I’ve had a couple of small wireless projects lately and have really been having a great time playing around with the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router and one of the many GREAT 3rd party firmwares dd-wrt. I know, for a couple years I’ve meant to get a hold of one of these little linksys boxes for testing. I had read about OpenWRT and found it an interesting idea. For those that don’t know, the original linksys wrt54g wireless routers were designed based around a customized linux firmware. What made this nice is linksys made the source code available for their firmware which made it a lot easier for others to improve upon linksys’ built in software.
Category: Computers
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Good USB ThumbDrive – Kingston 8GB DataTraveler
Just thought I’d do a quick post – I’ve had kind of a poor track record in ordering USB thumb drives lately. I ordered one which I absolutely hate… it was about the size of one of those small pieces of gum and didn’t have the proper USB adapter on there so all you do is slide it into the usb port on your pc – the problem is… which direction – well they say it will only work one way and you’ll feel some resistance the wrong way, well I tried it and found resistance both ways so I got down on hands and knees and looked in the usb port to see where the contacts were and lined the stick up with those so I KNEW beyond a doubt I was connecting it the right way. I managed to get it in and thought I was never going to get the thing out. Since then I’ve been using a usb extension cable with that annoying thing…
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Mail Server Rejecting all Messages – Check your Blacklists relays.ordb.org is listing the WORLD
It’s unusual for mail servers to suddenly start rejecting messages internally and from external sources. That’s exactly what I saw though over the weekend. A mailserver running mdaemon on Windows 2000 was rejected ALMOST every message that was sent it’s way whether it was an internal mail sender and recipient or external sender to internal recipient. The really interesting things was to see a message sporadically succeed. This problem was with mdaemon, but could have occured with ANY mail server. Here’s why…
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What Should you Look for in a New Computer?
This is one of the questions that I deal with at least weekly. Here’s where I usually start answering… First you have to ask yourself what you want to do with a computer. If your goal is email and internet access, most ANYTHING sold new today is much more than sufficient to the task. It will be hard to find something that won’t work for you. If you want to work with office documents, spreadsheets and other text files, you’re still looking at just about anything currently on the market. But what if you want to do some gaming or get into video or music editing?
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Virus Warning – Email Subjects – IRS Notice – Important Information from the IRS
I’ve seen a couple of these emails today and wanted to give a post just to warn people that these are bogus and you should NOT follow the link suggested in the email. I HOPE no one reading this falls for it, but the “tax software update” that they are pushing is a virus. (SHOCK!) Only a little over half the antivirus vendors currently detect it.
Read on for details on the message body…
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Varying Degrees of Password Security
Last week we talked about creating strong passwords, but should we use different passwords for every site? It’s best practice to do just that. Do they all have to be really hard passwords? Again ideally, yes. So, how can we keep up password spreadsheet? Big sheet of paper? Password management program. Some advantages of password management programs are that many are equipped with encryption. In other words one password locks the whole list away. The bad news is if you lose or forget that password you are locked out of everything. Lists are generally bad because with access to your pc, your list is easy to get at.
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Creating Strong Passwords that are Also Easy to Remember
Making up passwords is something we have to do almost everyday it seems. Banking web sites, forums, email accounts, webhosting accounts, mail lists, etc. But it seems that making passwords is one of the things that some people have the hardest time doing. Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to make a password, but hard to make a GOOD password. First off, what’s a good password and what’s a bad password? Anything that is a dictionary word (even in another language) is a BAD password. Personal names are usually very bad choices. Why?
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The Risk of Cloud Computing, Trust
There’s a lot of buzz these days about “cloud computing”. You may be asking yourself just what IS cloud computing? The concept is that you are not as reliant on your personal computer, but your applications and data are kept somewhere in the internet “cloud”. So for instance, I use google calendars and gmail for several things. All my calendar data is stored with Google. There are several backup services that work on the concept of online backups. This is a variation in a sense, for all of them you are relying on a server somewhere online to be where your applications or data are stored. Of course, I can hear it now, “I don’t know if I like that idea”. Yes, there are a lot of risks. Recently Charter Communications has been in the news for losing the contents of 14,000 email accounts. That should…
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Web Site Promotion Through Directories
When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good “google luck”. I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s of things have changed though. Recently submissions have been down to Google, MSN (Live), Yahoo and the Yahoo directory and the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been more and more frustrating in recent years as it seems to take several years to get added. So is that all you can do to get traffic for your site?
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Replacing a Power Adapter for a Microtek Scanmaker 4800
This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and I recall very many long hours of hair pulling making USB scanners and Windows 98 work years ago. Fortunately though, the driver cd was included in the bag their friend had passed along. The install process went smoothly, but there was one little detail missing.