Classic Tech Tips Archive

First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I've also studied French and Ge…

I guess by now you've noticed that I'm not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I've been thinking that at this point I'm going to be getting in one a month or so. Mor…

Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the "what if"s are probably the most intriguing. What…

We've all been there... 2 minutes to return a call with a "quick" answer. There's not enough time for a real conversation. You HAVE to start a meeting in 2 minutes. Times like this, making a call can…

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to take a look at synchronizing a Blackberry to Outlook 2000. They said that the phone tech support told them it was a really easy thing to do and if they had a…

I had a machine that I picked up to test internet connectivity. They were able to do email, but not visit web pages. My first thought was that internet explorer may have been a bit sideways, but when…

For quite some time I've been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I'm out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to r…

Oh I'm glad I ran across this link. bubbl.us has a really great site up that gives you some nice bubble map output of brainstorming. Some people call these bubble maps, idea maps, mind mapping. You c…

I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in quest…

SMART testing has been around for a while and isn't very well understood. I can't say that I'm an expert on it, but I've come to have several fairly well developed ideas in regards to it. First off, …

S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your dri…

I've devoted quite a few pixels to this topic over on the Online Radio and TV site, but... in the United States broadcast TV will make the move to ALL digital in February. We have cable and the only …

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I've had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I'…

This is the time of year that we start thinking about that monumental trip Santa Claus makes around the globe on Christmas Eve. There are lot's of neat ways to track his progress online. One of my fa…

Take a look at the official announcement. They've moved outside the usual update cycle for this one. VERY good move Microsoft to get this patch in before the holidays as it looks as though there's be…

I've seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They're about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It's nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I…

I've just updated my Wordpress install on 2 sites up to the new release version 2.7 which is now two days old or so. I quickly took a look at the sites and saw that the global translator plugin wasn'…

This looks NICE... The new Light for Life flashlight which uses an ultracapacitor instead of batteries. Because of the ultracapacitor it takes 90 seconds to charge up. It uses LED lights and can run …

In the wake of a huge patch Tuesday, Microsoft has two new fires to be fighting. There are apparently "limited and targeted" attacks against a flaw with the Text converter component of Wordpad. Affec…

Microsoft had a mammoth patch Tuesday this month with 28 bug fixes (23 critical). (Computerworld article linked above. This is one of the largest update releases in five years (!) Those fixes were wr…

I LIKE stamping things with the date, whether it's a status report email or filename. (Like say I've downloaded todays news in Spanish, it really seems to make sense to tag it as spanish_news_12_8_08…

If you don't know what a netbook is, it's this recent class of laptops that's very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not …

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it's December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it's spectrum to…

The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off a…

Here are some notes from a recent spyware cleanup. The system came in and there were complaints that "Ron Ads by NetupBanner" kept coming up all the time as well as popups claiming that the dll c:\wi…