Author Archives: Laz

Information Is King

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OK, kiddies, gather round.  Let me pontificate loftily standing upon my bubbly box of soap, in order to loudly proclaim that information is king (or queen if that is your perspective).  Why is information so important?  The reason is simple!  The more information we have (at hand, it doesn’t have to be memorized, it can be in a book or anything readily available), the more we know.  The more we know, the more we can do!  The more we can do, the richer we become.  Not just in dollars and cents but in self-reliance, survival and practical sense.  Take that information that you know, and add it to what your friend knows and now you both know even more.  Take that and share it with what many other people you know and oh my goodness!  We have a revolution on our hands, a real live revelation revolution springing up.  It is natural that folks will still have their areas of expertise, but all of that shared knowledge is only going to help us out.  More people can then do more things, you have more people to help when one thing gets really busy and backlogged, like when everyone has generator problems during an ice storm.  Would you rather have 1 person trying to fix all those 100 or so broken gennies, or 2 or maybe 4 or 5 or even 10.  Do you see where I am going with this?

What I just wrote about above is the sole reason I started this site.  I had lots of information that I wanted to share with folk, anyone who could benefit from it.  I have been working with computers and related “stuff” for over 20 years now, and whether it was trying to pass along some basic info to keep Grandma safe while checking her email, or sharing the intimate technical details of setting up SVM software RAID on Solaris UNIX servers, I felt like I had information that would be worthwhile to others.  So far I’d say it’s been a success, while I don’t share the popularity or traffic that Slashdot gets for example, I get quite a lot of visitors compared to your average website or blog, and I do get some email now and then from people thanking me for the site or telling me that they found help with their problem they were trying to fix, and that makes all of the work and effort that I put into this site worthwhile.

If you have managed to read this far, you are probably now asking yourself what in the world I am going on about.  Well, keeping what I have previously said in mind, I have decided to expand the site a bit.  You see, when I started this site, it was only natural that I focus on IT related topics.  However, I have experience with and work on much more than just IT stuff.  In the past years I have been an electronics technician, why at one point I could repair the copper runs on a circuit board complete with new green (or amber or whatever) over coating so that one could hardly tell it had ever been broken in the first place.  At one point I spent years as a mechanic, working on everything from air and electric tools to outdoor power equipment to diesel trucks and buses and damn near anything in between.  In both of these cases I was lucky enough to work for business owners who were also masters in their field, I mean pure freakin’ geniuses at the technical work that they did.  This allowed me to not only learn a great deal, but also develop some of the habits that I have now that make some people call me a perfectionist.  I just say that if it’s got my name on it, I want to make damn sure I do it right.  I am not saying that I am perfect or anything, I make mistakes just like anyone else, I just try really really hard to avoid them!

I could go on about other stuff I have done, some good learning experiences and some not so much.  The point is that I have decided to start adding more information to this site as I get the oppotunity to do so.  Because after all, information is king (or queen if that is your perspective), and if I can share something that helps someone, who cares if it’s about a computer or about a truck or maybe a CD player or who knows what.  I don’t know everything but I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I love to learn.  Maybe I feel it’s my duty or maybe my mission to give back and share that information.  Worst case is that I waste some time and take up some extra binary real estate on my server and no one notices, or they notice and shake their head and mumble something about that crazy guy and his weird website that sounds like something out of Harry Potter.  On the other hand, what we might call the best case, someone and maybe many someones come along from Google or however they get here and find something useful to them and helpful in solving a problem they were dealing with.

How is that, eh?  How is that for a long winded rant about information! LOL  I hope you enjoy this site and find something useful here, I have put a lot of time, energy and money into it because I believe in sharing information.  If you have something you want to share, to add to the data archive, please by all means let me know about it via the contact page.  I am unable to pay you for any information that you share, but I will make sure that you get full credit for it, in whatever format you like (i.e. your name, pen name, alias, whatever).  That could be a good way for aspiring writers to easily get content published for reference later on when needing to provide examples of your work.

Many thanks to all of my readers and visitors that have stopped by and even taken the time to come back!  (Cue the mysterious pipe organ)  Enjoy!

Disable Hibernation In Windows

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Here is a helpful tidbit for anyone that might need it.  It’s something I used now and then, often enough that I remember the command, but not often enough to remember the exact syntax LOL  At least if I post it here it will be easy to find.  What am I talking about you ask?  Well, enabling and disabling hibernation in Windows.  If you are running a desktop, you most likely don’t need to hibernate your machine.  You can if you want, but I for one don’t want to lose the extra few gigs of disk space taken up by the ‘hiberfile.sys’ hibernation file.  Not to mention the system resource usage and overhead of keeping it updated.

OK, getting down to business, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can enable or disable the hibernation function easily by using the ‘powercfg’ command with the ‘-H’ (hibernation) option.  Here are a couple of examples:

powercfg.exe -H off

This turns hibernation off naturally, and:

powercfg.exe -H on

Will turn it on, and just that easily too!

I hope this little trinket of wisdom comes in handy for you.  Enjoy!

New Firefox Addon Found, Fixes Drudge Report Refresh Roil

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I am a news junkie, I love to read the news from many sources and (try to) keep up with what is going on in the world.  One of the sites I frequent a lot is the Drudge Report, and anyone who has been there will know that (to me anyway) one really annoying thing about that site is the constant page refreshing.  Maybe this is done in an attempt to load more banner ads or something, but it gets on my nerves when I keep losing my place as I am reading articles.

