Classic Tech Tips Archive

The first maintenance release for Openoffice.org 2 has been released sometime today according to Betanews.com. It's mainly a bugfix release. I didn't see an official announcement on their main site, …

Google has released their Zeitgeist 2005. Zeitgeist is German and would translate roughly as "spirit of the times". The idea is to give a snapshot of what people are thinking about and searching for …

According to this securityfix post it's a daily occurance. The email that he cites was from a woman who was informed by a company that a data backup had been "lost track of". There is a web site that…

A few things to catch up on this afternoon, but first up is a Serious vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus. (It's always serious when security software has a vulnerability.) The securityfix is reporti…

One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast "light" window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has…

I'm sure you remember the CIA/FBI virus a few weeks back. There was a German version of this and apparently one individual took the warning email to heart and turned himself in for child pornography.…

I'm finding a bit more about the upcoming Wordpress 2.0 release. I haven't had time to test the RC in the 5 minutes since the last post, but I have been able to read a few sites. It looks like most o…

I see in the dashboard that the third and (last?) release candidate for Wordpress 2.0 is officially out. There is word that the final may come Wednesday or Thursday of this week. I haven't had much t…

The Washington Times, has a story from Brian Krebs of their Security Fix blog about ... Guidance Software -- the leading provider of software used to diagnose hacker break-ins -- has itself been hack…

Deep breath time. We've covered a lot of good topics and it's important at this point to take a close look at what we've talked about and think. "Am I overwhelmed?" If so that's fine. Maybe you don't…

Ok - Now I've mentioned the Sony shortwave radio a couple times. It comes with a little (maybe 23 foot?) random wire antenna that really boosts reception over the internal "whip" antenna. In fact, I …

Ok, another reboot after the BHO cleaning. Things are a good deal more responsive now, less disc swapping going on. (I suspect that those three missing BHO entries may have been causing the slow down…

Ok - Nvidia driver was an easy one, download the latest from nvidia.com stop the X server, run sh NIVIDIAlongfilename.run, hit enter a few times, wait and eventually.... restart the X server log in a…

OK - there may be those that read the last entry and had some obvious "oh, you ought to look in the ***** directory for menu information." On the issue I ran into with missing menu items after the up…

The SecurityFix is reporting on a security breech at reevesnamepins.com a company that supplies (among others) law enforcement personnel. Apparently, CardCops (which monitors for possible stolen data…

(or for that matter, rogue or suspect antivirus.) What's fascinating about this category is most of these products either use security vulnerabilities to get into a system, or merely convince a perso…

The SANS institute is warning of an increase in reports of malware scanning for vulnerabilities. Currently these samples of malware are undetected by current antivirus signatures. They're requesting …

OK - the last couple of entries got into some heavy lifting and some real learning on your part. Learning about what software needs to run, what services are running, updating them to keep current on…

It's not often that I get to talk about some of my hobbies on this site. The Genealogy sites are reserved for one of those hobbies, but time certainly takes it's toll and frankly it's hard to have mu…

Ok, it's BHOdemon time... installed from cd and on starting: BHOdemon bhotb-all.html not found, no web connection downloading on other machine. Finally get it to work copying from another machine. Bu…

Well, where are things? The gui installer did a good job, got the system up and running. The biggest initial problem is that it didn't change the default boot entry in lilo, which meant the system tr…

This one is going to be tougher. Of what we've looked at so far this will probably take more work and learning than any of the others. The good news is, depending on your situation you may need to do…

For many years I'd been curious about shortwave radio. Finally maybe five years ago, I broke down and bought a cheap ($30) shortwave radio to see what I could hear. It was ok. Probably among the best…

OK, we're moving on to BHOdemon to take care of the browser helper objects. Unfortunately it looks like BHODemon is not being currently maintained, the developer has had a housefire. I am very sorry,…

There are acouple situations where my systems memory needs have exceeded the supply. The most likely cases are running virtual machines and building cd/dvd images. Those things realistically take LOT…