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.
Category: Software
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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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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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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.
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Metapackages in Ubuntu for new system provisioning
In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as “metapackages” which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it “needs”. For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package is just such a package – when choosing it, it installs everything necessary for the kubuntu desktop/customizations to install. So, I was hit with an idea while I was apt-getting 30-40 odd packages…. everytime I “provision” a new ubuntu system I have a list of packages that I want to make sure are installed, why don’t I just create a single metapackage and be done with it to make life simpler…. But how could I do this?
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Windows web editor
I’ve been looking for a simple windows based web editor to recommend for someone. I use quanta plus on linux and would really have a hard time LEAVING it, but… there’s of course dreamweaver and frontpage… but I’ve also found kompozer which is based on nvu – although I still REALLY wish quanta plus were available for windows. (Of course, if they want the nice toys, maybe they should just think about switching or dual booting…) I’ll leave comments on in case anybody knows of a good windows based, web editor that has some of the similar capabilities of quanta plus.
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Torbutton – firefox anonymity browser extension
I don’t know if anonymity is exactly acheived, but…. anyway not too long ago I explored/setup tor on my system to play around with, no real reason I suppose, but doing what I do it pays to be aware of many different kinds of software. Tor proxies web requests from your machine through a tunnel to another machine on the tor network – it could be nearby or far away, but it essentially prevents the destination site from knowing EXACTLY where you’re located and can prevent machines in the middle from logging your access (i.e. your isp, or a wireless access point owner.) The problem is – once it’s setup you have to turn it on by changing the proxy settings in your browser – tedious. Well, in comes torbutton, which is a firefox extension to enable routing through tor with the click of a mouse. (You do have to have it setup beforehand (tor and privoxy work well together for that.)
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Miro – rss/videocast aggregator/player
I’ve just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It’s a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let’s you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher does for audio.) It also plays video within the player (you can organize your local video clips through it as well.) You can also search/download from youtube/etc. and you can add custom rss feeds such as those from tvrss.net for instance. It’s also bittorrent aware, so it can make use of bittorrent for downloading.
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HP Vista CLFS.SYS error
I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0x00000050” The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.
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Free PDF printers for Windows
I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.