Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: General Site Info

  • A few other odd updates…

    Just updated some information on the Virtualization page adding some information about virtualbox which I have spent some time with lately.

    I’ve also had a big vpn/dd-wrt project going which I’ve teased out a bit of information on my dd-wrt and openvpn pages. I haven’t given our “recipe” for it yet, but it’s a vpn that can bridge between any two networks (regardless of network address collision issues…. well there is a small subset of cases where we could still find network address collision, but it’s much more robust than anything else I’ve done in that area.

    I’ve also added a bit to my Online Virtual Servers page. I’ve been trying out gigenetcloud as an alternative to slicehost/vps.net – not for any particular reason, just to have options. Their billing is a slightly different model which may be of interest to many. By the way, I am still a HUGE fan of VPS.net. I can’t recommend them ENOUGH as a cloud VPS provider. It seems as though they are always rolling out great new features and they have great pricing and data centers in so many locations to boot. Their setup is soooooo resilient and their support is superb.

    I think I’ll have to hold off on any of the other stray thoughts that I’ve had the last few weeks to post here as it’s looking like another busy stretch… here’s wishing everyone a good start to summer and a good 4th of July coming up!

  • Link Dump on the Way

    Scanners, Virtual Machines, more bash scripting, malware and openvpn are just a few of the things I’ve been hip deep in over the last few weeks. Things have been (and continue) fairly busy….. but I’m hoping to get a few things organized and posted here in the next few days to serve as a dumping of links of the different trains of thought that have been going on (and for future reference.)

    I don’t think it will happen today as there are a few more irons in the fire still (although it might happen today yet)…. Update – it will probably be several posts scattered over a few days (and some may be updates to existing pages.)

  • Dr. Who – The End of Time FInale – life, health and other personal musings

    I’ll go ahead and warn you this is a very non-technical oriented post – just some musings about science fiction – life, health and a few other things including this site and my computer work.

    The Doctor Who series is premiering the finale of The End of Time tonight and I’m greatly anticipating that although it’s the end of David Tennant’s run as the Doctor. I’ll be sorry to see him go, but I think I can say that about most of the Doctor’s I’ve seen portrayed over the years with maybe one exception. Anyway in the lead up to this finale there have been hints that “your song is ending” which in many ways resonated with me as well. In many ways I feel as though the way I’m doing what I do is going to be changing dramatically……

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  • H1N1 Flu Symptoms Log | Swine Flu diary

    I wish this were a computer related post. Then I could give instructions, a removal tool suggestion and all would be better, but this is health related. For the last week and a little bit our household has been dealing with the current H1N1 outbreak on a very personal level. Friday October 23rd my wife took our 20 month old to the doctor for his seasonal flu shot and while there found that they do have the H1N1 vaccine on hand. Given his age he would need it in two doses separated by a month. So, she went ahead and got him the first shot that day and scheduled a time for our 8 year old to get the H1N1 shot and a followup for our youngest. At this time we are outside the age range that they are allowing to get the vaccination. Saturday (the next day) our oldest came down with a sudden high fever. Actually I think it started with chills. He slept a good part of the day and that night we made plans to take him to urgent care the following day (Sunday) if his fever continued. It did. Urgent care (5 hour or so visit I think) confirmed H1N1 via a nose swab and prescribed tamiflu.

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  • Updates – Rogues and Security….

    I’ve been running a series of how to remove articles related to some of the current nasty rogue security applications that has really been getting a lot of traffic the last week or so. I can see that there’s definitely demand for more. Frankly, I hate these programs that claim so many problems (that it brings) and offer to fix it if you pay. I’ve made some links to these recent ones at the bottom of my antivirus removal tool page. I’ve also put up a page on ppt security – mostly centered around powerpoint security.

    So, what might you expect to see in coming days? I’ll probably be doing some more in the malware removal series because there are some particularly nasty bugs out there and a thirst for some sort of guidance in removing them. I suspect beyond that I will be focusing more on antivirus and firewall areas because those seem to be in the highest demand right now (judging by the traffic I see here.)

  • Antivirus Removal Tool List Update

    Just a quick note that I’ve updated the Antivirus Removal Tool list to include VIRUS removal tools. (I originally intended the list to be those utilities to clean up a system so that it could deal with a fresh install of an antivirus product. (Can’t count how many times I’ve had to use Norton’s tool.)) Anyway, it’s such a popular page, I thought it would be a bit more complete to add links to the antivirus vendors free tools for removing viruses/virii.

  • New Page on Automated Voice Messages

    I just wanted to mention that I’ve added a new page with a rundown on the various Voice Broadcast or Voice Blast services out there on the net. It was only recently that I came to know these services as anything other than automated outbound voice messages as I think I referred to them in my old voiceshot review back in 2008 when I first ran across voiceshots’ service. I have heard them called robocalls as well….

    Anyway, I’ve heard less than great things from others about Voiceshots support and so I wanted to get a more thorough look at who else provides similar services and how their offers compare. (It’s a sub-page of my new VOIP services page.

  • 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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  • Morse Mp3 Ringtones

    I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

    I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

    In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

    Anyway …-.-

  • Universal Translator Plugin for WordPress

    I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)

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