This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I’ve had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would support it.) So, I thought I’d open this up and ask – what’s the oldest (working) computer hardware you still have?
Month: December 2008
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Tracking Santa Claus Online
This is the time of year that we start thinking about that monumental trip Santa Claus makes around the globe on Christmas Eve. There are lot’s of neat ways to track his progress online. One of my favorites in recent years has been the Norad Santa tracking site. Last year they were using Google Earth for the tracking. Have you ever wondered how or why NORAD started this whole Santa Claus tracking mission?
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Microsoft Releasing out of Cycle Patch for Internet Explorer Exploit
Take a look at the official announcement. They’ve moved outside the usual update cycle for this one. VERY good move Microsoft to get this patch in before the holidays as it looks as though there’s been a spike in the use of this particular exploit and with people doing a lot of home pc browsing over the next two weeks, hopefully they can have a patched Internet Explorer to browse with. These are one more good reason to have an alternative browser such as firefox installed “just in case”. That’s not to say that Firefox is immune to all such security issues, but it is targeted less frequently and perhaps most importantly by DIFFERENT things than Explorer is targeted by. (I should note that version 3.0.5 of firefox is out to address it’s own list of issues.)
By the way, this Internet Explorer vulnerability is listed as critical for Internet Explorer 5.01 on NT SP4, for Internet Explorer 6 on NT SP4 as well as pretty much every combination of Internet Explorer 6 or Explorer 7 on XP, Server 2003, Vista or Server 2008 AND those using Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 users are encouraged to update to a new release as well. In other words IF you use any currently supported version of Internet Explorer on any currently supported version of Windows you need to make sure this update installs.
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Dell Mini Notebooks – Very Nice
I’ve seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They’re about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It’s nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony Vaio which is not a bad size, but most laptops are just too big to be REALLY portable.
I think this size notebook is an improvement on the concept of the PDA because it gives you more options.
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Global Translator not Working after WordPress 2.7 Update
I’ve just updated my WordPress install on 2 sites up to the new release version 2.7 which is now two days old or so. I quickly took a look at the sites and saw that the global translator plugin wasn’t working. (It was giving 404 errors, or…. “nothing found for es” for example.) After a quick look at the FAQ, I just navigated to the settings page for the plugin and scrolled to update options (without really making any other changes) and all is back to normal.
I expect to ripple the new version of wordpress around to my other sites over the next week or two. Right now there is not a pressing need to upgrade (2.7 is a new feature release, not necessarily security update.)
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Ultra Capacitor Flashlight | 90 second charge | Light for Life Flashlight
This looks NICE… The new Light for Life flashlight which uses an ultracapacitor instead of batteries. Because of the ultracapacitor it takes 90 seconds to charge up. It uses LED lights and can run for 90 minutes on that 90 second charge. I see some uses that this wouldn’t be appropriate for, but many that it would be great for…. (If they could sell a handcrank adapter or some portable charge method that could be excellent.) It comes with a mounting bracket, belt ring and DC charger. (The number of charge/recharge cycles of a lithium ion or himh battery would pale in comparison to the ultracapacitor.)
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Two new Windows exploits in the Wild | Wordpad Text Converter | Internet Explorer 7 XML Parser
In the wake of a huge patch Tuesday, Microsoft has two new fires to be fighting. There are apparently “limited and targeted” attacks against a flaw with the Text converter component of Wordpad. Affected systems include Windows 2000 SP4, XP up to SP2, Server 2003 SP1 and 2. Vista is not affected Server 2008 is not affected, XP SP3 is not affected. Read on for more on this one (AND the Explorer 0-day)
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Massive Windows Update Tuesday
Microsoft had a mammoth patch Tuesday this month with 28 bug fixes (23 critical). (Computerworld article linked above. This is one of the largest update releases in five years (!) Those fixes were wrapped up in 8 updates for Internet Exporer, Office, Sharepoint, Windows media player and visual studio and Visual basic. (Oh and it looks like there are two more they SHOULD have fixed – reports of 0-days in the wild.)
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Getting the current Date in Your Scripts
I LIKE stamping things with the date, whether it’s a status report email or filename. (Like say I’ve downloaded todays news in Spanish, it really seems to make sense to tag it as spanish_news_12_8_08.mp3 instead of just spanish_news.mp3 doesn’t it?)
Okay, so this is something I do in a lot of my shell scripts. Here’s some code to play with.
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Netbook Comparison Listing
If you don’t know what a netbook is, it’s this recent class of laptops that’s very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA or phone.)
Anyway, this site has a great comparator of the various models currently out from makers such as Acer,Dell, etc. It gives a breakdown of the features, pricing, etc. Very nice if you’re in the market for one of these great small portables.
Many of these ultra small portables run a variant of linux or they will use Windows on them for a windows xp laptop, vista though hasn’t been used on many of these due to it’s resource requirements.