My laptop has a problem in the powering circuit. Most likely a bad solder connection. If I just bump it or move it the wrong way it goes dead. No power at all. A few months ago it crashed and looked like it would never power up again without repairs. I set it aside and hadn't bothered with it since. Well, now that I'm getting ready to move I decided to give it a try. It powered up, I bumped it and it crashed. Not one to give up easily, I tried it again. I am typing this on it now. As lo...

Since I have been sitting around unable to work due to my injuries from the December car accident, and being a long time Linux user, I decided to spend some time evaluating some of the multitude of distributions (flavors) of the Linux operating system out there today. All were evaluated on the same computer, an older Compaq Armada M700 notebook, PII 399Mhz processor, a Linksys Network Everywhere NP100 ethernet card connected to a dsl router, a Motorola WN825G wireless card, and a home built C...

I was messing around with my Linux desktop settings and kinda like the results. This is my current Gnome desktop. WIth a terminal window open With Firefox running Nothing too fancy, but I kinda like it.

I finally got around to installing Slackware Linux on my new laptop. I had made a point of getting one that I knew the hardware would be Linux compatible so the installation went fairly smoothly. I did have to spend a little time configuring the system, which is perfectly normal. As Broadcom doesn't provide Linux drivers (shame on them), I used ndiswrapper to utilize the Windows driver for the wireless card, and then wrote a very short boot script to initialize and configure the card durin...

I've been playing an online game called Galaxis lately. Link . It's a pretty cool game as these things go. Basically, you are building a planetary colony from scratch. You must aquire the needed materials and money (credits) to build and upgrade by trading commodities, pirating, or perfoming missions. You start out with a single small ship, some credits and materials and go from there. Some players choose to be primarily pirates who gain credits and materials by attacking and pillaging ot...

I had been wanting to build a source-based Linux OS on my laptop for some time now and recently decided to have a go at Gentoo. I knew going in that it would be a little bit of a challenge as I had never used anything but the binary pre-packaged distros before now. After a great deal of hair-pulling, frustration, and giving up three times, I finally got the OS built and running. I feel pretty good about it. I have to say that in the past few days I have learned more about my computer and L...

No affiliation.   I found a cool application that lets you use your laptop as a wifi hotspot to share it's internet connection (mobile broadband card, etc) with your other devices. I just tried it out and it works perfectly. http://mhotspot.com/index.html

While I use Linux as my primary operating system, I do need to use Windows for some work specific software. Lately I have noticed it was taking a really, really long time for my computer to start up from hibernation. After digging around a bit I finally figured out that the hibernation file itself was likely the culprit. I went into the command line as Administrator and turned off hibernation "powercfg /hiberation off" and rebooted the machine. I then turned hibernation back on "powercfg /hib...

Never, ever buy Memorex blank CD discs. these things are total crap. I bought a stack of 25 of the High Speed CD-RWs and at least half of them are bad. They're great if you need a bunch of coasters, but otherwise avoid them at all costs. I have a bunch of stuff I want to burn and am now going to have to go buy some decent ones if I ever want to get this done. I'll never buy Memorex again. I've always had good luck with Sony discs and will stick to those from now on.

What can I say? I was bored.

PC World's Techlog has a short piece talking about the upcoming emergence of "Windows Vista Capable' PCs. "From the article: "The Vista Capable designation doesn't promise that a PC will provide a great Vista experience, or even that it'll support all Vista features or features...just that it'll be able to run Windows Vista Home Basic in some not-very-well-defined-but-apparently-adequate way. At the moment, there are still new PCs on store shelves that don't meet the Vista Capable guid...