So, in the last year I’ve organized an LLC and my computer repair and support service as well as other technology services are now known as Diversified Tech Solutions. Among other things we are a Naples SEO Company and offer services to other areas as well through our Remote Tech Support Services We also continue to offer Linux Server Administration
Tag: support
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Laptop Woes, Customer Service Headaches and a New Laptop
It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.
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Kindle With Special Offers Debuts at $114
So, today there is an advertising supported kindle that sells for $25 less than its cheapest cousin which is the kindle wifi. What will it look like? The screensavers are one place that ads will show up. Also at the bottom of the home page. (It appears that you won’t have ads in the middle of your book.) I’m wondering if a $25 discount is enough to encourage someone to go for this version over the wifi?
It’s hard for me to say since I went ahead and sprung for the 3g version at $189. From their descriptions the advertising support seems relatively unobtrusive. (Much less so than google ads…. I could see them setting aside a part of EACH page of a text to put ads which would be annoying.)
So what do you think – will the $25 discount make for more sales?
Is any kind of advertising too much on this kind of device?
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Frustrations with Verizon Landline
As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It’s not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tree down on the phone line just before it branches to our house and one other. I called Verizon the first night (Saturday) and got a (!$!$!$!) robot attendant that told me many outages were reported in our area and it should be fixed by Monday at 9 something AM. Not wanting to waste the time then with holding for a person I resolved to call a second line. At this point I could see the line hanging to the ground from the pole and knew they were not aware of it though. I called from a cell phone (of course…)
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The Cost of Running a PC 24 Hours a Day
I saw an interesting question over at slashdot on the topic of how many companies actually had their employees power down their PC’s overnight. The site in question had about 8000 PCs about half of which stayed powered on overnight. There’s a lot of talk these days about “going green”. I’ve always been interested in the idea of conservation because it just makes sense to not be wasteful where it’s possible. So, as many of you know already I have somewhere around as many hobbies as there have been Presidential debates this last year…. At one point in time I’ve spent a lot of time working with off-grid power ideas (built a small somewhat portable emergency power system with solar/car recharge capabilities.) And if you’ve ever seriously looked at alternative energy you know that you need to learn about power consumption…. so based on what I learned here are some things to think about…
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Remastering Ubuntu’s live disk
Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.
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X-Plane and linux
I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….
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Custom livecd’s, virtualbox, seamlessrdp and sata dvd burners…
I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I’ve built a couple livecd’s (that I still use) for tech support, but I’m always thinking of one more tool that I’d like to have. After looking through their wizard it seems a bit limited in the granularity of what can be chosen (at least for what I’m thinking of.) But… it might introduce a new interest in the use of livecds.
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Funny – list of reasons it doesn’t pay to be “the computer guy”…
I found this not too long ago at a techamok forum… copied here for convenience – not intended to slight the original author….
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Really not wanting to sit at the desk….
So… it’s ~70 degrees out and springish I have network cables draped over my desk to support a couple systems that I’m imaging right now and am really not wanting to sit here, but… I do have a few things to “clean out”…