Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: time

  • Is 10:04PM the most creative time of day?

    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 their ideas… What I find more interesting is that most people lose their creative ideas by failing to write them down!!! (Carry a small notebook with you, you’ll be glad to have it.)

    Interestingly I’m writing this as we’re approaching 10:04PM local time!! So, what do you think – what is the most creative time of day? (Comments are Open

  • WordPress Stats plugin not updating – fix

    There are a lot of good things to like about the newer versions of wordpress. It seems to keep getting better. One of the really cool plugins is the WordPress.com stats plugin. This lets you have a nice simple stats interface accessible from your Dashboard on your wordpress blog. (It uses wordpress.com to track stats, so you’ll need a wordpress.com account to be able to use it. I set up a wordpress.com account some time back to be able to use the akismet plugin and the same key that you have for akismet can be used for the stats plugin.) You essentially upload the stats.php file into your wp-content/plugins folder, enable it in the plugins list, then enter your API key in the configuration page for stats. That’s all that should be to it, but I’ve noticed sometimes that’s not all it takes to get things going.

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  • Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling

    We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)

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  • Creating Strong Passwords that are Also Easy to Remember

    Making up passwords is something we have to do almost everyday it seems. Banking web sites, forums, email accounts, webhosting accounts, mail lists, etc. But it seems that making passwords is one of the things that some people have the hardest time doing. Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to make a password, but hard to make a GOOD password. First off, what’s a good password and what’s a bad password? Anything that is a dictionary word (even in another language) is a BAD password. Personal names are usually very bad choices. Why?

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  • The Risk of Cloud Computing, Trust

    There’s a lot of buzz these days about “cloud computing”. You may be asking yourself just what IS cloud computing? The concept is that you are not as reliant on your personal computer, but your applications and data are kept somewhere in the internet “cloud”. So for instance, I use google calendars and gmail for several things. All my calendar data is stored with Google. There are several backup services that work on the concept of online backups. This is a variation in a sense, for all of them you are relying on a server somewhere online to be where your applications or data are stored. Of course, I can hear it now, “I don’t know if I like that idea”. Yes, there are a lot of risks. Recently Charter Communications has been in the news for losing the contents of 14,000 email accounts. That should…

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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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  • Experiencing some turbulence

    I knew for some time that a server upgrade at my hosting provider was coming – they were essentially upgrading the underlaying software. (New versions of apache/php/etc. the entire system.) The original time was postponed and I breathed a little sigh of relief because I host somewhere in the order of 7 domains here. Well, this morning it happened and things mostly worked, some of the lesser importance domains were affected although. It took some .htaccess editing and php.ini editing to get everything working. (somehow php.ini had a bit of text that had “word wrapped” and was causing problems.) Also, .htaccess rules were causing the server to offer .html files for download instead of displaying them. All seems to be in order now. Back to regular schedule.

  • AT&T rbl block inquiry site

    First, I guess I should give a primer, what’s an RBL? RBL stands for Realtime Black List (or Realtime Block List depending on who you talk to.) The idea is there are machines that either 1) have no business DIRECTLY trying to deliver a mail message to a legitimate mail server or 2) are known to spew out junk mail, or viruses or other bad content. So, many service providers make use of blacklists to decline messages from suspect machines. In some cases these lists are cultivated in house, in other cases people make use of various publicly available lists online.

    But…

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  • Back into a Routine

    I think things are settling back to where I’ll be doing some more routine posting here. I know I’ve been sporadic for the last several months, but the truth is that at one point I had poured so much time into my sites I really burnt out on them. Now I’m taking a new approach and trying to keep my goals realistic. My intent is to have 1 post per week here. (As well as some of my other sites.) So, expect to see new content here on Mondays starting with tomorrow January 21, 2008. Also, I expect the look and feel may change soon. (Don’t know I really like where I’ve got the theme at the moment, but…. there are things I’m not too fond of.) Anyway, my host is upgrading their software and so as a result it will make it possible for me to upgrade to the latest branch of wordpress.

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