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?
Category: Uncategorized
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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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South Carolina Genealogy Site current redirecting Here
The South Carolina Genealogy Site is the first of my other sites I’m farming out to another server, so at the moment while dns settles that is redirecting here. Sorry for the inconvenience if you’re looking for SC Genealogy content. It will be back up soon. Update as of 9PM all has settled with the server migration of SC Genealogy. It’s now at it’s own separate server with a freshly updated wordpress install plust a few new plugins.
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Secrets of Making money online – bux.to
I know, you’ve seen the ads – make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and technically I was still “on vacation” until the 3rd of January). I had plenty of time to test out a few of these ideas. It seems that entrepreneurial-ism is a progressive disease – you find yourself many times thinking, hmmmm…. it seems like there should be a way to make a small profit by….. Anyway, many of these ideas are MORE trouble than they’re worth. REALLY. But one, that I signed up for just last night is actually looking very promising…. bux.to….
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Upcoming “thought” dump
As you can tell, it’s been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought that I’ve still got running (due in part to the open browser tabs that I just can’t seem to let myself close….)
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Wiring
I’ve got a home project to run more network cable here lately and found techtoolsupply to be an interesting resource for network and other cabling supplies. I don’t recall who I ordered from last time, it’s been several years (and those big spools of cable last for years unless you do a LOT of cabling.) On other notes…. There are many very good do it yourself wiring resources from electrical like this link to network wiring. Many people think that wireless means that it’s just backwards to install network cabling. (I don’t know how many people told me “why don’t you just use wireless” when I mentioned that when we built I wanted to get cat5 cable installed.) Well – here goes – wired is 1)faster and 2) more secure – yes I’ve heard of WPA for wireless, but my wired lan is between 10 and 100 times faster than my current wireless (yes, I’m running 802.11b still and an upgrade to the wireless wouldn’t get it up to the same speed yet either. then my wired network would be 2-20 times faster. (Of course that’s best case – clear line of sight to the wireless access point.)
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Black backgrounds use less power?
At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to know how long they estimated traffic stays at google as that would make the result vary widely anyway. If the average house used 24kwh per day (I have NO idea, just a number that seems like a decent baseline… that’s 8Mwh/year… so that would be the equivalent of less than 100 houses power consumption… of course, these are just off the cuff estimates as well (just like theirs.)
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Middle Ages Tech support – early books
I guess anytime technology changes it takes a bit of getting used to…. this video was recommended to me by a customer.
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Drive images – filling free space with zeros
So, one of the things I’ve been doing is drive imaging. I’ve got 3 systems that are to be identical (based on, of all things Freedos…) So, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to dust off cloning/imaging software. So, I’ve been using the excellent g4l (ghost4linux) which is now up to v 0.22 (I make use of this for trying to rescue failing hard drives too as it includes dd_rescue). Anyway, the new machines have 80GB drives and the lzo compressed images are running ~450MB…. but one of my questions was making sure that it was as small an image as could be. I found that there are a few ways to squish the image file more and that it mostly revolves around filling the empty drive space with zeros.
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Do it yourself Macro Photo studio
I don’t know where to file this, but it was interesting to me…. this how-to walks you through a cheap way to make good closeup photos… Basically they have you construct a light tent from a card board box (cut large openings in the sides and use white tracing paper to diffuse the light and posterboard for backgrounds.)
The idea here is that for those good closeups of small items being bathed in light is the ideal, but a direct flash usually is not good, diffuse light is the ideal and this setup does nicely.