Computer Tips -Tech Info

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….

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Wow… just took a glance at the error_logs and saw numerous errors from Trackbacks and started browsing to find that the last few days we’ve been weathering a spam storm. Thanks to akismet and another tool I’ve only had maybe 2 comments stuck in moderation that were spammy, but several thousand have made it to akismet (and if I recall my OTHER filter catches 90% of the spammy stuff before akismet sees it…) So, I hope someones having fun…. realistically they seem to be coming from a variety of machines, likely a botnet. I saw one machine belonged to a netblock owned by the state of Ohio for public schools. There was another residential broadband in Texas… etc. etc. etc. So, surprise, there are still botnets in the wild and being used for spam.

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I ran across a good public record search engine (pretrieve.com) a few weeks back. They’ve done a good job of integrating many searches/databases into one interface.

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I don’t know where to file this, but it was interesting to me…. this how-to walks you through a cheap way to make good closeup photos… Basically they have you construct a light tent from a card board box (cut large openings in the sides and use white tracing paper to diffuse the light and posterboard for backgrounds.)

The idea here is that for those good closeups of small items being bathed in light is the ideal, but a direct flash usually is not good, diffuse light is the ideal and this setup does nicely.

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I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned my Epson stylus photo 825 before, but I’ve had one for a couple years. The really nice feature (I thought) was the ability to print direct from camera memory cards (at the time I bought it, this was much more rare than in current printers.) Anyway, it had GREAT print quality and could print up to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, I use my laser printer (monochrome hp 4p) for 95%+ of my day to day printing and the epson sat unused for stretches of time and eventually I’ve wound up with a bunch of jets clogged on the print head. I’ve been taking increasingly drastic steps to try to get the thing to print well again.

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and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)

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Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…

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There’s an interesting writeup about bestbuy that essentially says they have 2 web sites, one is the public facing website, the other is an internal web site. No big surprise there I suppose, internet/intranet… the catch is

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There are lot’s of ways to get a file from one place to another, emailing is the first that many think of. (For larger files I’ll usually just upload to a directory on the website and then email a link…) The problem with email is multiple…. 1)viruses exploit email as a delivery vehicle and so attachments are looked at with rightful suspicion…. and 2) the size of emails is usually capped SOMEWHERE along the way, my isp, your isp, etc…. Usually that cap is around 5-10MB There are other ways to get a big file from point a to point b – (don’t underestimate the bandwidth of the postal service and dvd-r’s….) One online alternative though is yousendit.com – you upload a file, tell who you want it sent to and it appears that they send a link via email so the recipient can download.

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You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media at hand. The install would stop to validate the install media and you could proceed. Very handy if recovering from a full hard drive failure, virus infestation, etc. Well the word was, Vista upgrade requires the previous OS version that you upgrade from to be installed on the Hard drive. This makes the rebuild process from such failures sound VERY nasty and tedious (read: just go buy a new pc…) However….

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