Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Computers

  • Park Your Virus Impervious Smugness Mac (and Linux) Users

    Screenshot of ClamTk 3.08 running on Ubuntu 8....
    Image via Wikipedia

    I use linux. I prefer it over Windows for many reasons. It’s more resistant to viruses, less of a target, but that doesn’t mean that malware or other viruses are impossible. If someone were to trick me into running something and even worse, trick me into using my administrator password to install something system wide, it could be the same end result as a windows malware infection. To be fair Microsoft has improved their security over the years. They are still the most likely platform though to get a drive by virus just by visiting a site (with no user interaction.) That much said, Mac users and Linux users should avoid being smug. Why? They aren’t completely safe. No one is. Social engineering is the most common (and most effective) path to getting malware on a computer.

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  • Laptop Woes, Customer Service Headaches and a New Laptop

    It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.

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  • Is it a Hardware Problem or a Software Problem?

    Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?

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  • MyCleanPC.Com TV and Radio Ads

    You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn’t (or can’t) really deliver the miraculous results that they claim. Part of the idea is that they are a registry cleaner and claim that cleaning the registry will make your computer as good as new. For most people this really isn’t going to make an old slow pc into a brand new speed demon. From that aspect this is a scam. Over promising and under delivering.

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  • doublemyspeed.com Radio Ads

    Sometimes you just can’t escape work. The other day on my way home an ad came on the radio for doublemyspeed.com It reminded me somewhat of the claims finallyfast.com (read my finallyfast.com removal). Anyway, I hadn’t heard of doublemyspeed so I thought I would check them out and see if it’s as much of a scam as it sounds. They suggest that you may not need to buy a new computer if yours is slow then proceed to give testimonials of people that installed their software and their pc ran so much faster than before.

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  • Facebook Fan Check Virus

    There’s a rumor going around and a lot of unconfirmed information that a facebook application known as fan check is actually a virus. I’m seeing several claims that if someone becomes a fan of this facebook app (which the page claims is undergoing changes and currently unavailable)… well if someone becomes a fan in the meantime their friends will all be notified of the app, password on the account changed, etc. I’m a bit skeptical at this point because EVERYTHING I see seems 3rd party and I don’t see anyone claiming that THEIR account was compromised. What I DO know is that some of the top search results are known malware attack sites. For instance the second result (which was the top result a few hours ago….

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  • Various Notes | Morse Code Ringtones | Java updates | More Pages on the Way

    Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

    Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

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  • Gigabyte GA-7VT600 Motherboard automatically shutting off

    I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.

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  • Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 trackpad issues

    Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

    The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

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  • Ripping a DVD with Multiple Audio tracks

    First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

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