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fixing your desktop Google? Doh!

Gmail NEVER LOADS in Firefox? Cookies cleared, still get a blank screen? Try this…

After trying 4 or 5 things from this several-years-old page on Firefox’s support forums, I finally hit upon one that worked:

“For the heck of it tonight I clicked on Gmail in my calendar and it finally went to my gmail inbox.”

In my case, I just went to Google Groups, and clicked the Gmail link from the top navbar. Lo and behold – it works!

(this is after a week of having no way to access Gmail from my main web browser)

Why?

Looking at the problems other people have had, my guess is that Google’s code for running Gmail has some illegal (i.e. breaks-the-standard) bits in there that try to get around the browser standards by doing silly things with caching. Some of those are … fragile, perhaps … and tend to break easily. Over time, Google has added more and more unnecessary “features” to that code (e.g. I often have to wait for “connecting to google chat”, even though I have google chat permanently disabled and will never EVER use it) … there’s a *lot* of code in there these days; lots that could go wrong!

Normally, a Refresh of a page would fix this – that’s how the WWW was designed in the first place, as a core feature – but Google’s (my guess) playing so fast-and-loose that they’re *also* (deliberately? or accidentally?) bypassing the refresh. I can imagine several well-meaning reasons they might do that, but in the end I’d rather they stuck to the standards, instead of creating these “breaks permanently” problems for people.

And, of course, there’s no Google support for this problem. Once it strikes you, GOOD LUCK! (you’ll need it)

Categories
fixing your desktop

iMac crashed; wouldn’t turn on! (black screen)

At 27″, it’s too big to “simply” take in to the Apple store. In desperation, I followed this support article from Apple that’s for older iMacs and officially no longer supported.

Which is a pity, because in typical Apple fashion, they’ve deprecated an article that’s still accurate and useful. Following the steps in that article (copy/pasted below in case Apple ever deletes the webpage – something they’ve a habit of doing, sadly), my fans roared to life and the iMac REVIVED!

Resetting the SMU can resolve some computer issues such as not starting up, not displaying video, sleep issues, fan noise issues, and so on. If your computer still exhibits these types of issues even after you’ve restarted the computer, try resetting the SMU. To reset the SMU on one of these iMacs:

Turn off the computer by choosing Shut Down from the Apple menu, or by holding the power button until the computer turns off.

[NOTE — in my case, OS X had crashed completely, so there was no “turning off” to do – I had to yank the power cable out, and after that, it wouldn’t switch on]

Unplug all cables from the computer, including the power cord.
Wait 10 seconds.
Plug in the power cord while simultaneously pressing and holding the power button on the back of the computer.
Let go of the power button.
Press the power button once more to start up your iMac.

I then had to repeat the process – but with a *fifteen second* wait, as per the support page that seems to supercede the article above – to get the fans to shut up.