Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’m usually a bit leery of new antispyware products. I do a first look at the rogue antispyware lists and just try to be as cautious as possible when moving away from the tools that I’ve tried and tested. I downloaded malwarebytes anti-malware very reluctantly to clean up a machine with “virus isolator” that nothing else seemed to be able to completely remove. It just seemed like the 10 headed hydra or something that kept coming back, so I found malwarebytes anti-malware recommended and must say it did the task quite well.

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I can’t tell you how glad I am to see the ultra portable laptops coming back into favor. I’ve got a couple of old used sony vaio’s that are great little portable machines – lightweight/go anywhere…. The old Dell laptop that I have is the opposite it is a big desktop replacement – two optical drives/etc. Bulky and somewhat annoying to take with anywhere. Well, first HP has launched a ~8 inch portable and now asus. The Asus Eee PC looks like a great small portable. It’s about the size of a small book, uses a 4GB flash hard drive.

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As you know I’ve used wordpress as a platform for many of my sites. It makes updating and adding information so quick and easy (as well as great extensions available for it and good theme possibilities.) Anyway, I’ve wanted forum functionality on a few sites as well and so I installed bbpress v. 0.8 some time back. I was able to integrate the installs with their respective WordPress installs and share users. At one point though,l I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 and a few weeks later when I tried to log into the forum…. my password was rejected. At first, I suspected a security breach, but tested the login with wordpress… it worked there, but not bbpress….

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I use Google Calendar for most everything I do. Since I have a number of different jobs I have a tendency to break things down into individual calendars. So I have my personal calendar events, my computer work, my piano schedule, Church. Each of these are in separate calendars within my Google Calendar account. So, usually when I go to add an item I get a drop down box in the dialog box that let’s me choose which calendar to put the task in.

Today that vanished.

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I just found out today that dd-wrt v.24 has reached it’s final release. (As opposed to the previous release candidates.) I have several linksys wrt54gl routers that I’ve installed earlier versions of the alternative firmware on. I’ve been really pleased with the results as well. Most of my installs are based on v.23sp2, but I’m looking forward to taking full advantage of some of the new v.24 features. (Virtual SSID with (I think) virtual BSSID which should solve the wireless discovery problems.)

Downloads from dd-wrt are quite slow right now. I don’t think I’m the only one trying to get a look at their latest effort.

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Windows XP Home connecting to a file share in a Domain controlled by Windows 2000…. Not quite your recipe for headache free things “just working” I guess, but this is what I’ve run into. This workstation had a mapped drive connected to a folder on the server which opened in windows explorer just fine and up until a week before my visit, the desktop shortcut to their application in that folder “just worked”. For some reason though they suddenly started getting an error message that said Windows Cannot Access the Specified Path or File… then went on to say you might not have permission to access the resource, or it may be unavailable. Well, we could browse the network folder to it with no problem and clicking the program link in that folder gave the same error. So, at that visit I did a workaround… a simple batch script that changed to the directory of the program and launched it. Amazing the script worked. (As long as they had opened/browsed the folder in windows explorer first.)

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I don’t know if you’re familiar with bbpress, it’s the forum cousin of wordpress and can integrate nicely into the wordpress database to allow users to be shared across the two installs. So, on my North Carolina Genealogy site and my South Carolina Genealogy site I have bbpress forums installed. The catch is I wanted everything accessible through forums.domain.tld for each one. This worked with a simple config.php edit on the North Carolina site, but not the South Carolina Genealogy Forum. I kept getting 404 errors. So, I spent a couple hours chasing .htaccess Nothing I tried worked, I copied working files from one to the other, I looked at httpd.conf settings.

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If you have a linux machine and haven’t ever made use of sed (stream editor) you’re missing out on a great automation utility. I’ve saved myself probably 20 hours of manual editing with about an hour of work TWICE today. Here’s how…. over on the North Carolina Genealogy site I was opening forums for each county in the state of North Carolina (100 counties.) Now, I could have gone through and typed out a description, slug (address) and name for each one, but that looked too tedious. So…

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So, the adobe reader version 8.1 should be a straightforward install. On one particular XP system it wasn’t and from what I can tell, there are several that have run into the same problem. The installer seems to work well enough, but when I try to launch the application I just see the windows error reporting dialog that says Adobe Reader has encountered an error and needs to close. So, I did a full uninstall and tried to clean out everything, but on reinstall it still complains even before the splash screen.

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I’ve had a couple of small wireless projects lately and have really been having a great time playing around with the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router and one of the many GREAT 3rd party firmwares dd-wrt. I know, for a couple years I’ve meant to get a hold of one of these little linksys boxes for testing. I had read about OpenWRT and found it an interesting idea. For those that don’t know, the original linksys wrt54g wireless routers were designed based around a customized linux firmware. What made this nice is linksys made the source code available for their firmware which made it a lot easier for others to improve upon linksys’ built in software.

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