Posts Tagged ‘Computers’

Self-Service Pain

It’s extremely easy to cause yourself a lot of pain while performing maintenance on your computer. Here are two sure-fire steps:

Do something really stupid, while being aware that you are doing so!
Compound the error by being macho, and wanting to fix it manually!

Voila! You will have no one to blame but yourself for your pain, [...]

VirtualBox Multiboot USB

Yesterday, I wrote about paying for free software. At the very end of that post, I highlighted a program called Macrium Reflect. That program can automatically create a Linux-based Rescue CD (in order to restore a previously saved image to a damaged or new hard drive).
On their site, they have a good tutorial for how [...]

Cable Woes Resolved

On December 13th I wrote about my long-standing cable Internet woes. At the end of that note, I mentioned that I would update everyone if my solution worked.
Today is the first day that we are back in the apartment, and I can now report that we’ve had zero drops in the past six hours. That [...]

Vista speech recognition

I’ve been fascinated by speech recognition for a very long time.  I used a program called Simon on a NeXT computer back in 1992. I have toyed with every version of Dragon Naturally Speaking since v2 (now owned by Nuance). I keep upgrading my copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking (through v9, I haven’t done v10 [...]

Cable Internet Woes

A long time ago (I can’t remember when), we had a stable, reliable connection in the apartment (provided by Time Warner Cable). It was never super fast on the download (when it was stable, it was roughly 3Mpbs downstream). It was always pokey on the upstream (used to be roughly 360Kpbs). Now, it’s typically 7-8Mbps [...]

Welcome WordPress 2.7

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. It was super simple, no glitches whatsoever.
Earlier in the day, I noticed that there was an updated version of the Simple Tags plugin that I use, clearly stating that it worked with 2.7. I upgraded that while still running 2.6.5.
Then I upgraded WordPress to 2.7 on my laptop, running [...]

Internet Connection Sharing

Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) has been around for a long time (formally, and through hack-like methods). I have never had a need for it (slightly amazing) until now. Yesterday I wrote about our current hotel WiFi woes. In that post, I wrote that I wouldn’t need to worry about it today, given that I would [...]

Hotel WiFi

This post is inspired by my current hotel WiFi woes. I’ve likely mentioned this gripe before, but since I’m living it at the moment, I’ll repeat it, vigorously. It’s insane that high-end hotels charge for Internet use (WiFi or wired), while their low-end chains (owned by the same company!) give it away for free!
Sure, some [...]

Welcome Vista x64

I wrote quite a while ago that I had ordered two new laptops for Lois and me, with Vista x64 on them. They took a lot longer to arrive than anyone thought (including the vendor, PowerNotebooks), due to delays in getting the LCD’s from China.
Because of all of the delays, I had to keep updating [...]

Rebuilding jackkapanka.com

I have written twice now about taking over the maintenance of Jack Kapanka’s website. There were three distinct phases of working on the site:

Fix the broken links
Change the home and store pages (adding PayPal support)
Redesign (rebuild) the site from scratch

All three phases are now done, though there is no trace of #1 or #2 left, [...]