Computer Tips -Tech Info

It looks like at least one label is not as concerned that freely available lyrics online are a threat… The push to make song lyric sites and programs illegal has cooled — at least on one front. Walter Ritter, creator of the popular PearLyrics lyrics program, and Warner/Chappell announced that they would work together to […]

Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I […]

Mirrors are added, now it’s time to start the process. OK, everything up until now has been preparatory and hasn’t REALLY upgraded anything. I’ve skimmed over the errata and release notes (again) at http://qa.mandriva.com to make sure there isn’t anything hardware specific or urpmi –auto-select from Mandrake 10.1 specific that I need to be aware […]

Just found this fairly challenging javascript game escape. You control a square and try to avoid touching 4 moving blocks (and the walls). It’s fairly tricky – I made it to 32.something seconds after a couple tries though. Just what I needed for a few moments this afternoon.    Send article as PDF   

Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. etc. Or, perhaps […]

Ouch, Dell is recalling 35,000 notebook batteries that were shipped between October 5rd and 13th of this year. They were made in China or Japan and “pose a risk of fire.” There is a web-site setup by Dell on the issue… here. They also suggest “Batteries subject to recall should not be used while awaiting […]

Since Google Talk is based on the Jabber protocol (XMPP) it’s been compatible with any jabber client for instant messaging. That was a well and good move. Very welcoming to see a big name use an open protocol that can be implemented by anyone. There were some concerns though that the voice talk features were […]

In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows… Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in “userland”. Display adapter/driver problems have been one of the greatest source of instability and crashes for some time. That should make for a noticable improvement.    Send article as […]

As I type this, I’m downloading a compressed hard drive image from the freeoszoo download page. The download size is about 1.2GB and it’s been BLAZING fast. (286KBps is the top I’ve seen) it’s been going – maybe 20-30 minutes and is 70% through…    Send article as PDF   

Ok, so you’ve got a hardware firewall and you’ve got antivirus. You’re safe right? Well, not entirely. I’ve mentioned the flaws of antivirus. It’s always a step behind. A firewall doesn’t protect against unknown viruses, so what else is there to do? I’m going to tackle this in two steps. The first is to know […]