Computer Tips -Tech Info

I saw an interesting question over at slashdot on the topic of how many companies actually had their employees power down their PC’s overnight. The site in question had about 8000 PCs about half of which stayed powered on overnight. There’s a lot of talk these days about “going green”. I’ve always been interested in […]

Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s […]

Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or […]

The other day I was struggling with something that should have worked “out of the box”. It was a little wireless bridge (Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge). The idea was to just connect it to the pc and it would just work. Well…. in a word NO. It “sort of worked”, the problem is the […]

One of the things I’ve really admired about the Ubuntu project is that they will MAIL you REAL cds of their product for free. That can give a much more professional look for redistribution than a hand burned cd with handwritten green ink saying ubuntu linux 5.10…. Well, Ubuntu has done this for quite a […]

There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk back to the REAL spam sender (clever concept huh? bouncing to the person that REALLY sent the message… Of course what was clever here […]

Rootkits are a piece (or pieces) of software that someone can be used once a system is compromised to a) regain access to a system and b) remove traces of a compromise and c) many times hide itself. There are some tools for linux based systems that can be run to detect traces of rootkits […]

Incidents.org has the story on Sun’s release of new versions of the Java Runtime Environment and the Java SDK to fix some remote security vulnerabilities. These security vulnerabilities could allow malicious, untrusted code to compromise a user’s computer. Sun recommends that users update to the newest version of the SDK and JRE available at http://java.sun.com […]

I have no idea where to put this. It isn’t exactly high tech…. Anyway, we live out in a rural (becoming suburban…) area which means good lighting is very useful. We have a good outdoor houselight, but have never wanted an always on area light. Flashlights are good, but even the biggest mag-lights seem ineffective […]

This is unusual, but it sounds like there is a bug in regedit (and regedit32) which prevents the displaying of unusually long registry keys. Now, that sounds innocent enough, it also prevents the viewing of keys entered under them. Again, ok not a crisis. Imagine if you had an extremely long registry key entered in […]