computer if used improperly.

Step 5: Really be sure that the partitions make sense and that you do have your USB drive selected. Then, type:clean
This cleans all the configuration information off the drive.

Step 6: type:create partition primary

Step 7:Assuming you want a fat32 filesystem,
type:format fs=fat32 quick

And that's all there is to it. If you check in "My Computer", you will once again see a flash drive, unlike when it was formatted with an HFS+ filesystem.