I’ve mentioned offline wikipedia access before mainly because for all it’s flaws, wikipedia is probably the single largest, most comprehensive and best information resource out there. There may be other encyclopedias that are more accurate, but require subscription access… anyway for all the warts it’s a great resource. To many people though it comes as a great shock that we’re not plugged into the internet all the time.. (so many people say “why offline, that’s what makes wikipedia so good is that it’s current and if it’s not current it’s worthless.” When I was growing up we had an encyclopedia set from 1965, I grow up through the 70’s and 80’s and it was still VERY useful and there was very good information, now it may not have been “up to date” in many areas, but it was still informative and was right on a GREAT many things. I think if I manage to download wikipedia once a year I’ll get by on the “currency” of the information. Anyway… the main point is that many times internet access is 1)not reliable 2)not practical 3)not there….. For instance I do have wireless for the laptop, but don’t always hook up to wireless networks there are places here and there “bubbles” of access around town, but many of the places I go there just isn’t wireless internet available. Now I guess if I wanted to pay verizon another $60 a month that would increase I would have MORE pervasive access, but frankly…..
Tag: GREAT
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High powered laser from a dvd burner
I really don’t know if I want to do this or not… but I found several sites talking about how to salvage the laser from a dvd burner and use it as a VERY high powered handheld laser. (i.e. “light that candle” kind of power….) Don’t get me wrong, I would like to be able to start the campfire from 10 paces just like anybody else would… in fact that would be VERY cool…. but the whole “instant blindness” thing kind of slows my eagerness down a bit. (Plus maybe the “is that skin burning?” thought that comes along there too…) You see I’ve got a 6 year old in the house (and another due in February… well – he won’t be six but… ) I know how much my 6 year old likes to get his hands my combo flashlight/laserpointer that I carry with me all the time and in fact when it was first given to me at Christmas (my brothers got identical ones), he was very quick to scarf one up that was within reach and start playing with it. Now we’ve had talks about being careful, not pointint it at someone else’s eyes, not looking into it, etc… but he’s not at an age where that really clicks… so if I build one of these I’ll need to lock it away in a gun cabinet…. And really ANYBODY that makes one of these OUGHT to treat it with the same respect as a loaded weapon. (No you’re not going to kill anyone, but blinded for life would not be fun….) Treat them responsibly. Links below the fold.
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Epson stylus photo 825 clogged print head woes
I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned my Epson stylus photo 825 before, but I’ve had one for a couple years. The really nice feature (I thought) was the ability to print direct from camera memory cards (at the time I bought it, this was much more rare than in current printers.) Anyway, it had GREAT print quality and could print up to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, I use my laser printer (monochrome hp 4p) for 95%+ of my day to day printing and the epson sat unused for stretches of time and eventually I’ve wound up with a bunch of jets clogged on the print head. I’ve been taking increasingly drastic steps to try to get the thing to print well again.
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Freenx on Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux based systems because the performance seems much better and the client has a nice way to choose from preset sessions. (You can also do individual applications, etc…) One of the benefits over X tunneling is the compression…. Anyway, I’ve gone through setting this up several times on various ubuntu 6.06 installs and thought I’d go ahead and document this on the web page so I didn’t have to keep hunting links each time….
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Sysinternals/Wininternals acquired by Microsoft
Sysinternals.com is a GREAT source of free Windows utilities (rootkit detector, process list, list of files being used by a process, etc….) Today the news started to spread that they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Am I the ONLY person that has had an urge to download their entire free utility library?
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Seller Beware…
This is a cautionary tale about bank fraud for anyone that sells things. (online or otherwise). A man sold a car online, the buyer sent a check for several thousand more than the buying price. He claimed it was to cover extra shipping costs and for the seller to just wire him the excess which turned out to be $5000. He felt a bit suspicious of the check and inquired a couple times if the check was ok, the teller confirmed that the check was fine.
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Bad capacitors causing strange system behavior
This is, in fact something I’ve been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I’ve visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fact I think I saw it a couple times a week and either couldn’t reproduce the errors on demand, or could only get an error once, do something and not see it again, then hear about something similar the next day…
Anyway, ultimately the system has been replaced (and it’s twin…) on inspecting the motherboard post-pull, there were some interesting issues with the capacitors, yellowish crusty leaked electrolyte… uh-huh, that explains everything…
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Open Source Web templates
One of the things that I’ve really not looked at until lately is the use of open source web templates. I don’t know why but I’ve never really paid much attention to the thought of templates outside of those for a cms platform like wordpress or ezcontents, etc. However, recently I’ve started a site redesign for someone that wanted to use a template. So, an article on open source web design caught my attention.
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Mars Ice lake?
I don’t know how I ran across this link, but it’s interesting and has a GREAT photo. The picture is supposedly of an Ice Lake on Mars Beautiful coloration, I’m not sure if it’s false color or what. Obviously this has little to do with computers other than how the image was captured and transmitted, but it’s neat nonetheless. (more…)