Archive for October, 2007
$200 PC at Wal-Mart
My often repeated hope for a low-cost appliance PC is coming closer to realization. Wal-Mart will be selling an Ubuntu system from Everex for $200. Whether it will be as easy to use as a TV, I don’t know but it’s a step in the right direction. Will anybody buy it? Probably not, unless it [...]
Fake FTC email
The readers of this blog are probably too savvy to fall for the type of scam described below but you may know some less knowledgeable PC user who should be warned. Here’s an excerpt from The Blade:
The FTC is warning that a fake email is being sent out which appears to be from their agency, [...]
About time and dates
The Web is full of sites with specialized information and here is one called http://www.timeanddate.com/. The name tells the story. The site has various kinds of time and date calculations and calendars. Want to know what day of the week, May 24, 1934 fell on? Want to know when sunset in Kabul, Afghanistan occurs next [...]
Control startup programs
One of the most common reasons for computer performance to suffer is too many programs running in the background. Very often a lot of things get loaded at startup and cause the system to run slowly. It’s a very bad habit of many programs to stick themselves into the background whether you want them there [...]
Throw away your desktop software?
Some see the future of software to be Web apps. Others see some sort of combination of desktop and Web. The talk is still mostly speculation since there are many imponderables. However, Scott Spanbauer has done a real live experiment for PC World and he likes working just on the Web. In an article, Life [...]
Find out what all those abbreviations mean
Email and Internet postings often contain abbreviations or jargon words. There are even made-up languages like “leet-speak”. A lot of this is from the age-old inclination of teenagers to try to baffle their elders but many acronyms and abbreviations are in pretty general use. If you want to know what some of this stuff means, [...]
Command line tip #4 – How to save the output of a command to a file
Normally, the results of a command-line operation are displayed on the screen. However, a more permanent record can be created by sending the results to a new text file with the redirect symbol “>”. If the file already exists, any previous contents will be replaced. You can append results to the contents of an existing [...]
Radio appearance
I hope I will be forgiven for posting a small personal plug but I can be heard on Connecticut public radio on Sunday, November 4, at 3 pm on NPR station WNPR, at 90.5 FM in Hartford/New Haven and at other frequencies throughout the state. The subject is tips for taking care of [...]
Squirrel feats
It’s the weekend and this post has only peripheral relevance to computing. At least it may serve as an example of how video sites like YouTube are supplanting TV as a source of amusement. Anyway here’s something that made me smile. I like to watch birds and this clip reminds me of my struggles to [...]
PDF problem only part of larger Windows security hole
It turns out that the PDF reader ActiveX security hole mentioned earlier is only part of the problem. The real problem is with Windows XP and IE7. Ryan Naraine at ZDNet reports:
In the wake of this week’s malware attacks using rigged PDF files, Microsoft has updated its security advisory to stress that the underlying flaw [...]
How to get backup disks for Dell computers
It is a very common practice among PC manufacturers to omit giving you any kind of disk for reinstalling the Windows operating system. Instead, they put the backup on a hidden restore partition on the hard drive. If the hard drive goes down, you are out of luck. I’ve written about how to create your [...]