Is your DNA an EMF antenna?
There are hundreds and hundreds of studies showing that our wireless wonderland of EMF is not good for our health. But you might ask: Well, HOW? When we say "EMF", we're talking about many different types of electromagnetic waves, different frequencies, different...
Autorun Fun: Customize or Repair Autoplay for an External Drive
Let’s say your external harddrive or USB stick no longer triggers the AutoPlay feature in Windows. In fact, it may not even automatically show up in Explorer at all when you plug in it!
What to do?
It’s surprisingly easy to fix such problems by creating a new autorun.inf file on the external storage device.
The Easy Way to Copy a MySQL Database
If you have a web site of any kind, you probably have dealt with MySQL databases. Sometimes, you need to move your database, whether it’s to another server or back onto your existing server after performing an OS upgrade. Lucky for you, there’s a very, very easy way to copy your DB over with a few copy commands…
The Truth About the Performance and Capabilities of Intel’s GMA 500
Alrighty, I just can’t stay quiet about this one. I’ve had enough. I’m talking about Intel’s GMA 500 graphics chip. You know, the one that’s in all those Z-series (and soon Pine Trail-based) netbooks, the one that gets all the bad reviews, and the one that is generally regarded as less capable than even that ancient, stinking heap of a graphics core, the GMA 950. Well folks, think again. In fact, the GMA 500 is capable of simultaneous decoding of two (yes, two) 1080p streams, 3D graphics, and DirectX 10.1 – and all that in a 2.3W power envelope (at least in the US15W “Poulsbo” chipset).
Windows 7 File Sharing: Fixing the “Entire User Directory Shared” Problem
One of the most common problems in Windows 7, as I recently discovered, is that you tell Win 7 to share only your Public directories, but it doesn’t quite listen. Due to some apparent bug that is at least present in the Release Candidate build of Win 7, sometimes the OS will share your entire Users directory – including the Public files/folders. That means ALL your files are shown to the whole world on your LAN. Question is: How to fix it?
Save Time and Preserve Your Sanity with Windows Easy Transfer
If you’re like me, when it comes time to upgrade Windows or the hardware inside a computer, you do things the old fashioned way: you manually copy all the user’s desktop, settings, and data onto a backup drive, and then restore it all after the upgrade. Recently I have discovered a much, much easier and faster way to do the same thing. It’s called Windows Easy Transfer, and it’s present in Vista, Windows 7, and you can even install it on an old XP box.
How to Increase the 10 Connection Limit on a Windows LAN
Let’s say you have a network of more than ten Windows computers connected in a local workgroup without a domain controller. One of the computers has a printer connected to it, and more than ten machines in the workgroup need to print at the same time. The good news: It’s actually really easy to increase the limit and get everybody printing/sharing files in a very short time!
How to Fix a DVD Burner that Won’t Read/Write Certain Discs
Every computer these days comes with a DVD/CD burner. They are seriously useful devices, especially since blank DVD media is now dirt cheap. When your burner was new, it probably worked like a charm. As time went by and you tried different brands or types of media, you may have discovered that your drive didn’t burn as well any more. Many people just assume that their drive is bad, and they buy a new one. But there is another even cheaper option that many folks simply don’t know about: you can usually upgrade your drive’s firmware for free!
How to Easily Print a Large Image to Multiple Pages in Windows
Let’s say you’ve got a ginormous image that you’d like to print. Maybe it’s a picture of a map, and the resolution of the image is something like 2000 by 2200 pixels. Obviously, you could just print the image to a single sheet of A4/Letter paper, but you’d lose a lot of detail. The good news is that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all give you a wonderful (AHEM!) application that does exactly what you need…
Splitting Atoms: Choosing the Best Atom-Based Netbook
These days, netbooks are the “in” thing. You’ve no doubt seen them around – they’re like little teeny-tiny laptops. Generally speaking, they are slower than a regular laptop, but are smaller and have longer battery lives. If you are following the latest netbook craze, you will no doubt be aware that the new Pine Trail platform will be out probably early in 2010. I’ve been packing my brain full of all kinds of specs and reviews and datasheets and whatnot, and I’m here to tell you that you can get tomorrow’s netbook platform today – if you know what to look for.
What to Do When Your Manual WordPress Update Dumps You Back to the Installation Page
Everyone loves WordPress – especially when it comes time to upgrade to the latest version of a plugin or of WordPress itself. You just click a button, and it does all the work. Sometimes, you can’t automatically update WordPress itself. In such cases, you need to manually install the newer version. If after a manual install you are dumped back to the initial WordPress setup screen, it will seem like you have just destroyed your entire old WordPress site. Fortunately, you haven’t destroyed anything! Here’s how to get your site back in just 3 steps…
Notebooks, Netbooks, and Hot Air: Laptops Demystified
Back in the day, it was easy to select a portable computer. There was only one size: big suitcase. At that time, Apple’s portable computer was called the Macintosh Boulder, and it only weighed 1,264 ounces. Running through the airport with one of these “portable” devices was a lot of fun. Yes, life was good. Fast forward a few decades, and laptops were just lower-powered portable computers. Then, a few years ago, something odd happened: everyone started demanding “desktop replacement laptops”. In short, everyone wanted a laptop that could do everything their desktop machine could do. And today? Well, we have netbooks. And we are on the verge of seeing a whole slew of new laptops with CULV processors. They’re going to be thin and light and have “long” battery lives… or so we’re told. So, what the heck are you supposed to buy? Well, that depends on what you need and want. But hopefully, it will all be a bit more clear in a few minutes…
Big Brother Techniques to be Revealed at Black Hat USA 2009? Big Deal!
NetworkWorld has an interesting article entitled How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data. The article discusses a presentation that will be held at the Black Hat USA conference later this month. The deal is that two researchers are supposedly going to demonstrate how keystrokes can be read from a remote computer using either a laser, or signals transmitted over the ground line coming from a nearby computer. While these techniques might be interesting to know about, somehow I think we have bigger things to worry about.
Download the Elusive Windows Live Standalone Installer
Download the Windows Live Standalone Installer in one easy step!
SyntaxHighlighter: Prevent #{var} in a Ruby String from Being Parsed as a Comment
Since I generally write posts about programming issues on my WordPress blog, I needed a good plugin for automagically highlighting code segments. I ended up choosing SyntaxHighlighter by Viper007Bond. While it generally kicks butt, there is one little bug that is particularly annoying for those of us who post snippets of Ruby code: including a variable in a string like ‘this is a #{color} string’ causes SyntaxHighlighter to make everything after the “#” into a comment, which it wraps down to the following line. That simply won’t do…
Calling a 32-bit System Command from a Script in x64 Windows
Let’s say you’ve written a little script that calls a Windows command such as nbtstat. When you try to run the script in x64 Windows, you get an annoying “File not found” error – even though you can see the command sitting in the \Windows\system32 folder. What’s going on here?