Classic Tech Tips Archive

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...…

I'm usually a bit leery of new antispyware products. I do a first look at the rogue antispyware lists and just try to be as cautious as possible when moving away from the tools that I've tried and te…

I can't tell you how glad I am to see the ultra portable laptops coming back into favor. I've got a couple of old used sony vaio's that are great little portable machines - lightweight/go anywhere...…

As you know I've used wordpress as a platform for many of my sites. It makes updating and adding information so quick and easy (as well as great extensions available for it and good theme possibiliti…

I use Google Calendar for most everything I do. Since I have a number of different jobs I have a tendency to break things down into individual calendars. So I have my personal calendar events, my com…

I just found out today that dd-wrt v.24 has reached it's final release. (As opposed to the previous release candidates.) I have several linksys wrt54gl routers that I've installed earlier versions of…

Windows XP Home connecting to a file share in a Domain controlled by Windows 2000.... Not quite your recipe for headache free things "just working" I guess, but this is what I've run into. This works…

I don't know if you're familiar with bbpress, it's the forum cousin of wordpress and can integrate nicely into the wordpress database to allow users to be shared across the two installs. So, on my No…

If you have a linux machine and haven't ever made use of sed (stream editor) you're missing out on a great automation utility. I've saved myself probably 20 hours of manual editing with about an hour…

So, the adobe reader version 8.1 should be a straightforward install. On one particular XP system it wasn't and from what I can tell, there are several that have run into the same problem. The instal…

I've had a couple of small wireless projects lately and have really been having a great time playing around with the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router and one of the many GREAT 3rd pa…

Just thought I'd do a quick post - I've had kind of a poor track record in ordering USB thumb drives lately. I ordered one which I absolutely hate... it was about the size of one of those small piece…

I've fought this evening with Php Link Directory. I had a list of addresses I wanted to add in bulk and managed to string together the correct format of a csv file for import. It's somewhat of a long…

In the last couple months I've been "farming out" several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites a…

I've started adding the Share This plugin to several of my sites and was frustrated on one site to see on the front page "SHARETHIS.addEntry(" and a lot more ugly text. Upon investigation the < sc…

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 n…

It's unusual for mail servers to suddenly start rejecting messages internally and from external sources. That's exactly what I saw though over the weekend. A mailserver running mdaemon on Windows 200…

I've started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of Wordpress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don't know what I'm talking about, …

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…

In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let's say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a …

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 …

Qassia is an interesting social bookmarking/tagging site. What they're trying to do is have their members tag and organize websites, in return you get unlimited backlinks to YOUR websites. A very int…

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…

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 idea…

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 …