In an effort to reduce power consumption, I’ve moved most systems I use regularly onto a pair of virtual servers, enabling me to keep many machines off most of the time, except for occasional use. There are still a few physical machines, and I do prefer to have current backups… Continue reading
As a consumer, getting support for Apple’s devices is pretty easy. If it’s in warranty or you have AppleCare, it’s not hard to get something fixed. As a developer, however, working with Apple is … not so easy. Apple has one of my widgets available for download, which periodically gets… Continue reading
From Steam, I installed and played Left for Dead 2 (L4D2) for a few hours without any problems. After rebooting after an update, the warning “OS Paged Pool Memory Low” in red appeared in the game, followed shortly by bizarre visuals, halting sound, jerky game play, and ultimately, a lockup… Continue reading
We have a PBX system through which it’s possible to make announcements, some of which I find myself making regularly. Having an old voice modem lying about, I decided to program it to make regular announcements for me. Rather than dedicate a modem to voice announcements, I decided to share… Continue reading
A while ago, I posted a design for a home-made circuit designed to connect multiple hard drive add-on cards (and the motherboard) to a single case LED. I made a handful of these for the servers around here, and in the three years or so since then, I’ve yet to… Continue reading
While it’s not well documented, it’s possible to do a bare-metal restore of a machine running Windows XP that’s been backed up via BackupPC (assuming, of course, that some method, such as that documented here, has been used to back up open files, such as the registry.) Step 1:Â Build… Continue reading
Unlike many other virtualization solutions, it’s not particularly easy to connect a Windows 2008 Hyper-V guest to its host serial ports. Perversely, there are settings to connect the guest COM ports to “named pipes,” but there’s no way on the host to connect COM ports to named pipes. (It appears… Continue reading
I’m in the process of “upgrading” a server from Windows 2003 server to Windows 2008 server, and one of the things this server does is manage a few serial devices. Therefore, it contains an old PCI serial board, but the manufacturer has since moved on to newer hardware, and hasn’t… Continue reading
A little over 10 years ago, I bought an open-box RCS TX10-B thermostat control unit to replace a TX10 unit. “Open Box” means it came without any documentation, but it should, in theory, be a drop-in replacement for the TX10 — the “B” designator indicates that it’s capable of reporting… Continue reading
I have an old Fujistu Stylistic 3500 Tablet that I picked up cheap as hospital surplus, which usually sits in its cradle in the kitchen, handy for looking up recipes and playing music. It came with Windows 2000 preloaded (and as surplus, ravaged by viruses) which it ran until last… Continue reading