This is the blog for Heart Computers in Eugene, OR. We use this to post computer tricks and stories from our job which we hope you find useful or at least funny. Be sure to check out our Facebook page for more great, easy ideas to keep your computer running well for years. Click on the links at the top to find out more about our services and ethos.
Review of Freelogoservices.com/Logomix for Business Cards
This is just a quick review of freelogoservices.com, we recently used them to design some quick promotional cards for our business. This site looked very sketchy to us, and the online review are all either 5 stars (“This place is a great place to design and print things”) or 1 star (“They stole my money and their product are horrible”). The deluge of negative reviews certainly didn’t give us much confidence in shopping there. As with review sites like TrustPilot and BBB, most of the reviewers hadn’t reviewed other businesses, so the reviews weren’t particularly reputable. So we’re posting this in case anybody else is trying to research this company.
We only purchased the design, not the cards themselves, so we can’t speak to the quality of the cards. The design files are delivered in PDF format, which is not the best if you want to edit them later. They don’t give you the files in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
We paid with Paypal so we could dispute the transaction if it didn’t go well, but we’re pleased with the cards we got. The way they process payments, instead of just charging once, they have you setup the ability for them to charge again in the future, which we quite frankly find sketchy. Just go into your PayPal account when you’re done and cancel that recurring charge ability so they can’t charge you in the future without you re-authorizing it.
Review of iPlum Android App
We use VoIP services to power our business, so we tried out the iPlum App for Android and here’s our experience. Overall, we weren’t very happy with it, but it shows promise and if it works well on your phone it can be a decent choice.
Pricing: 3/5
The pricing for iPlum is great, and that’s about all we can say. The price per minute is competitive. Unlike many other virtual phone number providers which have a minimum $5 or $10 per month fee, you just pay for what you use at iPlum. For many startups and small businesses, they wouldn’t even use $10 a month in minutes or need unlimited minutes.
The only downside on pricing was that it cost $20 to port your number out to another service. That feels more like being held hostage than a reasonable fee to cover their costs. Other providers we’ve used charged nothing or at most $5. They were kind enough to refund this when we had troubles with the app.
Bugs & Support = 2/5
The app just plain didn’t work on our Android OnePlus One we tested it on running Lineage OS and stock. Sometimes after 5 minutes, sometimes after an hour, but always eventually, the app would just “time out”. It couldn’t send or receive any new texts or calls until we force quit it or restarted the phone. Other VoIP apps worked fine so it was something with iPlum specifically. We provided detailed debug information to their support team and waited a week for a fix with no luck. Also, scrolling in the SMS area was almost totally broken. Sometimes it would jump pages of text when dragging a line or two in any direction.
Features & Privacy = 3/5
The app can text and call from a second line over wifi or a data connection and it supports MMS which is not that common among their competitors. It provides no feature to import/export your SMS messages, which can be a problem for businesses that need to prove what happened in a conversation with a client.
The app is constantly sending analytics back to a Russian analytics provider, but scarier still, it requests root access! Why does a VoIP app need root? We asked iPlum but they didn’t tell us.
WordPress How to Fix: Warning: printf() [function.printf]: Too few arguments in template-tags.php
If your theme is throwing errors in WordPress, the best way to fix it is of course to fix the underlying issue in the theme. For some, this fix is outside their technical ability or they don’t want to introduce a fix that will get over-written in the next theme update. It’s always helpful to let a developer know if their theme is having issues, as they may not know!
For a quick fix, you can tell WordPress to just not print any errors it gets and instead just write them to the logs.
Go to your wp-config.php file (in the root of your wordpress directory) and find the line that says:
define('WP_DEBUG')
Be sure to change the WP_DEBUG value to false and add the following lines below it:
error_reporting(0);
@ini_set('display_errors', 0);
These additions to your wp-config.php file will prevent wordpress from displaying ANY errors, so use with caution!
Having issues with your WordPress site? Contact us for a free consultation & quote!