Category Archives: Computer Support

Recovering from a Spambot Attack

So, sometime towards the middle or end of March, my site got hit with a spamdexing attack. Nearly all my pages got littered with links to illegal boner pill sites. I suspect, and I really can’t prove this, the attack … Continue reading

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Thinking about getting myself a toy!

So back in May, after serving her well for 10 years, the power supply on my mother’s venerable Dell Optiplex (Which was a very well made machine in my opinion.) finally died. So I told her, we could go hunting … Continue reading

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Apply sledgehammer gently to CPU

So, I discovered that the import file of my old posts has a lot of mangled markup and incorrect hard line feeds in it. This may be due to: Taking it straight from Linux but uploading it from Windows to … Continue reading

Posted in Computer Support, Webmastering | 5 Comments

A week with the Gutsy Gibbon

So I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.1 last weekend. Things went very smoothly. Prior to this, System76 sent out some upgrades for their hardware drivers, perhaps in anticipation of everyone migrating to 7.1. There was really only one hitch. My screen … Continue reading

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Defenestrating Keyboards

Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I don’t want to throw a keyboard out of a window. I want to remove the Microsoft branding from my Linux laptop keyboard. I don’t think it’s really spite. Microsoft makes a decent enough set … Continue reading

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One Week with Fiesty Fawn

So I’ve had my new Darter Ultra laptop for about a week. I’ve noticed many improvements in speed for many tasks–still image rendering, page loading, conversion of file formats, copying large files and so on. I’m very pleased. A very … Continue reading

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Early birthday gift to myself

Day before yesterday, I bought a brand new laptop. This will be the first brand new computer I’ve bought in 7 years. My venerable Inspiron 3800 ran Win2k, XP, Redhat 7, Knoppix 3 and Ubuntu 6. I upgraded its RAM, … Continue reading

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Net Neutrality, Aero and Linux screen readers

So this is really a bunch of random computery things thrown together into a post. Yes, another boring, “Pace is thinking out loud post.” First, I continue to strike tiny blows to protect network neutrality from the lobbyists of telecommunications … Continue reading

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Other People's Dead Tech

One side-effect of my part-time vocation as a computer technician is that people often give me their dead gadgets and old software. Actually they don’t give it to me. What really happens is that I see they are about to … Continue reading

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Build your own laptop

This is some news to me (Which only shows the limits of my expertise.) but you can actually build your own laptop. Things aren’t quite as modular as desktops. You don’t have the freedom to use one motherboard with another … Continue reading

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