Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’m putting this post up in case I lose the link to The Hunt For Gollum – fan made film – it looks to be about 45 minutes. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, I’m not usually into fan made films, but ……..

Ever had to determine if a site was really down or if it was just you that couldn’t reach it? If you have access to multiple computer networks you already have some ways to determine if it’s a problem with the site or just your connection, but…. there is a good online tool for [...]

I’ve been using 1000BT switches here for a year or more now, but just today have I run across the need to make a crossover cable. Many 1000BT (*gigabit ethernet) devices support “auto-mdix” which basically means a direct interconnect no longer needs a crossover cable. However, some devices don’t do this and it [...]

Php list is a great mailing list manage package. But, from time to time you already have a list of users and want to import without requiring everyone to go through phplists web based signup process.
So… this document can give you a walkthrough of how to do it.

I usually try to avoid talking about politics here really because I don’t want this to be a political blog. I am going to make an exception right now to talk about a concept. I’m going to try to stay out of the party/candidate discussion, but just want to make a question on [...]

We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways.
What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up.
Interestingly the only thing happening prior to [...]

Yesterday news broke of an out of cycle security patch for Windows. The bulletin is available from Microsoft. Apparently the vulnerability was in the Windows Server service (XP, 2003, 2000, 2008, Vista ALL affected though regardless of server/workstation/client/desktop/etc…). The RPC handling (remote procedure call) is the achilles heel this time [...]

The telegraph brings us this survey which claims that 10:04 PM is the most creative time of day. To contrast that 4:33PM is the least creative time. It’s not clear HOW exactly the survey was conducted, but apparently I would be among the 25% of people that burn the midnight oil working on [...]

How many online backup solutions ARE there now? Anyway I’ve seen another cross platform solution in JungleDisk. It’s available for Windows/Mac and Linux and uses Amazon.com’s storage as a backend. The software itself is free you just pay for the storage you make use of. (15 cents per GB using Amazon’s [...]

I’ve always had more than a passing interest in astronomy and physics… so when I found reference to this video series explaining how to visualize four spatial dimensions. Multiple spatial dimensions are the domain of math, but I’ve always suspected that the universe has 4 spatial dimensions… anyway interesting stuff to think about.