Archive for January, 2016

My Nexus 5 has an erratic touch screen that jumps all over the place

Sunday, January 17th, 2016

Symptom: The Nexus 5 Android smartphone occasionally registers touchscreen clicks in the wrong place or when a click was not requested.  Turning the screen off and back on in a normal touchscreen recalibration maneuver does not prevent it from recurring.

Solution: Unplug the Nexus 5 from the USB charging cable while using it, or use a ferrite core USB charger cable (the kind with a round “wart” on the cable). Don’t replace your touch screen, as some users have mistakenly done!

Long answer: An erratic touchpad that seems to jump all over the screen is a problem with electromagnetic interference when the Nexus 5 is connected to a USB charger. There is a long Google bug thread here. The problem will not be fixed.

Posted in Computer Hardware Interfacing, Embedded, Linux/UNIX/Open Source, PC Hardware/Consumer Electronics | 1 Comment »

Solve WordPress FeedWordPress and Broken Link Checker Plugin Errors

Friday, January 1st, 2016

I ran into the following problems while helping with a friend’s WordPress blog.

  • The FeedWordPress plugin, when updating a feed (either scheduled or on demand), would throw an XML parser error.

Feed Error: [http://abc.com/feed/rss/] update returned error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: Attribute without value at line 37, column 42

If I fetched the same feed URL in a browser or with wget, it worked and produced a valid XML file (also, one that had far fewer than 37 lines). Mystery! Also,

  • The Broken Link Checker plugin shows a “403 Forbidden” in the Status column for some webpage, http://abc.com/page.html.

But again, if I fetched the same supposedly failing URL by other means, there was no problem.

So, how could I find the cause?
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Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source | No Comments »