Computer Tips -Tech Info

The South Carolina Genealogy Site is the first of my other sites I’m farming out to another server, so at the moment while dns settles that is redirecting here. Sorry for the inconvenience if you’re looking for SC Genealogy content. It will be back up soon. Update as of 9PM all has settled with the server migration of SC Genealogy. It’s now at it’s own separate server with a freshly updated wordpress install plust a few new plugins.

   Send article as PDF   

I knew for some time that a server upgrade at my hosting provider was coming – they were essentially upgrading the underlaying software. (New versions of apache/php/etc. the entire system.) The original time was postponed and I breathed a little sigh of relief because I host somewhere in the order of 7 domains here. Well, this morning it happened and things mostly worked, some of the lesser importance domains were affected although. It took some .htaccess editing and php.ini editing to get everything working. (somehow php.ini had a bit of text that had “word wrapped” and was causing problems.) Also, .htaccess rules were causing the server to offer .html files for download instead of displaying them. All seems to be in order now. Back to regular schedule.

   Send article as PDF   

First, I guess I should give a primer, what’s an RBL? RBL stands for Realtime Black List (or Realtime Block List depending on who you talk to.) The idea is there are machines that either 1) have no business DIRECTLY trying to deliver a mail message to a legitimate mail server or 2) are known to spew out junk mail, or viruses or other bad content. So, many service providers make use of blacklists to decline messages from suspect machines. In some cases these lists are cultivated in house, in other cases people make use of various publicly available lists online.

But…

Read the rest of this entry »

I think things are settling back to where I’ll be doing some more routine posting here. I know I’ve been sporadic for the last several months, but the truth is that at one point I had poured so much time into my sites I really burnt out on them. Now I’m taking a new approach and trying to keep my goals realistic. My intent is to have 1 post per week here. (As well as some of my other sites.) So, expect to see new content here on Mondays starting with tomorrow January 21, 2008. Also, I expect the look and feel may change soon. (Don’t know I really like where I’ve got the theme at the moment, but…. there are things I’m not too fond of.) Anyway, my host is upgrading their software and so as a result it will make it possible for me to upgrade to the latest branch of wordpress.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since I’ve had an “on-topic” post here, but as you might imagine quite a bit has been going on. I had this peculiar problem reported to me in the last week about print spool issues with certain models of printers following the official windows update day.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know, you’ve seen the ads – make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and technically I was still “on vacation” until the 3rd of January). I had plenty of time to test out a few of these ideas. It seems that entrepreneurial-ism is a progressive disease – you find yourself many times thinking, hmmmm…. it seems like there should be a way to make a small profit by….. Anyway, many of these ideas are MORE trouble than they’re worth. REALLY. But one, that I signed up for just last night is actually looking very promising…. bux.to….

Read the rest of this entry »

Update – you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere’s Disease at my Meniere’s diagnosis blog.

Well… after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. Let me back up a bit…. several years ago I started getting a stuffy feeling in my right ear on occasion. I had allergies and it reminded me of an ear infection years ago, but I didn’t have a fever. It would come for a few days and go. Of course, it was always the right ear and I would always have a hard time hearing out of that ear. Occasionally, it would be accompanied by a roaring sound like a fan…. sometimes loud, sometimes soft. Sometimes it would feel like the ear drum was “tight as a drum” as you could actually FEEL sounds as well as hearing them slightly. Eventually I just got used to it coming and going. I’ve chalked it up to allergies…. over the years I’ve been prescribed and taken most every allergy medication I can think of and the next step was allergy shots…. well, it was a nuisance not a MAJOR problem, just a nuisance. Then… I would start feeling dizzy if my ear had been stopped up for 3-5 days running or more. That was still inconvenient, but I knew when to expect it and could manage…. Then the vertigo hit…. April 2006…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane…) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia’s product lines of late… Here’s a nutshell idea…. They’re currently using 4 digit product numbers – like 7300, 7800, 8300, etc…. I found this breakdown in zdnets talkback…

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an older platform, but there are still some around. I found this nice guide to troubleshooting startup issues on these versions of Mac’s OS.

   Send article as PDF   

I’ve talked about Clonezilla as a remarkably good an fast disk cloning utility previously, but there’s more to the clonezilla project than just rescue imaging of drives. There’s also a thin-boot server as well…. (diskless remote boot loader?) Anyway, This tutorial talks about how to setup clonezilla/drbl on a recent ubuntu install.

Read the rest of this entry »