As I hope everybody does, I have a backup system in place that ensures that I have copies of all critical files, including the system registry. A combination of Volume Shadow Copy and BackupPC ensure that I’ll have ample copies of the registry available, but the registry itself makes recovery… Continue reading
If you’re like me, a considerable amount of your computing experience takes place within Firefox. I have a couple of old, slow computers, however, for which the actual loading speed of Firefox itself is problematic. Either can keep up fine with web content, and their connections are fast, but Firefox… Continue reading
What initially attracted me to Gentoo is its sometimes-elegant portage system, which is Gentoo’s version of a package manager — one of the things that distinguishes Linux flavors from one another. Portage suffers from a sort of chicken-egg conundrum in that portage and all of its files and dependencies are… Continue reading
If you’re like me, you have at least 40 computers lying around, some of which have software installed that’s useful just often enough to justify their continued existence — inevitably, right after you decide the hardware would be useful for another purpose and wipe out the disk. In this day… Continue reading
X10 is an unfortunately-named industry standard for controlling devices (e.g., lights) via low-voltage signals over power lines. First created in 1975, it has the advantage of having relatively cheap hardware, and although there have been attempts to create a more modern and capable replacement, they have been hampered by high… Continue reading
Update: Versions of the files below may be downloaded here. This post is probably still useful as documentation. This isn’t specific to BackupPC by any means, but I’ll preface this with a brief explanation: BackupPC is a “set it and forget it” backup system driven from the server,… Continue reading
ActiveSync is a wonderful thing — unless something goes wrong. In the maddening manner of most Microsoft error messages, you get the functional equivalent of “something went wrong” with no other detail — and worse, an error message that appears to be telling you something: “Critical communications services have failed… Continue reading
Google Browser Sync was one of the handiest things for people who use Firefox 2.0. For those who are unfamiliar, it synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, history and persistent cookies across installations of Firefox, using Google’s own servers. Google announced that they are dropping support for Google Browser Sync effective in 2008…. Continue reading
For a while, I worked for an antivirus software company, which leads me to understand malware and viruses better than most. Antivirus software is the rare category of software that I’ll not just pay for, but keep paying for, because antivirus software is software that continually costs money to maintain…. Continue reading
Email spam is universally loathed. It’s difficult to prevent entirely, not only because spammers have a wealth of techniques at their disposal, but because so many legitimate mailers are misconfigured or routinely behave like spammers. The best approaches to combating spam involve multiple techniques to combat various spam techniques. I’ll… Continue reading