Computer Tips -Tech Info

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 route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly secure web browsing setup. But, as they say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And, that’s what I’ve played around with the last couple days. First off, I guess I should describe the concept. 1) Let’s say that you’re browsing the web at an open wireless access point and you don’t trust the network or 2) let’s say you need to be able to access an intranet web server that is not accessible from the internet side of a network or scenario 3) let’s say a web site is blocking access based on ip address (for instance say you’re behind the great firewall of xyz business/company)…. how can you still manage to access the web pages you want to 3,2) at all or 1) securely with as little snooping as possible.

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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 can also use this to create a simple flow chart. It’s still a great site (and the results look pretty nice.)

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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 question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.

Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:

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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, if I have a live hard drive that fails to complete a SMART test, it’s time for me to retire that drive. It may seem extravagant, but I would rather not have to spend loads of time recovering data of a potentially failing drive. It’s true that SMART is not necessarily going to raise a red flag before a significant data loss event happens. In fact, I’ve seen drives report that they’ve passed the health test in spite of some serious disk problems. What I think you ought to look out for are a few of these points:

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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 drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.

How?

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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 way it’s affecting me is in my planning for the inevitable winter storms that will knock out the cable from time to time. Times like that we need over the air access to our local news and I’ve got the converter box for that. But, with so many people on cable or satellite – will the digital transition affect you?

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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 support it.) So, I thought I’d open this up and ask – what’s the oldest (working) computer hardware you still have?

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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 for the tracking. Have you ever wondered how or why NORAD started this whole Santa Claus tracking mission?

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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 over the next two weeks, hopefully they can have a patched Internet Explorer to browse with. These are one more good reason to have an alternative browser such as firefox installed “just in case”. That’s not to say that Firefox is immune to all such security issues, but it is targeted less frequently and perhaps most importantly by DIFFERENT things than Explorer is targeted by. (I should note that version 3.0.5 of firefox is out to address it’s own list of issues.)

By the way, this Internet Explorer vulnerability is listed as critical for Internet Explorer 5.01 on NT SP4, for Internet Explorer 6 on NT SP4 as well as pretty much every combination of Internet Explorer 6 or Explorer 7 on XP, Server 2003, Vista or Server 2008 AND those using Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 users are encouraged to update to a new release as well. In other words IF you use any currently supported version of Internet Explorer on any currently supported version of Windows you need to make sure this update installs.

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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 Vaio which is not a bad size, but most laptops are just too big to be REALLY portable.

I think this size notebook is an improvement on the concept of the PDA because it gives you more options.

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