So, in my attempt to find an easy way to stop the Drudge Report website from refreshing every second or so (OK, maybe not EVERY second), I came across a nifty little plugin for Firefox that allows you to blacklist websites and thus stop them from running scripts.  In this case that also meant that Drudge no longer refreshes while I am reading the news.  It’s a lot like the NoScript plugin that we have talked about before, except that instead of deny all and permit by exception, this one is the other way around.  Everything is white listed by default and you blacklist sites that you don’t want to run scripts.  It works great for me, and I have found it to be quite useful.  I have added it to the Must Have Firefox Extensions page in the Library, go check it out and while you are there, see what other ones we talk about.  Enjoy!

NetFlix DRM Error: N8156-6013

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Recently I have been having trouble with my NetFlix instant watch service.  On several occasions I get odd DRM errors telling me that the date on my PC is set to (insert current date here) and to check and make sure it’s correct, which it is.  I don’t think I am the only person having this problem because when I fired up trusty ol’ Google, I found lots of other folks complaining about and seeking solutions for NetFlix DRM errors as well.  Not all of them shared my exact error number, but they all sounded faily similar in what was happening.

As I searched, I found a few things to try and although none helped me, some helped other folk so I will list them here anyway.  Finally, the explanation and solution that worked for me actually made a lot of sense once I digested it, and I bet it will help some of you out there as well.  🙂

Continue reading →

Good Stuff, What Is It?

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Let me talk to you for a moment about a new box of stuff on the right side of this site.  Yep, just like the title says, it’s Good Stuff!  First though, I want to share some information and history if you don’t already know.  I started this site because I wanted to share information.  I felt like (and still feel like) if we all share the knowledge that we have with one another, our collective knowledge base grows by leaps and bounds.  Seems obvious I know, but some folk I have seen and have even worked with want to horde information as if it were gold.  So, hoping that sharing some of my knowledge and information might help others, I started this site.  If someone is having a problem, and I have already run into the same thing and can post an adequate solution, then they get to solve that problem without re-inventing the wheel (so to speak).

I do this because it’s just something I do, a way that I can try to give back and help others.  I don’t charge people for access to anything, I don’t have banner ads or popups (or unders ;]) or anything like that.  At one point I played with Google Ads, but that was more to learn than really try and make any money.  Which is good because I didn’t make any, a few pennies here and there, but nothing really.  This though, is my point and has a direct impact on the Good Stuff I am getting ready to explain.  That point is that I run this site using my time, paying for the server and bandwidth out of my own pocket, and I like it that way.  I don’t want to be beholden to a vendor.  I do have a donation link, so if a reader wants to show some love they can, but that’s different.  I don’t get any kind of payment, kickbacks, reimbursement, dump truck loads of yen, or anything from companies that sell products, especially the ones I talk about or recommend.

What does this mean?  This means that if I post a review about something, I am not blowing smoke just to say there is a fire.  I am telling you, my reader, my own experience with whatever it might be and what my honest opinion is about it as well.  Mainly I do this when I find something really cool that I think more people need to know about.  Some piece of software that other geeks like me might find useful, or a game or whatever that seems to be well worth the duckets.  I want to share that information with anyone who wants to read about it, that might benefit from it, and I want them to know that the information is coming from an unbiased source.

So, back to the Good Stuff box.  This is where I am putting stuff to showcase things that go above and beyond or are extra good or really special, etc.  Kind of like banner ads except I decide what is put there and no one is paying me to do so.  It’s a showcase of things that I use and that I very highly recommend and therefore proclaim to be “Good Stuff”.  This site had over a million hits last year, and the traffic trend is still rising, so my goal is to share Good Stuff with my readers, and hopefully help encourage those people that care about the customer and care about providing good valuable service to keep up the good work.  If any of you have something you want to recommend, or some information you want to share with the world, hit the contact page and share it with me.  If I end up doing something with your submission, I’ll make sure you get credit for it.  Thanks.

Solarum’s Open Source Project – nix32

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I thought I would post some information about a project that I started a few months ago called nix32.  It’s hosted on SourceForge for the most part, with a handy website that I host myself mainly because it’s just easier to manage that way.  The basic goal of this project is to create native command line tools for Windows that operate much like the commands that we know and love from Linux and UNIX.  Things like ls, mv, cp, df and so on.  I have become so used to, comfortable with and productive with the UNIX/Linux command line environment, that when I have to leave it behind on Windows, it’s pretty tough.  Not just changing from what I am used to, but also because I think the command line of a UNIX/Linux server is much more powerful and flexible than the Windows command line, even including the power shell.

I have been working on the more popular commands, and I have a few basics out now with basic functionality.  I hope to have more and better (improved) tools in the future.  I am writing everything in PERL and then compiling each one on Windows as a standalone exe using tools from ActiveState, and so far, they run very nicely.  It’s all completely open source, you can download the PERL scripts as well as the executable files if you want to take a look or help improve them.

Now, I know you can get similar results with other projects and products out there, CYGWIN comes to mind first.  However, that’s a whole separate shell and almost a little mini-Linux setup in and of itself, especially looking at the directory structure after it’s installed.  Here with the nix32 project I wanted to have native Windows executables that you can stick in your path somewhere and call right from the Windows Command Prompt, without ever leaving the Windows environment and without having to install anything.  So far that is exactly what we have, just copy the files somewhere, make sure it’s within or added to your PATH variable, and you are good to go!

So check it out, see what you think, spread the word and maybe even help out a bit and crunch a little code too.  Do whatever you feel and keep both feet on the wheel … or, keyboard maybe.  🙂