Category: Geek Stuff

“Press This” is a bookmarklet you can add to your Internet Explorer favorites or Firefox bookmarks (a bookmarklet is a small computer program that can be run via a bookmark or favorite).

What makes Press This so handy is that you can highlight some text on any random web page, then click the Press This bookmarklet and a window will pop up, containing all the highlighted text from the original page in a WordPress “new post” window. You can then add your own text (if desired) and click the “Post” button to quickly post the text to your blog. For example, most of the posts currently on the front page were added via Press This (look for posts that say “via [some link]” at the end of the post. If you like, you can also add pictures and videos to your Press This posts as well.

To add Press This functionality to your browser, just go to your WordPress dashboard and click the “Tools” link in the sidebar: you’ll find complete (simple) instructions there.

Once you start using Press This, you’ll see how handy it is. It’s almost as fast as Facebook’s “Share Link” function, and it’ll save you all kinds of time and hassle with cutting and pasting!

Note: there is a bug with Press This in WordPress 2.7.1. If you follow the instructions on your blog and get an error message when using Press This, let me know, and I’ll send you a link to a fix.

Tracfone is, as I always say in these posts, “America’s largest prepaid only mobile provider”. They offer pretty good deals on prepaid wireless with some of the best terms in the industry. If there’s a problem with Tracfone, it’s the phones themselves. Tracfone’s hardware is years behind the times. This is most likely because the company wants to get the best possible prices on older, popular and proven designs, although Tracfone’s customer base isn’t exactly cutting-edge, either. Tracfone’s cheapest handset – the Motorola c139 – looks like something from 1999, save for the low-res color screen. Their second tier phone – the Motorola w370 – is a slightly thicker version of Moto’s RAZR, the hottest phone of 2004.

Recently, however, Tracfone has offered two new phones with some groovy new features: the Motorola w376g and the LG 600g. Both phones offer Bluetooth and VGA cameras, a first for Tracfone. A bit of a warning: Bluetooth on the Moto phone is crippled, in that it can only connect to Bluetooth headsets. The LG, on the other hand, can connect to most any other Bluetooth device, including desktop PCs, so you can use your computer to shuffle pics and ringtones back and forth instead of SMSing them to yourself. For this reason, and for the external screen (another rare feature on Tracfones), I decided to ask for the LG for Christmas. For what it’s worth, the Moto phone also comes with a built-in FM radio (a feature you think you’d like, but end up never actually using).

So… Santa was good to me, and I got the LG! I transferred my airtime to the new phone quickly and easily (but more on that later). I also ordered a few accessories, such as this Bluetooth USB adapter ($5.94 shipped) and this Bluetooth earpiece (around $25). Now that those accessories have arrived… I can do the review!

Continue reading “REVIEW: LG 600g Mobile Phone”

Distributed File System (DFS) is a feature of Windows Server that existed in Windows NT 4.0, but didn’t really become useful until the release of Windows Server 2003.

At its simplest, DFS is a technology that allows you to create “virtual file shares” and add what amounts to symlinks or junctions to real file shares to it. So if, for example, you had a situation where you needed to share ten folders off seven different servers, you could instead create a DFS share and create links to the real shares. As far as your end-users are concerned, it’s only the one file share. That way, all users have a “S: drive” with the same folder structure, instead of one group (Finance) having one set of mapped drives and another group (Marketing) having another.

What’s even better is that you can map a DFS link via WAN connection, so people in two different offices can have the same file shares regardless of location. You can also build redundant DFS shares: just create a new share, robocopy the existing data to the new share, then add both shares to your DFS root. That way, if you ever need to take one of those servers offline, end users will still be able to access the data. In fact, they shouldn’t even notice a difference!

Although DFS was created for corporate customers, I have found one neat use for it at home. As you might know, I got a new computer for Christmas. That computer runs Windows Vista Home Premium; it therefore cannot join my local SBS 2003 domain, which has around 8 total shared folders. As you might also know, Windows networking has always been pretty crappy. After a week of owning the new computer I got sick of getting the dreaded “multiple connections to the same server using more than one set of credentials are prohibited” error with all the different file shares (even though I was only using my domain username and password). I therefore went in and created a DFS share for my local domain. I now map the DFS share as a drive, and Windows only asks me for credentials when I first map it – from that point on it’s smooth sailing!

Learn everything you could ever want to know about DFS here.

Did you know that you can send SMS messages via email? It’s something that’s been around for ages, but many people never use – except us IT folk, who often set up server monitoring programs to send an email out when something goes wrong.

To send SMS messages via email, all you’ve gotta do is address the email to the proper carrier (see below). Keep in mind that your email will still be limited to 160 characters, like any other text message. As far as I know, email to SMS works with these carriers, and requires nothing at all special – all email services and all email clients are supported:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com

Remember, “phone number” means the complete 10-digit number – using 7 digits won’t work.

