I usually work on desktop computers and so have complaints from time to time about the way desktop computer manufacturers design access to their components. They’re improving overall, but sometimes you’ll still find something that you’d just like to slap an engineer over… Recently I had to swap a keyboard on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. (Spilled drink.) I must say, congratulations to whoever designed the laptop for the easy access to the keyboard replacement.
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Month: August 2005
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Applause for Dell
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Gentoo new release 2005.1
It looks as though Gentoo 2005.1 has been released. The ModWiki.org’s tech blog has mentioned it. Of course for more details you can look at the main gentoo site. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that has gained a following for the fact that everything is built from source.
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Simple Backup
This is going to explain some ideas for a really simple way to make your own backup routine. (more…)
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5 must have tools for the network admin
This multimedia presentation details five “hacker tools” that every network admin needs to be familiar with. Along the lines of “know your enemy” I think it’s important to be well versed with what tools a cracker might use to infiltrate your network.
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Daylight savings time changes could cause problems
The Boston Globe has a story about todays energy bill signing and an issue which I mentioned once before. It seems that there are many devices that are hardwired to change to DST on a fixed schedule.
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Kstars – great personal astronomy software under linux
I’ve played around with Kstars off and on for a good while. It reminds me vaguely of a program I used to have under windows. It’s essentially a planetarium on your desktop. It is GPL licensed and part of the KDE Education suite of programs for the KDE desktop under Linux. It has all the basics for a program of this class (view the night sky and the stars from your latitude and longitude.)
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The state of computer security
The Register has an interesting piece, reflecting on the current state of the computer security industry. The recent Blackhat convention has prompted this reflection and they conclude that not enough is being spent currently on computer security.
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Display problems with livecds
One of the things I’ve run into with various linux livecds, whether it’s my own made with mklivecd, or others based on Knoppix, the Suse Livecd, or I could go on…. the problem I’ve seen is with the display drivers. Yes, MOST of the time the autodetection seems to work fine and you get a good legible display. There are sometimes that you get an illegible display of one or two flavors. One is the overlapping ghostted images. I personally like this one more because it means we’re close, that the autodetect has just chosen the wrong resolution or refresh rate. This can be fixed.
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Pay per click hijacking
Interesting article at lurhq.com on pay per click hijacking, which is really an extension on old DNS poisoning attacks. Essentially the DNS poisoning attack works like this…
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Review of Acer Ferrari 4000 notebook
The Register also has a review up today of the Acer Ferrarri 4000 notebook/laptop. Apparently, an older version of the Ferrari was too bright red for the taste of the reviewers. They do a thorough writeup of the newer version which appears to be a sleeker, more conservative colored model.
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