My first experience in Airbnb in Vancouver

I tried my first Airbnb just a few days ago and would like to share my experience which might be useful for some especially for those interested to give Airbnb a try for the first time.

Airbnb is actually someone’s place. From what I heard, house owners in Vancouver can only offer their place on Airbnb if the owner is already living there. So don’t get surprised if someone is living in the same floor as yours! But we actually got the whole floor (downstairs) and the owner was living upstairs. They were quite and honestly I didn’t notice if someone is living there.

We rented a place not actually within Vancouver city but close to it, Squamish. It’s located North side and is around an hour drive from downtown Vancouver. Squamish has lots of big houses and our Airbnb place was large as well. It had a huge kitchen in which you could fit three queen size beds! A large screen TV was in the living room. Usually, you can’t find these kind of TV’s in hotel rooms and also it was connected to Netflix which is also not available in hotels.

Towels were provided with shampoo, soap, dish washer soap, and any washing necessities. I thought we needed our own towel but hopefully, clean towels were available in the bathroom. Even they had a laundry (both washer and dryer) but not dish washer. It was a good experience to wash dishes by hand!

Additionally, they had a large yard and a fire place in the middle. Sadly, it was August when fire ban is in place in Vancouver so we were not permitted to use it. But I’m pretty sure we could use it any time of the year without fire ban. The yard was large enough to play Frisbee.

Unexpectedly, it was a better experience than a hotel and the owner provided everything we needed. We had a good sleep on a clean bed.

The only drawback is lack of communication with the owner. For example, when we got to the house it was pretty dark and it took us time to find the door. The lock was also tricky to open. We couldn’t find someone to ask these. The owner was on the top floor and the only communication method was thru text which is slow and not efficient.

They had also a desk which was perfect place to work a few hours of web application projects and Excel jobs.
As a whole, it was a good experience and I would try Airbnb in Vancouver again.

Best place for programming in Vancouver BC

Are you a freelancer or a programmer looking for a place to do your job? ​I am also a programmer and part of my job is web application programming in PHP. I usually do coding at home, or office or other places. My favorite place is not actually my home, office or coffee shops!

I have a portable monitor which can get connected to my laptop by USB. It’s easy to carry so I could turn anywhere with Internet to an office by setting up my monitor, keyboard and mouse!

I tried programming in different places even in coffee shops. However, it is hard to find a power plug in most of the Coffee shops especially Tim Hortons. In Starbucks, tables are usually small and hardly a laptop with monitor can fit. I also do Excel VBA programming so I prefer to work with at least 20″ screen to view my entire excel spreadsheet. That’s why I carry a portable monitor.

At home, I am usually too relaxed so not much work can be done. Everyday programming at office can also get boring. Among all these places I prefer programming at library.

In the library, it’s quite and peaceful to focus on  programming. Desks are large enough and even seats are more comfortable than coffee shops seats. Library has multiple levels and huge space so I could seat at a different places everyday. I even met different people at libraries like business men who use library as their office too!

But there are many libraries in Vancouver. Which library in Vancouver is good for programming? The worst library for programming I believe is down town library because it’s crowded and actually dirty! I enjoy coding in North Vancouver library because it’s new and has a good view. The only drawback of this library is difficulty in finding a place to seat near a power plug especially during school exams. I also enjoy the libraries in West Vancouver, Lynn valley (North Vancouver) and metrotown in Burnaby. I haven’t tried all  libraries in Vancouver but I believe all of them should be good for programming except the one in down town.

In conclusion, home, office and coffee shops are not suitable for programming or freelancers. In my opinion, best places for programming include libraries especially new libraries such as the ones in North Vancouver.

Exporting SharePoint List to Excel But Getting Error “An unexpected error has occurred.”

I am an Excel developer and tried to export a custom SharePoint List unto Excel. On the page, I clicked List tab and then Export to Excel (screen shot is available below).

Then my Excel 2016 opened up; however, an ugly error came up saying, “An unexpected error has occurred. Changes to your data cannot be saved.” The error is because the connection cannot be made with your SharePoint site which requires authentication.

I found a solution to force authentication of Excel by using >File >Open >Other Web Locations >Browse and entering SharePoint site information. Now I tried again and worked!

Please keep in mind that you might get another error if you’re using older version of Excel. I tried to export SharePoint list to Excel 2007 but I got error, “You do not have adequate permissions to modify the list. Changes to your data cannot be saved. ”

I do not have much experience with older version of Excel. If you know a method to fix this issue, feel free to leave a comment, please.

