Classic Tech Tips Archive

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…

When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good "google luck". I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started…

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…

Everything seems to be back to normal now after the server upgrade and the migration of one of the "child" domains out of the account. I do have several other "child" domains that will be migrating o…

The South Carolina Genealogy Site is the first of my other sites I'm farming out to another server, so at the moment while dns settles that is redirecting here. Sorry for the inconvenience if you're …

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 origi…

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…

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 …

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 know, you've seen the ads - make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and…

Update - you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere's Disease at my Meniere's diagnosis blog. Well... after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere's Disease. Let me bac…

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 …

It's an older platform, but there are still some around. I found this nice guide to troubleshooting startup issues on these versions of Mac's OS.

I've talked about Clonezilla as a remarkably good an fast disk cloning utility previously, but there's more to the clonezilla project than just rescue imaging of drives. There's also a thin-boot serv…

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 wor…

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 …

As you can tell, it's been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought tha…

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…

Deleting TONS of comment spam that had slipped in unnoticed in the last couple months. I may have to generically disable pingbacks as well as comments. (Sad...) I hope I haven't dumped legit comments…