Computer Tips -Tech Info

This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I’ve just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list of the top ten things to do before you throw away, give away, pitch or […]

By default the apache install for most sites now restricts directory browsing. It’s a good idea, you don’t want just ANYTHING to be browsable on a web server, but there comes a time that it makes life easier for a directory (or tree of directories) to be browsable without having to write (copy and paste) […]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this complaint from the bash shell when trying to remove a bunch of files. In this case, I was trying to clear a directory where log rotating had run amuck and there was a 10 second lag in typing ls ∗.gz and seeing any output…. So, […]

There’s a utility called Thumbs that looks like a good quick way to make a cd launch a web documented on autoplay in Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/ …Of course, autoplay under windows is fairly easy to setup. If you have a program on the disk you can just have autorun.inf in the root directory of the cd […]

Since, I’ve still got a few older Mandrake 10 installs that I’m maintaining as mailservers, there aren’t supported security fixes for various things anymore… Friday there was news of a new clamantivirus to fix some security flaws with 0.88, new version is 0.88.1 I’ve taken the cooker srpm and recompiled for 10.0, so… for my […]

To change the Google theme of the afternoon…. Microsoft is due to release their April updates this coming Tuesday (April 11th.) Advance bulletin is here. Four updates affecting Windows, one affecting Office AND Windows. Highest severity is Critical (Explorer flaw probably) Reboot will be required… The Office/Windows update MAY require a reboot and is listed […]

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 […]

This really could be used to encyrpt web traffic over any “hostile” network. Here’s what I’m talking about. Laptop using wireless. Within our internal network we would LIKE all our web traffic to be encrypted at least from the laptop to a wired host. (From there to the outside world it will be open.) At […]

I’ve just been sitting down with the laptop for a while (Dell Inspiron 8000) it’s an older laptop by current standards I guess, but it does well for me. The inspiron 8000 has some “hotkeys” for volume up and down, mute and controlling the cd player (play, stop, next and previous tracks.) It’s pretty standard […]