Classic Tech Tips Archive

This is going to explain some ideas for a really simple way to make your own backup routine. This isn't very fancy and in some ways it's not the best backup solution. Let me explain what to use this …

This multimedia presentation details five "hacker tools" that every network admin needs to be familiar with. Along the lines of "know your enemy" I think it's important to be well versed with what to…

The Boston Globe has a story about todays energy bill signing and an issue which I mentioned once before. It seems that there are many devices that are hardwired to change to DST on a fixed schedule.…

I've played around with Kstars off and on for a good while. It reminds me vaguely of a program I used to have under windows. It's essentially a planetarium on your desktop. It is GPL licensed and par…

The Register has an interesting piece, reflecting on the current state of the computer security industry. The recent Blackhat convention has prompted this reflection and they conclude that not enough…

One of the things I've run into with various linux livecds, whether it's my own made with mklivecd, or others based on Knoppix, the Suse Livecd, or I could go on.... the problem I've seen is with the…

Interesting article at lurhq.com on pay per click hijacking, which is really an extension on old DNS poisoning attacks. Essentially the DNS poisoning attack works like this... Every domain name on th…

The Register also has a review up today of the Acer Ferrarri 4000 notebook/laptop. Apparently, an older version of the Ferrari was too bright red for the taste of the reviewers. They do a thorough wr…

AOL has purchased Wildseed according to The Register. Wildseed provides wireless "accessories" such as ring tones, video downloads, backgrounds, etc. AOL recently bought a company involved in online …

Sunbelt blog has an article about Microsoft's plan to keep Windows Vista from becomming more sluggish as the system aged. Microsoft's plan is to run defragmentation in the background and preloading c…

The big buzz in tech circles last week was the release of a tool called "car whisperer" which could allow someone to remotely insert audio into a bluetooth enabled vehicle. It was also possible, usin…

A few days back I mentioned that slashdot was posing questions to Bill Hilf, the manager of Microsoft's Linux lab. Today his responses are being posted. Among the more interesting points, in general …

So, you need a firewall for your growing home network (or small business), don't want to lay out a couple hundred dollars (or even 1 hundred dollars), what do you do? Give up and let the world in? No…

Incidents.org is soliciting people to submitting URL's of malware, those addresses we get in mail that are a link to something, bad. Their hope is to create automated methods for dealing with these a…

Cooltech zone currently has an article(slashdotting underway I think), on the topic of an inkjet buying guide. It may be a bit slow at the moment, but if you're in the market for an inkjet printer, t…

A good how to has been posted at howtoforge.com, giving some instructions for setting up Mandrake (now Mandriva) 10.2 into a web/email serving platform. (As well as MySQL and FTP, DNS, and a few othe…

This interesting article says that Sony has released some information on the PS3 (Playstation 3) that says "The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such …

This may not directly relate to computers, but one of my interests has been solar electric. I have a solar and battery system setup for powering small things when we have black outs and I also have a…

The Globe and Mail has a good writeup on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is schedule to lift off Wednesday from Florida. It mentions some of the other upcoming space missions related to Mars a…

Long ago there was talk about the desktop not meaning anything anymore and that software would be delivered through the web. Well, it looks as though AJAX has brought that closer to reality. Wired ne…

Among other sources, media law professors blog notes the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband. Effectively the decision will remove the requirement of phone providers to allow for competitors to ha…

It looks as though Windows Vista has been designed to essentially neutralized the usability of OpenGL, one of two competing 3d acceleration apis. Directx *(by Microsoft) is the other competing API an…

The New York Times online has an article on the rise of Cyberextortion. Businesses are usually targetted. That was true in the case of the focus of this article. Apparently the person in question use…

There's a primer in the independant on Novell pushing linux adoption. They also mention Novell trying to balance between opensource, freely downloadable content and providing business level support. …

This is a WOW idea. This article at the Financial Mirror, talks about Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat Linux, and his latest venture. The venture is called Lulu and if you'll pardon me it's a "Lulu"…