Back in 1999, computer hardware was far more expensive than it is today. At the time, the difference between “top of the line” and “middle of the road” in processors was (looking back on it today) laughable. Back then, people seriously agonized over whether to buy the 500MHz or 533MHz processor; it was a clock difference of only 33MHz. But back then every megahertz counted, even if those 33 MHz cost you an extra $100.

I wanted a new computer at the time, as my PII-300 box was getting a bit long in the tooth. The only problem was that the high-end Intel processor of the time – the Pentium III 933 – was incredibly expensive… like, “well over $1000” expensive. I simply didn’t have that much scratch at the time.

And this is where the Abit BP-6 motherboard came in. The Abit BP-6 was a wonderful feat of hacker engineering. At the time, Intel didn’t allow Celeron processors to be used in SMP (multi-processor) systems; the BP-6 changed all that. Using Intel’s legendary 440BX chipset, the BP-6 board allowed end-users to use two inexpensive Celeron chips in place of  a single high-end Pentium III processor. So instead of buying a $1200 PIII-933 processor, the BP-6 allowed me to buy two $150 Celeron 466 chips. Sure, two Celeron 466 processors working together wouldn’t be as fast as a single PIII-933… but performance would be very close, close enough to justify the $900 savings. The BP-6 was also one of the first boards to heavily advertise its overclocking features, so people lucky enough to get a closely-matched pair of the “special” Celeron 300A MHz chips got the same performance for even fewer dollars (because the Celeron chips were essentially a Pentium II without the L2 cache, the 300MHz “Mendocino” Celerons could easily run at the Pentium II’s 100MHz FSB speed, thus they could easily be overclocked to 450MHz).

I put together my BP6 with two Celeron 466 processors, a then-outrageous 512MB of RAM, and the largest hard drive I could find at the time. Since Windows 9x couldn’t handle multiple processors, I installed Windows NT Workstation 4 on this new box… and then went to town. This computer and I went through a lot together. We learned a lot about IT and computers together. I was an official Microsoft beta tester at the time and would soon be constantly installing (and reinstalling) beta versions of Windows NT 5.0 (later named Windows 2000). I got my first taste of Linux on this computer. I fell in love with the BeOS on this computer. I soon got a TV tuner card, and learned all the ins and outs of video capture on that computer.

Continue reading “Goodbye, Old Friend!”

I easily downloaded the Windows 7 x64 version earlier today, but it was only just now that I snagged a key!

Woot!

There are many companies out there that offer a free antivirus programs to home users. Avast! is one, as is Avira, BitDefender, and AVG. AVG, however, appears to be the sole vendor to offer a free antivirus program for the x64 versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. And since I just got a new x64 computer running Vista Home Premium, I was in the market for a new AV solution. So I downloaded and installed AVG Free 8… only to recoil at how bloated the whole thing had become!

AVG Free 8 has, in my opinion, two big problems: the Link Scanner and the Notification Area.

According to About.com, Link Scanner is “a tool that protects the user from visiting malformed sites from a search engine. So for example, if you were to open up Google and type ‘skiing’ and Google returned 100 sites concerning skiing, Link Scanner would visit each of those sites and determine if you were at risk by clicking on any of the supplied links”. This is a giant waste of bandwidth for nearly everyone involved – especially since the same types of sites that Link Scanner blocks are easily blocked by Internet Explorer and Firefox’s phishing filters, as well as OpenDNS’s servers if you use that service. More importantly, Link Scanner visibly slows down Google and adds these annoying green icons all over your results page:

So – how do you disable the Link Scanner?

Continue reading “Slimming Down AVG”

The latest beta (test) version of Microsoft Windows – currently known as “Windows 7” – leaked to the Internet just before Christmas. Millions have downloaded it illegally… but you might want to hold off on actually installing it. Microsoft recently admitted to a bug in the included Windows Media Player 12 which can delete the first couple of seconds of every mp3 file it plays!

What actually happens is that Windows will corrupt any MP3 file with a header larger than 16KB if that file’s metadata is overwritten. So your data will become corrupted if you manually edit the ID3 tags in Windows Explorer *or* have WMP set to automatically fetch the artwork and other information over the Internet (which is the default setting if you picked the “Express Setup” of WMP 12).

This bug applies to leaked build 7000 of Windows 7 only. It does not apply to any other Microsoft operating system, or any other build of Windows 7. Although Microsoft is working on a patch for this, you can avoid it completely by not using WMP12 or using any built-in tool for editing metadata. Risk takers are advised to turn off the “download artwork” option if they must use WMP12 in Windows 7.

Read more about it here.