Computer Tips -Tech Info

If you use Internet Explorer to browse the web, I’d suggest finding the instructions to disable active scripting, or drop it and use something else in light of the recent exploit floating around. It seems that in spite of Microsoft’s infinite wisdom that “Microsoft has determined that an attacker who exploits this vulnerability would have […]

It’s interesting to see the rumor mill around Vista – I saw articles this morning claiming that 60% of the Vista code would have to be rewritten and the Xbox team was pulled to work on Vista – from what I can see both of those are not true. I suspect people are looking to […]

I should mention a fairly big Windows vulnerability (which involves active scripting). Apparently there are proof-of-concept exploits circulating that do innocent things like open up the calculator. Unfortunately, once exploits are out that can do this, it’s trivial for them to do worse. The bottom line is, be careful what sites you visit, beware of […]

This is a good idea…. let’s say you want a linux install, but you’re very particular. You’d like to have a certain setup out of the box, say a basic desktop with OpenOffice and Firefox/Thunderbird. Nothing fancy, just a basic desktop and you wanted to deploy over several systems. Some distributions give you the choice […]

I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone […]

Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there….) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft’s AVG and so I tried to force an update. I was greeted with an error message… “Cannot Launch AV internet […]

So, juice (formerly known as ipodder) was a bit too gui-only for my tastes, I took a look at bashpodder which is a bash-script based podcast client. Really, this is very much to my liking as it can be scripted to run via cron (or at)… basically, there are three required files from the main […]

I’ve been playing around a bit with podcast clients the last couple of days. I’ve been finding online news feeds for the onlineradiotv.com site and for many of those I have bash scripts to handle downloading or streaming the audio available from shortwave broadcasters. I did run across a few podcasts too though and thought […]

Not long ago, I switched from Evolution to Kontact as my primary mail/calendar/addressbook/etc…. program under linux. One of the nice things about the Kontact suite is that you can either open up the “umbrella” application kontact or, the individual applications. I like the fact that they can still be used standalone. So, I was a […]

Mandriva 2006 released without Mozilla Firefox 1.5, it came with 1.0.6 (which included security fixes and other patches from 1.0.7)…. anyway, source rpm’s for Firefox 1.5 became available in cooker, so I’ve built rpm’s for Mandriva 2006 for easy management on my systems. I’ll post links here as they may be of use to others […]