Category

Archive for the 'General' Category

Pingomatic Alternatives, 2006 Style

( General )

I did Ping-o-matic alternatives once before when it was down, but all I had to offer back then was pingoat.com .

Thunderbird 1.5 is out

( General )

Not to jump on the bandwagon or anything, but it looks like Thunderbird 1.5 is out now, and with some nice-looking new features. The automatic draft saving looks good, since I’ve gotten way too used to that (and maybe a little spoiled) by having it on Gmail. That alone makes it a must-download for me.

Fixing Christmas lights that stop flashing

( General )

We have these strands of Christmas lights where you have the option of making the strand flash by replacing one of the regular bulbs with a “flasher” bulb. The flasher bulb is a clear bulb with a red tip, and after it’s been plugged in for 10 or 20 seconds, it makes the rest of [...]

The Positive Side of the NYC Transit Strike

( General )

Ok, so you get rediculous traffic and lines and congestion because you can’t ride the subway, but there’s always a positive side (as seen on Craigslist):

Removing a USB hard drive with Gigastudio installed

( General )

I use an IDE-to-USB adapter to connect loose hard drives to my desktop using USB. I think it’s one of the coolest things ever invented, which is a little bit sad when you think about it. But it’s very handy. It works great, but I ran into one annoying problem. Often when I try to [...]

Why Windows Annoys Me, Volume 531: Changing Drive Letters

( General )

I have a few USB things plugged into my Windows XP box. The important ones for this story are the Compact Flash card reader and a hard drive on an IDE-to-USB adapter. For months and months, ever since having that setup, the card reader was the H: drive and the hard drive plugged into the [...]

Choosing the PVR’s power supply

( General )

The important bit in choosing a power supply for a PVR type box is that it has to be as quiet as possible. A few quick searches showed that there were a handful of companies that were highly regarded and made some very quiet power supplies. I wound up getting a Seasonic S12 330 watt [...]

Blockbuster Online won’t take a DVD back

( General )

I rented King Crimson’s Deja Vroom DVD from Blockbuster Online a little while back. So far so good. Then I tried to return it. That was a little bit tougher.

Arrested Development (sad but cheap)

( General )

Yes, it’s sad that Arrested Development was cancelled. Yes, it’s been one of the funniest shows on TV in the last few years. Yes, Fox needs better marketing and needs to stop cancelling their best shows. But that’s several-day-old news at this point. Right now, my big dilemma is this: do I buy seasons 1 [...]

Continually buggy XP firewall

( General )

Last week’s instance of my XP firewall acting up keeps happening. Most of the time I can’t get into my home machine via SSH because XP, for some reason, has decided that the port should be closed, even though it’s forwarded in the firewall configuration. Like before, unchecking the box for that port, saying OK, [...]