Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: December 2007

  • Meniere’s Disease – diagnosed yesterday

    Update – you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere’s Disease at my Meniere’s diagnosis blog.

    Well… after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. Let me back up a bit…. several years ago I started getting a stuffy feeling in my right ear on occasion. I had allergies and it reminded me of an ear infection years ago, but I didn’t have a fever. It would come for a few days and go. Of course, it was always the right ear and I would always have a hard time hearing out of that ear. Occasionally, it would be accompanied by a roaring sound like a fan…. sometimes loud, sometimes soft. Sometimes it would feel like the ear drum was “tight as a drum” as you could actually FEEL sounds as well as hearing them slightly. Eventually I just got used to it coming and going. I’ve chalked it up to allergies…. over the years I’ve been prescribed and taken most every allergy medication I can think of and the next step was allergy shots…. well, it was a nuisance not a MAJOR problem, just a nuisance. Then… I would start feeling dizzy if my ear had been stopped up for 3-5 days running or more. That was still inconvenient, but I knew when to expect it and could manage…. Then the vertigo hit…. April 2006…

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  • Nvidia video cards

    I’ve been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane…) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia’s product lines of late… Here’s a nutshell idea…. They’re currently using 4 digit product numbers – like 7300, 7800, 8300, etc…. I found this breakdown in zdnets talkback…

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  • Mac OS 7/8/9 troubleshooting

    It’s an older platform, but there are still some around. I found this nice guide to troubleshooting startup issues on these versions of Mac’s OS.

  • Clonezilla/DRBL on Ubuntu

    I’ve talked about Clonezilla as a remarkably good an fast disk cloning utility previously, but there’s more to the clonezilla project than just rescue imaging of drives. There’s also a thin-boot server as well…. (diskless remote boot loader?) Anyway, This tutorial talks about how to setup clonezilla/drbl on a recent ubuntu install.

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  • Remastering Ubuntu’s live disk

    Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.

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  • Hard drive testing utilities

    Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

  • Home Asterisk system VOIP adding phone lines

    I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

  • X-Plane and linux

    I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….

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  • Windows XP repair install problems

    I’ve run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

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  • Upcoming “thought” dump

    As you can tell, it’s been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought that I’ve still got running (due in part to the open browser tabs that I just can’t seem to let myself close….)