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DISABLE WINDOWS 10 FIREWALL NOTIFICATIONS

So, I have disabled my windows firewall….because it breaks some of the apps I run on the daily. Now that the firewall is disabled, about 15 seconds after using my computer (right after it turns on), i get this extremely annoying sound, and a very annoying popup alerting me to the fact that I have disabled it. Yes Microsoft, I know I disabled it…i dont like your firewall. It kinda sucks. Infact it is about the worst one I have ever used. So i keep it off. BUUUUT the notification continues to pester me on the daily….To disable windows 10 firewall notifications, I ran the following command set, and it worked for a bit…but the annoying popups persist. Hopefully these steps help you.

Click the Type Here to Search bar

Search for Control Panel

Select Security and Maintenance

Select Change Security and Maintenance Settings

Under the Security Messages section

Uncheck Network Firewall

Reboot, and watch to see it it is now fixed

IMAGEMAGICK CONVERTING PDF TO IMAGE FAILS [SOLVED]

When attempting to convert a PDF to a Tiff, using imagemagick, converting fails and the following error occurs:

convert-im6.q16: attempt to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy PDF' @ error/constitute.c/IsCoderAuthorized/408. convert-im6.q16: no images definedoutput.tiff’ @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3258.

To fix the error:
Open a Terminal

sudo bash

nano /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml

scroll down near the bottom of the file and change
policy domain=”coder” rights=”none” pattern=”PDF”
to
policy domain=”coder” rights=”read | write” pattern=”PDF”

Save, exit, and you can now convert the PDF to Tiff

“MySQL: Host ‘IP’ is not allowed to connect to this MariaDB server”

If you are trying to connect Power BI to a Mysql/MariaDB server and receive the error “MySQL: Host ‘IP’ is not allowed to connect to this MariaDB server” perform the following

Login into the server via ssh

sudo bash

mysql -u root -p

Enter your mysql password

Type in the following:

CREATE USER 'newusernamehere'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'newpassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'newusernamehere'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
CREATE USER 'newusernamehere'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'newpassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'newusernamehere'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Now retry your connection in Power BI using the new user and password you specified above

OPEN PORT 3306 ON UBUNTU 20.04 SERVER WITH MARIADB

Login to the server via ssh

sudo bash

nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf

Uncomment the line:
#port = 3306

Change 127.0.0.1 to the address of your server
bind-address = 192.168.1.100

Save the file, exit, and either reboot the server or restart the service.

PHPMYADMIN ERROR:

The error is as follows:
“The phpMyAdmin configuration storage is not completely configured, some extended features have been deactivated. Find out why.
Or alternately go to ‘Operations’ tab of any database to set it up there.”

When you click Find Out Why, you see this message
Create a database named ‘phpmyadmin’ and setup the phpMyAdmin configuration storage there.

To solve this, in PHPMYADMIN
Create a new database named phpmyadmin

Click on the PHPMYADMIN logo at the top left to go back to the home page

Click on the Find Out Why

Click Create on the line that says “Create a database named ‘phpmyadmin’ and setup the phpMyAdmin configuration storage there.“

The database will setup now

And the error will be fixed

VIEWING TIFF FILES ON UBUNTU DESKTOP 20.04

Using the default setup for Ubuntu, i have run into an issue where I cannot view Tiff Files. I receive the error “Failed to load tiff image”. So the fix for it is as follows:

Open your terminal

sudo bash

apt-get install feh

Once feh installs you can right click on the image and select Properties

Navigate to the Open With tab

Select FEH

Click Set as Default

That’s it. You can now view your tiff images

SETTING UP A CRON JOB FOR SCRAPING THROUGH NORDVPN

If any of you are like me, you find that your scrapers are limited from time to time by the number of requests you can make to a website within a certain period of time. To get around this, you can setup python scraping through nordvpn to automatically change of your IP addresses. There are other programs as well…Tor allows this for free. I personally use NORD, because I have had better performance and the cost is a few dollars per month not to have to deal with the headaches.

So I setup my cron job as follows
Every hour (9:00, 10:00, etc) it will connect to Nord
5 Mins past every hour (9:05, 10:05, etc) it will run my scraper
15 Mins past every hour (9:15, 10:15, etc) it will disconnect from Nord
30 Min past every hour (9:30, 10:30, etc) it will reconnect to Nord (this usually gives it enough time to get a different IP. If you log back in immediately you will attach to the same server. This fixes that.
35 Mins past every hour (9:35, 10:35, etc) it runs the scraper
45 Mins past every hour (9:45, 10:45, etc) it disconnects from Nord

To set this up I run the following

sudo bash

Enter Password

crontab -e

Select 1 (for nano)

Scroll to the bottom of the file and add the following:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/nordvpn connect >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1
5 * * * * python3 /home/user/scraper.py >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1
15 * * * * /usr/bin/nordvpn d >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1
30 * * * * /usr/bin/nordvpn connect >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1
35 * * * * python3 /home/user/scraper.py >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1
45 * * * * /usr/bin/nordvpn d >> /home/user/cron.log 2>&1

Save the file, exit, and you are all set. Your scraper will run as directed

BS4 ERROR [SOLVED]

Here is an interesting, and easy fix to a nagging BS4 Error (bs4.FeatureNotFound) that I kept encountering. I was using a Windows 10 computer, running Ubuntu Server 20.04 through VMWare Workstation as my platform. If you see the following error

bs4.FeatureNotFound: Couldn’t find a tree builder with the features you requested: lxml. Do you need to install a parser library?

To fix it is easy, and simple.

Open a Terminal

Type
sudo bash
pip3 install lxml

lxml will install, and your error will be fixed!