Archive: Computers

I use linux. I prefer it over Windows for many reasons. It's more resistant to viruses, less of a target, but that doesn't mean that malware or other viruses are impossible. If someone were to trick …

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 …

Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn't write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and …

You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn't (or can't) reall…

Sometimes you just can't escape work. The other day on my way home an ad came on the radio for doublemyspeed.com It reminded me somewhat of the claims finallyfast.com (read my finallyfast.com removal…

I've been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad's computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spe…

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It's rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windo…

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I've had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I'…

I've seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They're about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It's nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I…

Ugh.... you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as…

Some time back I did an article here about leaky capacitors and linked to some really great photos of a "healthy" mainboard capacitor and "bulging" capacitors. The long-story short version is this...…

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 …

I've seen a couple of these emails today and wanted to give a post just to warn people that these are bogus and you should NOT follow the link suggested in the email. I HOPE no one reading this falls…

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 appli…

This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day... A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I wa…

Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Mi…

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 w…

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 b…

It's been a while since I've had an "on-topic" post here, but as you might imagine quite a bit has been going on. I had this peculiar problem reported to me in the last week about print spool issues …

I've been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane...) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia's product lines of late... Here's a nutshell idea.... They're currently using 4 digit …

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck... users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there's also a utility called TestDisk that looks p…

I'm tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house - and use VOIP for additional lines. Here's an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

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…

I've run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard …

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 tim…

In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as "metapackages" which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it "needs". For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop pa…

For quite a while I've used ghost4linux (g4l) for my disc cloning needs. What I REALLY like are the ability to do a network copy of the image to an ftp server and the built in dd_rescue to rescue dat…

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 mor…

The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I've installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what's what and so far haven't had much time to play around. I seem to recall the loca…

I've been looking for a simple windows based web editor to recommend for someone. I use quanta plus on linux and would really have a hard time LEAVING it, but... there's of course dreamweaver and fro…

I don't know if anonymity is exactly acheived, but.... anyway not too long ago I explored/setup tor on my system to play around with, no real reason I suppose, but doing what I do it pays to be aware…

I've just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It's a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let's you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher doe…

I found this link of plugins for wordpress to aid in multilingual site building. I've been experimenting with English/Spanish designs of one site I maintain using plain html (index.html.en index.html…

Of course, we've heard of skype, vonage, and our dsl/cable providers hawking VOIP. I thought I'd make a note of this one though as the name is a bit more obscure... packet8

I've had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it's HP specific, but don't know for certain.) The error goes like this... "A problem has been detected a…

I would dare say there are more than a couple people "out there" right now that are puzzled as to WHY some of their mail is bouncing back to them as being rejected. Right now I'm talking about Bellso…

Why do I always wind up being the one to discover problems? .... Today in checking mail I found a mail that had bounced back from one of my clients that uses bellsouth... Now bellsouth has recently b…

I guess anytime technology changes it takes a bit of getting used to.... this video was recommended to me by a customer.

I've been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps - it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn't know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image …

I found this not too long ago at a techamok forum... copied here for convenience - not intended to slight the original author.... I only met my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s family once — the year …

As long as there have been wireless networks there have been people trying to squeeze out just a bit more range... there was the cantenna and now there are other variations on trying to collect and i…

I like the PDF file format for so many reasons - free writer under linux is one of them, usually it's just configured out of the box - openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is acce…

For years I've been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I've absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I've had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an …

For a while dnsstuff.com has been my favorite dns tools web site, but there are others. Recently I was pointed to domaintools.com.

A while ago I wrote about various ways to have an offline copy of the wikipedia. Yes, I know there are credibility issues with wikipedia, but taken with a few grains of salt and objective thinking it…

A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it's a windows installer style download that can bootst…

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…

One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu do…

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn't find the article, so I'm posting it now... if it's a duplicate, sorry... I'm still using Ubuntu's Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a…

I ran across a good public record search engine (pretrieve.com) a few weeks back. They've done a good job of integrating many searches/databases into one interface.

