Author Archives: Laz

Blizzard Hearthstone Blank Screen Not Responding FIX

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If you are trying to play Hearthstone, now in open BETA, and are having a problem where as soon as you hit the Play button the screen or window goes dark and the process in the task manager says it’s “Not Responding”, I may have a fix for you.

I had this very same problem and after no help from the forums or tech support, I figured it out myself. Really it was just basic troubleshooting. Getting to the part that helped me with the problem, I disabled my firewall and associated agents (I am running Avast Internet Security, one of the best), the game suddenly ran fine! Imagine that. That meant that the problem was with my firewall. Sure enough, I re-enabled everything and the game stopped working, went right back to the blank screen.

So, here is where the fix comes in. Even if you aren’t running Avast, this could be your problem regardless of what brand of firewall you are running. Check out what I found and see if you have the same problem with your firewall.

I went into the settings and in the application specific rules section, where firewall rules are associated with specific executable programs, I found rules for the Blizzard Agent, the Updater and many more, even the Hearthstone Setup executable. What I did not find was any rule for the Hearthstone game app at all! They had rules for everything but the game itself! So, I simply added a rule for the Hearthstone executable itself

C:\Program Files(x86)\Heartstone\Hearthstone.exe on my system

and then all went well after that, the game ran fine. The whole problem was that the game executable could not talk through the firewall. Once that was enabled, everyone was happy, including me! I hope that helps you with your problem.

Check Out Linux Mint

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Linux Mint Operating SystemI have to share something with everyone now. Anybody and everybody that knows me, knows that I am a die hard UNIX and Linux fan. I made the majority of my career managing UNIX and Linux boxes, with a server to admin ratio of sometimes 100 to 1. Everyone also knows that I am a die hard Debian fan, my distro of choice for my servers and my desktops is Debian, hands down. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t use or like other distributions, I mean every one has it’s place and purpose. I really dig Ubuntu and SuSE and I cut my teeth on Red Hat and CentOS just as an example.

That being said, the purpose of this post is to tell you about another distro that I just recently checked out called Linux Mint. I know a lot of people have found it since it is in the number one slot over at distrowatch. On the recommendation of my friend Steve, I tried it out and I have to tell you that I was absolutely blown away by it. It’s based on Ubuntu which itself based on Debian so right there is a plus in my book, it has a solid core and foundation, but that’s not what blew me away.

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Goodbye 2013 …

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… and hello 2014 More hints. Happy New Year everyone and I hope it’s a great one for all of us!

Get Your Internet IP Address Fast And Free!

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Network Connection InformationJust in case you need to know your Internet facing IP address, I have setup a new page just for the purpose of showing you that information and more, right down to your longitude and latitude just in case any of you are hiding some ICBM’s in your backyard and want to reach out and touch someone! So check it out, go to http://yerip.com and see what it has to say about you, and before you say it, I know this has already been done. There are other sights on the net that show you what your IP address is, but I wanted one that wasn’t going to display ads or have any ulterior motives, just quickly and cleanly providing a good service!

Create Your Site’s Favicon In One Step

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folderAre you working on a website? Do you want to do all of the creating and coding of the ‘favicon’ stuff by hand? Heck no, it’s a pain in the rear! No doubt you can do it but it takes a long time and it gets old after you do it a few bazillion times, right? So what’s a poor web developer to do? Well, check out this site: Faviconit.com! Upload one image, and press a button. Their site turns that not only into the regular favicon you need, but all of the variants for other systems, mobile, different browsers and more. Plus, you get the code that makes it all work too. Upload your image, hit the button, and you get a zip file with all of your goodies in it. Now, how much does this cost I hear you asking. Yet another great thing about this site, it is completely free!! So go check it out and off load some of your website setup work for a change! Enjoy!!

Post Link: http://faviconit.com

Quickly backup files with this bash script

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Bash ScriptThis is something that I use on a regular basis on all of my servers. How many times have you been ready to edit a file and either don’t make a backup copy or make one but by now are real tired of typing out copy one file to another name with a date stamp and blah blah blah. It’s not hard to do, but it gets old quick typing the same thing over and over again, plus you might not always name them the same thing or the same way, so now your backup files have different naming patterns and whatnot.

Don’t worry, I have an easy solution. I created a simple script to backup the file specified and append a time and date stamp to the end of it. I symlink this to the command ‘bu’ in someplace like /usr/bin so it’s always in the path of whatever user I might be (myself, root, backup, whoever?), and then POW, it’s easy to backup files plus they are always named the same way – you just type “bu filename”. Now, if you don’t like the way I name my file copies, feel free to customize this to suit your needs. Also, I currently have the script make the copy right next to the original file, but it would be easy to always copy the files to a backup directory somewhere if you wanted, the possibilities are endless!

OK, on to the script goodness:

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
  echo "No input given, stopping"
  exit
fi
 
YEAR=`date | awk '{print $6}'`
MONTH=`date | awk '{print $2}'`
DAY=`date | awk '{print $3}'`
TIME=`date | awk '{print $4}' | awk -F: '{print $1"-"$2"-"$3}'`
 
echo -n "Backing up the file named $1 ... "
/bin/cp -p $1 $1_${YEAR}.${MONTH}.${DAY}_${TIME} > /tmp/bu_run.log 2>&1
echo "done."

There you have it, a simple file backup script it bash that can save you time and many, many keystrokes. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think, or if you have any suggestions or improvements.