Computer Tips -Tech Info

The telegraph brings us this survey which claims that 10:04 PM is the most creative time of day. To contrast that 4:33PM is the least creative time. It’s not clear HOW exactly the survey was conducted, but apparently I would be among the 25% of people that burn the midnight oil working on their ideas… […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Making up passwords is something we have to do almost everyday it seems. Banking web sites, forums, email accounts, webhosting accounts, mail lists, etc. But it seems that making passwords is one of the things that some people have the hardest time doing. Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to make a password, but hard […]

There’s a lot of buzz these days about “cloud computing”. You may be asking yourself just what IS cloud computing? The concept is that you are not as reliant on your personal computer, but your applications and data are kept somewhere in the internet “cloud”. So for instance, I use google calendars and gmail for […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]