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 (a…

and you can't turn it on without an error... Oh boy... last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It c…

Might should have typed this up sooner, but... a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these…

There are lot's of ways to get a file from one place to another, emailing is the first that many think of. (For larger files I'll usually just upload to a directory on the website and then email a li…

You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista's upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions w…

In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate p…

http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ is an interesting bundle of linux designed to be an out of the box network service swiss army knife of sorts. Here are the network services that it provides.... Kerberos…

As I've mentioned, there are a few older Mandrake (now Mandriva) systems that I maintain and one of the packages that I'm frequently rebuilding for those systems is clamantivirus. Well, 0.90 came out…

http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit... is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it's something that would be done when you've had a suspected rootkit on the system and you …

There are all sorts of these things out there on the market - I saw an ad for the Hawking HWL1 802.11b/g WiFi Locator... and it looked interesting (directional)... I've seen mixed reviews, but some m…

There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It's more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks a…

A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that's worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called..... http://www.…

There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security …

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that wo…

If you're upgrading to Vista and use an ipod (true Apple branded iPod)... you might want to refrain from hooking the ipod up to the Vista pc. theregister has reported that Apple is sounding the alarm…

Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the lat…

Shocking bit of news here.... (sorry, I couldn't help it.) This is a serious piece though. Apparently the Dell models listed above (Inspiron) and their other 17" cousins may be affected by a rather p…

Here's a followup to one of the first big stories that I posted on... the Sony rootkit - there has been a settlement with the FTC (Federal Trade Commision). It has yet to be approved but, affected cu…

Of course, you shouldn't be using Windows 98 anymore, it's unsupported (i.e. no security updates.) However the reality is that there are quite a few Win 98 installs out there perking away. But, with …

It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it's not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in quest…

I want to make a note of this here... Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for …

There are some tools that I make use of almost daily. Either because something strikes my curiousity or because of necessity to find out a bit more about a computer issue. DNS lookup tools fall into …

In the past when installing an upgrade version of Windows it meant having your original disk handy to prove that you were REALLY eligible for an upgrade license. What this meant is that if you wanted…

In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it's not available...) In some parts of …

I heard on the local news last night that the North Carolina Department of Revenue has lost a laptop that had ~30,000 state taxpayers information on it. Social Security numbers/etc... The report I sa…

Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen.... I thought why don't I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but wa…

This is a good quick reference for some command line linux commands.... pixelbeat.org - linux command line tips. Nice reference. (of course you can also make use of man/apropos and -h to find out mor…

I found a peculiar problem while I was setting up an openvpn link the other day. The goal was a simple shared key setup and I started with the sample configuration and modified it a bit to fit the ci…

I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line... n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating syst…

Spam spam spam spam.... the last couple days have been busy for the akismet spam plugin for my sites. They've been catching a lot of spam comments it appears. Many of them (the comments) seem to be f…

One of the slickest video editing tools I've used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it's geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video…

One of the utilities under Linux I've made use of in the last few months is Dvdstyler. It essentially will take your dvd ready video and make the DVD filesystem (as well as menus). Simple menus are v…

A long time ago I had found how easy it was to reject messages outright with Postfix that came from non-existent domains. You know... junk from asdflkjuasdlfkjh@imadethisupmyselfanditsnotregisteredan…

I almost forgot to pass along a link to a more comprehensive detailing of postfix's anti-uce controls.... here. Also, in the last article I briefly mentioned whitelisting. IF you intend to have sever…

Postfix has a NUMBER of tools for rejecting unwanted messages before they get in the door and waste your CPU time on deciding "hey this mail is spam". Up until recently I've mostly used the relays.or…

Haven't had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I've been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions o…

Anyone that's setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I'd mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my serve…

I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn't find my post.... so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I've ru…

This last week virtualbox announced that they have released a version of their virtualization software as open source. There is a pay version as well with more features. (*read on for features availa…

A few days ago I had reason to investigate iscsi and AoE (ata over ethernet). Both are protocols for sharing a physical drive over the network at the block level. Let me put it in context first. Trad…

I've done one or two mentions in the past of ways to recover/reset lost windows passwords and thought it was probably time for another "brain dump/web research dump" of things that I've run across. T…

One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine.... it's not as straightforwa…

I've noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false p…

I've replaced bare email addresses on web page with either an encoded variation of the email or with a contact form to discourage spam scrapers and other automated tools from using it for a spam magn…

I saw this a few weeks back and think it's a good idea. Essentially why don't we have a .bank domain registration and limit it to just financial institutions the way .gov is limited to government reg…

There's no better way to say it, netcat is SOO useful, and there is an encrypted variation... cryptcat, you can do quite a few interesting and useful things VERY easily with these two utilities. (*It…

For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I've noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of s…

Wordpress has a great plugin available to automatically keep your google sitemap updated, but I've done a few static websites in the last few days and just wanted a good, quick, web generated sitemap…

I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here.... The situation is this... Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has us…

I haven't been overwhelmed with VMware server's web interface. You can start a virtual machine, or see statistics, but you can't create virtual machines. Well, from the VMWare forums I did find a cou…