Computer Tips -Tech Info

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’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would […]

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 favorites in recent years has been the Norad Santa tracking site. Last year they were using Google Earth […]

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 been a spike in the use of this particular exploit and with people doing a lot of home pc browsing […]

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 really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony […]

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’t working. (It was giving 404 errors, or…. “nothing found for es” for example.) After a […]

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 for 90 minutes on that 90 second charge. I see some uses that this wouldn’t be appropriate for, but many that […]

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. Affected systems include Windows 2000 SP4, XP up to SP2, Server 2003 SP1 and 2. Vista is not affected Server 2008 is […]

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 wrapped up in 8 updates for Internet Exporer, Office, Sharepoint, Windows media player and visual studio and Visual basic. (Oh and it […]

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.mp3 instead of just spanish_news.mp3 doesn’t it?) Okay, so this is something I do in a lot of my shell scripts. Here’s […]

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 desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA […]