Harry Potter fans, we’ve got only four days left to register at Pottermore. I bet you were just like me who waited in agony for the registration to open for a few hours per day and searched high and low for the right answer to find the magical quill. Some were lucky enough to register while some faced a rather peculiar problem at the last step of the registration process.

How many of you encountered this annoying message?

When I first reached the last step, I was thrilled. I happily chose a username and clicked the register button but to my dismay, this annoying little reminder popped out of nowhere. I thought it was my browser so I did the registration process again on a different one and again on the last web browser I had on my laptop but they were all the same. It was frustrating. I thought I had to wait for another day to register. Until I decided to change my internet connection from smartbro to globe (my phone has wifi capabilities), refreshed my browser and there it was. The captcha that had been missing for an hour. If I only knew that my smartbro had got to do with the problem, I would have had saved myself an hour’s worth of frustration. =)

If you’re also facing the same problem, try switching to another internet service provider. As per my experience, the captcha disappears when I use the smartbro prepaid dongle (I verified this when after I had successfully registered, I refreshed the other open registration form in another browser and the captcha again disappeared). Using globe’s internet service, however, does wonders. =)

Best of luck everyone! See you at Pottermore!

I hope I was able to help. Now, excuse me while I search for cash advance sites.

This is how Marty’s home screen looks like now. Pardon my sickeningly cute wallpaper. I have developed fondness for black and white creatures which included certain kinds of cows and pandas, you see. I recently upgraded my HTC Desire Marty to Gingerbread after running on Froyo for a good number of months now. Before you ask me how I was able to upgrade to Gingerbread despite news that the development of the platform for the HTC Desire is still in the running, my beloved Marty is rooted. Thank goodness for geniuses over at XDA Developers forum! I don’t have to wait my entire life for the official Gingerbread release for my beloved HTC Desire. *thumbs up*

I did not root the phone myself. I bought it at two-weeks old from another tech-savvy friend who rooted the phone before it landed on my hands. When I first tried my hands on flashing a custom ROM some time back, I was really nervous; afraid of bricking my phone and turning a good piece of technology into a very expensive paperweight. The experiment was a success. Months later, I attempted to do another upgrade to the much-talked about platform. To my dismay, I discovered that most of the experts at XDA forums are advising against using ROM Manager to upgrade your phone. Oh crap. Now, I had to do it the old-fashioned way. Much like any noobs at this flashing thing, I wasted almost an hour trying to figure out how to get past that cellphone-with-a-red-exclamation-mark-inside-a-triangle screen. I was nervous and frustrated at the same time. I followed every bit of instruction there was: Press the volume key while turning on the phone, choose hboot from the menu and another menu will come up. Alas. I always end up stuck on that screen. With nowhere else to go I ended up removing my batteries and starting all over again. That went on for almost an hour (I’m so thankful that I didn’t mess up my old software!) – until I got so frustrated that I pressed on the up volume button while on that screen. Voila! There it was. The boot-up screen that I had been looking for! Turns out that I had to press the up volume to load the correct hboot screen to proceed to the next steps. Haha! If only I had the patience to scour through the threads!

Marty is running on AdamG’s Oxygen Custom ROM (Version 2.1.5) which I like very much except that there’s too few bundled apps included that I even had to download facebook and twitter apps from the market (I believe that unlike dental supplies, which are totally random btw, facebook and twitter are two of the must-have Android apps nowadays.) AdamG’s Oxygen ROM is consistently being updated. I’ve had my phone running on Oxygen for two days and there has been two updated versions already since I first installed it. No worries though ‘coz it also comes bundled with its own Oxygen menu where you can upgrade from one version to another with just a single click. Don’t you just love it? It’s so hassle-free! (and noob-friendly too!) Hehe.

So I totally forgot that I had a blog for a few days and when I came back, to my horror, I couldn’t seem to get through the dashboard. The login page was good and I supplied the correct username and password but I couldn’t seem to access the admin.php page of my blog. I thought it was an isolated situation – until I found out I couldn’t access my other blog’s admin.php too. WTF was wrong?

I initially thought it had something to do with my using Google Chrome’s Incognito window so I switched back to the regular Google Chrome to no avail. I also tried logging in using Firefox but then faced the same problem. I thought that my wordpress files are probably fucked up so I upgraded to the latest wordpress. Sure, I was able to get through the login page and was even able to update my database but the dashboard was still inaccessible and the weird 404 “Page Not Found” screen still stared back at me. The hell?!

Of course, during such dire situations as this, one’s instinct is to checkout trusty Google for answers. It’s like searching for gold coins amidst a stack of hay. It was difficult to find a reliable and working solution to my problem. A good friend, Leyn of Sosyalera.net told me there was probably some problem with my server so off I went to email them. But of course, it didn’t occur to me that it’s a weekend and offices are close. Bright move, right? Until finally I stumbled upon this thread at wordpress support. Went over through it and tinkered with my admin.php as the poster suggested and viola! I was finally able to access my dashboard once again. =D

For those of you who will encounter the odd “404 Page Not Found” in the future while trying to access your wordpress dashboard, fret not: deleting a few lines from your blog’s admin.php file from the wp-admin folder seems to do the trick. The line to look for is this:

if ( current_user_can( ‘manage_options’ ) )
@ini_set( ‘memory_limit’, apply_filters( ‘admin_memory_limit’, ’256M’ ) );

I hardly understand programming language so I appreciate if someone would be nice enough to explain what this line does and how it can suddenly wreak havoc on your comfy little space on the web.

Well, that’s enough geekiness for now. Tata!

I’ve already forgotten the last time I logged in to my yahoo account to edit my information. Yes, I am fairly active with YM but I still use Gmail as my primary account just because I feel that Yahoo is already too populated. So, when I logged in today, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Yahoo has put their identity theft protection service to the next level.

I’ve always thought their old method for verifying users was too easy to break. Now, unless you really know the person eerily well, (or a stalker perhaps?) you will be having a very hard time breaking into their account. Kudos to Yahoo!

Here’s to you stalkers!