Computer Tips -Tech Info

It’s certainly a brief story, but to the point…. Google will allow pdf downloads of the books in their book search that are already out of copyright. Of course, copyright law is a strange and peculiar thing to many people, so this doesn’t mean that EVERY edition of “The Canterbury Tales” is now freely downloadable. So, it may take a bit of digging to find the free downloads for some of the titles you’re searching for, but they can be found and downloaded. They do categorize by “limited preview” and “full view” books. It’s possible to JUST search “Full view” books as well.

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I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading the free music. Testing will begin in the US and Canada before the end of the year. It sounds as though they will use DRM from Microsoft on the free downloads…

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I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had done a test page through the printers software at the end of the install process (Some sort of deskjet toolbox software, not Windows test page pattern.) Then we were making sure everything worked and they went to print out a UPS label from Worldship. The printer had come unplugged in the last rearrange, so I plugged power back in and the printer loaded a page, ran the head back and forth twice and spit out a blank page. Oh, we were using a parallel cable – I’ve seen some parallel cable based printers get “flustered” when power is lost and back on (especially if it was in the midst of a job when the power was pulled) – so reboot…

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One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to test out by converting to tif. There MUST be a way….. yes there is (several I suppose).. In linux though the answer is ghostscript.

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Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) are the only ones that are ubuntu specific. For your given distribution, install according to your distro (urpmi/etc.)

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There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those can give the same error messages. Not too long ago my brother had a laptop hard drive failure, it gave a “no partition found” kind of error message. We talked about a utility such as ghost4linux (g4l) which includes dd_rescue which does a remarkable job with failing disks.

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Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) broadcastemailgroupcom and broadcastemailcorporation.com are some of their other recent aliases. They claim in the email that their offer is only for non-profit groups and to excuse the inconvenience if you have received this by mistake. Over the last weekend though, I received 7-10 of these on various postmaster@ and root@ addresses (Plus one sales@ address) for the various domains that I either own or administer for others.

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I’ve added yet another category for “data leaks”. This is where I’ll put news along the lines of X company leaked data on yyyyy customers. It’s unfortunate that this is something that likely happens daily. There is no way that I can keep up with EVERYTHING, but I’ll try to post the bigger events in this category. I have many customers that say they’re concerned about people getting their credit card or bank numbers and for that reason they don’t do ANY transactions online or have any of that data on their computers. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the genie is already out of the bottle, because the companies that we do business with (ON OR OFFLINE) have all your data on computers and prohibiting yourself from online transactions is NO guarantee that you won’t have your data stolen or be a victim of Identity theft.

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Verizon Wireless accidentally attached the wrong file to an email and wound up broadcasting an Excel spreadsheet with the details of some 5210 customers to about 1800 people. Apparently, they were sending out a promotional email to some of their customers and instead of the electronic order form they intended to send. The promotional email was for a bluetooth headset.

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A couple weeks back, there was a pretty important security update for the Intel Proset Wireless driver. The big problem is that the update was a memory hog and caused porblems. Sans has info on the update to the update, also George Ou is encouraging everyone to make sure they’ve got things updated. It’s possible to JUST download and install the driver without getting the full proset management software. So…. CENTRINO users – this means you… update your wireless driver.

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