Error 406 – Not Acceptable on Shared Hosting

We are a web application development company and some or our applications based on Laravel. We were running a web application on chrome but I got Error 406 – Not Acceptable, in the Console. In this blog, I share my experience how I ended up fixing it.

The application is based on Laravel and Vue.js framework on front end. I got this error during some requests from front-end. The content of this error was, “Generally a 406 error is caused because of a request has been blocked by Mod Security. If you believe that your request has been blocked by mistake please contact the website owner.” This error could be displayed on Chrome Console or on Network tab.

My application is hosted by inmotionhosting. I believe inmotion has disabled some of requests (other than POST and GET requests) so this error is raised. Your hosting can turn off Mod Security on your hosting to fix this issue; however, your website might get more vulnerable, for example it might cause unauthorized changes to your site. A better solution would be not to use requests that are not blocked by your hosting, or you could get a virtual server!

As I know, shared hostings cannot turn Mod security off for only part of your website or some directories. They need to disable for the whole hosting account. To do this, you could directly contact your hosting and just ask to turn Mod Security off. On shared hosting, website owners usually don’t have access to manage Mod Security, so it’d be better to contact them.

UPDATE: I found out on inmotion hosting blog that “the PUT and DELETE functions are not enabled on shared server due to the security flaws involved with these functions.” Well! This would be frustrating while developing a web application.

I included screenshot of my application displaying Error 406 at Console.

 

 

Is your email not delivered due to spam URL in content?

I sent an email today from BSUPERIOR SYSTEM LTD. but it got flagged as spam and I got “Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender” error. I received an automatic email response which is copy/pasted below.

I contacted my host to check if my domain name is blacklisted. Hopefully, blacklist wasn’t the issue. The problem was simple and the mail delivery failure was due to including my website name in email signature. It’s interesting that some mail servers block email if the domain name is included in the email signature. Anyhow, if you get the same issue as mine, you could remove all URLs from your email including the ones in your email signature. And then try again!

Removing website name from email signature is not professional. As an employee of a company, it’s a good practice to mention our company info in the email. I tried to find some workarounds but no luck. But if anyone knows better solutions, please feel free to share it in the comment section.

 

 

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  some@example.com
    host mail.example.com [2.72.37.3]
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    554 rejected due to spam URL in content

 

Enter and Back Buttons Sometimes Doesn’t Work on Dell Laptop Keyboard

It frequently happened to me that some buttons stop functioning on Dell laptop such as Enter and Back button. The reason that this happened to me was pretty simple, my laptop gets hot fast. Some buttons stop working at high temperature and I’m not sure about the technical facts behind it.

Whenever this happens to me, I turn off my laptop and leave it for some time to cool down. And then the whole buttons on the keyboard start working again!

Please make sure to prevent your laptop from getting hot. It might burn your memory or CPU.

Is your dell laptop not charging?

My Dell laptop battery stopped charging at some point. I share my experience, how I ended up fixing!

When my Windows is started, the battery is displayed with a plug so power connection works. However, when I click the battery, it says, “Not charging”. I got a screenshot as below.

The reason my battery wasn’t charging was due to faulty AC power adapter. The solution was easy but might be a little pricey if your laptop is not under warrantee! I replaced my AC adapter and now battery is charging as it used to be. My laptop was still under warrantee so I contacted the warrantee center and they mailed me a new AC adapter.

How to check whether your AC adapter is in a good condition?

When I turned on my computer, I got, “Alert! The AC power adapter wattage and type cannot be determined. the battery may not charge. The system will adjust the performance to match the power available.” I used to press F1 and my Windows started normally; however, the battery wasn’t charging.

In addition, when I restarted my laptop, I check BIOS setting. Under battery information in BIOS settings, the AC Adapter is set to unknown. As it says, the adapter has some problems and is not recognizable by the laptop.

If you are getting similar errors, probably the quickest fix is replacing your adapter. However, please keep in mind you might get this error due to other reasons like faulty power jack. I’m not sure how to check the condition of power jack. If you have some ideas of checking power jack, please feel free to share them in the comment section.

Please let me know in the comment section if replacing your AC adapter solved the issue.

 

 

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About me: I’m a web application developer and an Excel VBA programmer. In this blog, I’m sharing my technical problems and how I fix them!