Computer Tips -Tech Info

Just thought I’d do a quick post – I’ve had kind of a poor track record in ordering USB thumb drives lately. I ordered one which I absolutely hate… it was about the size of one of those small pieces of gum and didn’t have the proper USB adapter on there so all you do is slide it into the usb port on your pc – the problem is… which direction – well they say it will only work one way and you’ll feel some resistance the wrong way, well I tried it and found resistance both ways so I got down on hands and knees and looked in the usb port to see where the contacts were and lined the stick up with those so I KNEW beyond a doubt I was connecting it the right way. I managed to get it in and thought I was never going to get the thing out. Since then I’ve been using a usb extension cable with that annoying thing…

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I’ve fought this evening with Php Link Directory. I had a list of addresses I wanted to add in bulk and managed to string together the correct format of a csv file for import. It’s somewhat of a long story, it started with lynx dumping the source of a web page, sed trimming just the links, then just the link titles, etc. Finally a few scripts later I had a basic spreadsheet. Added NULL values in a few fields and tried the import. Everything looked good, so I thought I’d test adding a link through the user interface and see if everything was good.

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In the last couple months I’ve been “farming out” several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites all in the same virtual server as averyjparker.com. Well, I’ve noticed some strange behavior from Google Reader as a result…. read on.

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I’ve started adding the Share This plugin to several of my sites and was frustrated on one site to see on the front page “SHARETHIS.addEntry(” and a lot more ugly text. Upon investigation the < script tag enclosing the SHARETHIS javascript. So, I went on an investigation. I looked in the share this forums and found some people reporting the same problem with no real solutions.

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There are a lot of good things to like about the newer versions of wordpress. It seems to keep getting better. One of the really cool plugins is the WordPress.com stats plugin. This lets you have a nice simple stats interface accessible from your Dashboard on your wordpress blog. (It uses wordpress.com to track stats, so you’ll need a wordpress.com account to be able to use it. I set up a wordpress.com account some time back to be able to use the akismet plugin and the same key that you have for akismet can be used for the stats plugin.) You essentially upload the stats.php file into your wp-content/plugins folder, enable it in the plugins list, then enter your API key in the configuration page for stats. That’s all that should be to it, but I’ve noticed sometimes that’s not all it takes to get things going.

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It’s unusual for mail servers to suddenly start rejecting messages internally and from external sources. That’s exactly what I saw though over the weekend. A mailserver running mdaemon on Windows 2000 was rejected ALMOST every message that was sent it’s way whether it was an internal mail sender and recipient or external sender to internal recipient. The really interesting things was to see a message sporadically succeed. This problem was with mdaemon, but could have occured with ANY mail server. Here’s why…

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I’ve started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of WordPress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, wordpress is the “blogging” software that I use for this and several other sites. It makes adding content to a website very easy and has a great ability to be extended with plugins. bbpress is forum software by the makers of wordpress and with a similar look and feel. It also has the capability to share the user list with wordpress.

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We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)

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In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.

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This is one of the questions that I deal with at least weekly. Here’s where I usually start answering… First you have to ask yourself what you want to do with a computer. If your goal is email and internet access, most ANYTHING sold new today is much more than sufficient to the task. It will be hard to find something that won’t work for you. If you want to work with office documents, spreadsheets and other text files, you’re still looking at just about anything currently on the market. But what if you want to do some gaming or get into video or music editing?

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