Classic Tech Tips Archive

After 12 years of effort FreeDos has reached the milestone 1.0 released. It can be found here. I've really found freedos to be quite usable for quite some time as a drop in replacement of MS Dos envi…

For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though... it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I've mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERY…

I ran into something I hadn't yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them…

Today is the first chance I"ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter "in the field". I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5") or desktop (3.5") drives as well as large…

I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn't thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has re…

Yesterday codeweavers announced a beta release of their Crossover Office product geared towards Apple Mac OS X users. The software will allow certain windows applications to run on top of Apple's ope…

A new Internet Explorer bug was published on Monday. It's been given a CVE (2006-4446) and affects IE 6.0 SP1. It's worth considering alternative browsers. Details from bugtraq indicate that it's a b…

We've got an antivirus false positive to pass along... apparently, a signature update for CA eTrust Antivirus has flagged lsass.exe on Windows 2003 as an undesirable program. There have been updates …

Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are…

First, Linspire released the freely available "freespire" release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run s…

I've FINALLY tracked down what was causing the issue with displaying my page in Internet Explorer 7 (RC1). It turns out that the stattraq plugin in wordpress (stattraq site) is part of the problem. N…

I've been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as "Internet explorer cannot display t…

So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn't working correctly without administrator privili…

Several months back I had to figure out a way to get Create a card gold (5.0?) run on an XP system. The only real problem was that I had setup the account with limited user privileges (shared machine…

Numerous bug fixes - MAKE CERTAIN PREVIOUS VERSIONS ARE UNINSTALLED. uninstall instructions Sun's Downloads page

The Java Runtime Environment from Sun has a vulnerability that's due in large part to a poor approach to updating it. IF you have not uninstalled previous versions of the JRE on your PC, they are lik…

It's really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100's of thousands of computers. There NEED t…

Sendmail 8.13.8 released 8/9/06 various fixes including DoS fix Download

I've got to admit, I hadn't caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don't currently administer sendmail on any machines, but.... Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to a…

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (…

AT&T has had a breach of data that revealed information on as many as 19,000 individuals that had used their online store. It appears that credit card data is what was stolen, it happened over the we…

It's certainly a brief story, but to the point.... Google will allow pdf downloads of the books in their book search that are already out of copyright. Of course, copyright law is a strange and pecul…

I've seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006…

I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had…

One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one …