BBPress forum reference

October 11th, 2008

BBPress is nice, lean forum software from the makers of wordpress. I just wanted to do a quick post to make note of a good forum – bbpress showcase forum that has listings of plugins and other things of interest to bbpress admins.

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Where did Expert Mode go on my Westell DSL modem?

October 9th, 2008

My brother does a variety of things, as I do including the front line of dealing with todays technology. This means looking to calls about DSL modem outages and problems. Well, he was passing along that in the last several days he’s come across several Bellsouth AT&T DSL customers with a problem with the control interface. He went into the modem configuration to configure pinhole routing after things were stabilized and… clicked the Expert Mode link. There was nothing there. We speculated that perhaps the modem had a bad firmware flash? We even wondered if AT&T had changed policy and stripped the Expert settings. It turns out that the solution is fairly simple.

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GrandCentral – One Ring to rule them ALL?

October 9th, 2008

Has Google gone too far with the purchase of GrandCentral? “One number that rings all your phones” (and in the darkness binds them?) There are already great privacy concerns with google. This new acquisition I am SURE will lead to more worries. The idea with grandcentral is that you have a unified inbox for voicemail. All of your voicemail can be accessed in one place. You can get voicemail notifications via sms or email. You can screen calls it looks like, you can have incoming calls ring specific phones depending on who’s calling… it sounds like there are some interesting features including (of course) managing it all online. The service is currently in beta and is taking “reservations” for YOUR unified phone number.

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Adsense UsernamePasswdNotMatch

October 6th, 2008

So, I went to adsense to check my stats and I get a page that is almost blank with the only text showing being UsernamePasswdNotMatch

Ahhhhh…. what have I done to upset the Google overlords…..

It sounds like just clearing your browser cache and trying again should get you in. It’s also possible that this is an intermittent problem and is affecting more than just your account. The Digital Point Forums can be a good place to check up and see if others are having similar login problems.

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Converting rm to mp3

September 29th, 2008

Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.

For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:

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Visualizing 4 spatial dimensions

September 29th, 2008

I’ve always had more than a passing interest in astronomy and physics… so when I found reference to this video series explaining how to visualize four spatial dimensions. Multiple spatial dimensions are the domain of math, but I’ve always suspected that the universe has 4 spatial dimensions… anyway interesting stuff to think about.

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Has Asheville NC Run out of gas?

September 25th, 2008

Asheville NC Gas shortage, has some links and a gathering of prices and availabilities. It looks as though many stations in the Asheville area are out of gas.

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Need to install Ubuntu linux on an HP Pavillion a6400f?

September 22nd, 2008

Linux does quite well on this machine, but there is a problem with the built in ethernet (gigabit adapter). The hardware appears to be detected correctly, but the network card doesn’t really work with the driver. Thankfully it’s a fairly easy fix… thanks to the ubuntu forums.

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Megaupload alternative

September 22nd, 2008

I guess the better way to put this is that this is an alternative way to download from megaupload. megaupload.com is a file storage site. If you pay them you can have unlimited downloads, but normally they limit downloads to single ip addresses. (As well as limiting simultaneous downloads.)

I’m not certain of the ins and outs of how they’re doing this, but xmegaupload.com provides an alternate way to get to files if you’ve hit your maximum limit. (In fact altering the megaupload link to have xmegaupload.com was working last week as a way to get to megaupload files.)

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Alfa 500mw usb wireless

September 15th, 2008

I’ve seen some high powered wireless cards from Senao, but… 500mw I think is the most powerful wireless radio I’ve seen. This Alfa USB adapter appears to require 2 (!) USB ports for full power, but it can use just 1. It also appears that this is a USB wireless adapter compatible with linux (even some of the wireless scanning utilities on linux as well…)

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