Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Tech Support

  • Top 10 things to do when throwing out a computer

    This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I’ve just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list of the top ten things to do before you throw away, give away, pitch or otherwise dispose of your computer…..

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  • Using .htaccess to ALLOW directory browsing

    By default the apache install for most sites now restricts directory browsing. It’s a good idea, you don’t want just ANYTHING to be browsable on a web server, but there comes a time that it makes life easier for a directory (or tree of directories) to be browsable without having to write (copy and paste) links to a bunch of files. Fortunately, .htaccess files can be used for many things and this, of course, is one of them…

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  • /bash/rm: argument list too long

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this complaint from the bash shell when trying to remove a bunch of files. In this case, I was trying to clear a directory where log rotating had run amuck and there was a 10 second lag in typing ls ∗.gz and seeing any output…. So, I did rm ∗.gz and got bash/rm: argument list too long in response…. So, then I though I could “surgically remove” some files and shrink the list a bit… rm ∗5∗3∗2∗.gz -f; rm ∗5∗3∗1∗.gz -f, etc, etc, etc after about 4 of these it became obvious I’d need to find another way because even some of THOSE gave the “argument list too long” error. (What’s more, it looked like I was going to have to deal with files matching ∗[1-5]∗[0-9]∗[0-9]∗gz – yuck…)

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  • Make an autorun cd show a web document on autoplay…

    There’s a utility called Thumbs that looks like a good quick way to make a cd launch a web documented on autoplay in Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/ …Of course, autoplay under windows is fairly easy to setup. If you have a program on the disk you can just have autorun.inf in the root directory of the cd and in that you can specify WHAT program to autorun. The problem with html documents on a disk is telling the computer how to run it. (Yes you can adjust the icon as well.)

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  • Clamav 0.88.1 for Mandrake 10.0

    Since, I’ve still got a few older Mandrake 10 installs that I’m maintaining as mailservers, there aren’t supported security fixes for various things anymore… Friday there was news of a new clamantivirus to fix some security flaws with 0.88, new version is 0.88.1 I’ve taken the cooker srpm and recompiled for 10.0, so… for my convenience (and that of anyone with an older Mandrake box…) the links will be below.

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  • Microsoft April Updates coming Tuesday

    To change the Google theme of the afternoon…. Microsoft is due to release their April updates this coming Tuesday (April 11th.) Advance bulletin is here. Four updates affecting Windows, one affecting Office AND Windows. Highest severity is Critical (Explorer flaw probably) Reboot will be required… The Office/Windows update MAY require a reboot and is listed as Moderate.

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  • Customized small download linux iso….

    This is a good idea…. let’s say you want a linux install, but you’re very particular. You’d like to have a certain setup out of the box, say a basic desktop with OpenOffice and Firefox/Thunderbird. Nothing fancy, just a basic desktop and you wanted to deploy over several systems. Some distributions give you the choice to save settings for a later install, but for most, this can be the start of a fairly tedious install-fest. Someone has come up with a good solution to this (and a solution to the multi-GB of iso downloads….) You go to a web page answer a few questions and then download a CUSTOMIZED linux install iso that then takes care of the whole process for you.

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  • Your own wikipedia….

    I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone through the spanish language version of the wikipedia putting some of my spanish reading skills to the test. Anyway, in the last couple days I became curious for various reasons about actually downloading a copy and installing the wikipedia locally. Now, I know one of the benefits of the wikipedia is that it’s collaborative and this way I’ll miss out on current and changing/improving/updating articles. But I can see some reasons to want to have a “snapshot”.

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  • Using ssh to protect web browsing over wireless or other hostile networks

    This really could be used to encyrpt web traffic over any “hostile” network. Here’s what I’m talking about. Laptop using wireless. Within our internal network we would LIKE all our web traffic to be encrypted at least from the laptop to a wired host. (From there to the outside world it will be open.) At the minimum we would like to have the traffic encrypted over the wireless leg of the journey. Here’s the most straightforward approaches uing ssh.

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  • Enabling keyboard hotkeys under KDE

    I’ve just been sitting down with the laptop for a while (Dell Inspiron 8000) it’s an older laptop by current standards I guess, but it does well for me. The inspiron 8000 has some “hotkeys” for volume up and down, mute and controlling the cd player (play, stop, next and previous tracks.) It’s pretty standard these days to have hot keys of some sort on the keyboard for at least the volume. I realized though that I had never setup those hotkeys under KDE (Frequent visitors will remember that I use linux as the primary desktop.) Now, I guess some would have tried the hotkeys and, on seeing no response, conclude “hotkeys don’t work under linux.” That, of course, would be wrong….

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