Just a reminder folks, don’t forget about the Solarum forums. Be sure to register if you haven’t already and hop on over there and ask some questions or just chit chat with folk. They aren’t as busy as they used to be, but I’m trying to stir up the fire a little bit and get people back in there. It really is a good place to ask questions, because we have some really smart geeks in there that can help you get it answered! So check it out …
Category Archives: Site News
ANNOUNCEMENT: Solarum Is Looking For Contributors
Here at Solarum, the idea that I started this site with was to share information. If I share what I know and the experiences that I have had, and others that visit this site do the same, pretty soon we have a great deal of information that anyone and everyone can use anytime they need it. So far, all of the information posted here has come from me. Now, that’s fine because it’s my site and I wanted to share that information. However, in the interest of making this site better, I am putting out the offer for others to become contributors here. If you like to write and have some type of technology background and/or experience that you want to share with others, please contact me and let me know. I will then contact you and we will go from there. Just so I don’t misrepresent anything, this is not a paid position or anything like that (it’s not for me either, I am running this site out of my own pocket to try and do some good for people), but anyone that wants to contribute will get full credit for their work and will be helping others from all over the world that come here to get help and info. It’s a pretty cool thing all in all. So what are you waiting for? Sharpen up those pens, light up those keyboards and get to writing!
Nice Usenet News Reader For Free
XanaNews Screenshot
I was looking for a good, solid and preferably open source news reader (usenet client) whilst booted into Windows XP on my laptop earlier, and I found a dandy. I found a lightweight client called XanaNews, which although lightweight, not over burdened or bulky, it is also solid and easy to use. Throw in that it is open source and free, and it’s a nice application.
I looked at the screen shots and it looked like it was along the lines of what I wanted, so I decided to download it and give it a try. After running the installer I easilly configured my news server (Giganews, if you aren’t using them and you want AWESOME usenet access, check these guys out! Like NOW!) and off I went, effortlessly subscribing to groups and reading posts on procmail. That’s what I was working on at the time.
Well, I liked XanaNews so much, that I decided to install it on my main machine running Ubuntu. I fired up Wine and ran through the same install steps and it again worked like a charm. So now I can use this dandy little news reader on Windows and Linux. I felt like I just had to share with everyone, because it seems like good usenet clients are hard to find unless you want to try and use something bundled into a web browser or email client which I usually don’t. Give me an app made especially for what I want to use it for, and it’s probably going to do a better job of it every time. Not always, but most of the time I would say. Hope you enjoy it!
Quick Update
Fallout 3 rocks, rocks big. It’s awesome. Between that and work, you see I haven’t posted much in the last few days. Keep the faith, I’ll be back soon, there is a long weekend coming up and I hope to get some new stuff up! Thanks 🙂
Spam Goodness
Well, it appears as though we got hit by a metric ton of spam bots in the last few days on our forum site. We routinely get loads of spam comments here on the main Solarum website, but Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering them out. This time the bots were targeting our forums, and even going so far as to register accounts bypassing the CAPTCHA even. I say bypassing but really I guess they are smart enough now to read the images. Sounds like some advanced scripts just to dump some porn and viagra spam. I can’t imagine they get enough benefit out of it to justify all the work that must go into making the bots in the first place. But then again, they keep making these things (bots, worms, viruses, etc) so maybe I am wrong and they are making out like bandits. Either way, I upgraded the forums and set some tighter restrictions on user registration. Hopefully that will keep the bots out. Thanks for your patience!
New Feature At Solarum, Short Links are here!
A new feature has been added to the site, it’s for anyone that wants to use it and it’s totally free. I call it Short Links, and basically it’s a web site redirector. We all know it’s a pain in the rear to send those really long links to friends and family because they get wrapped and all munged up in the email and then don’t work. Then you are trying to copy and paste in notepad and put it all together or explain all this over the phone when mom calls and is clicking but not working. Yeah, we’ve all been there. So, what you can do here is enter your long web site link, hit the button and get a short one back. The short one you can send to whoever you want and when they go there it will re-direct them to your long link. It makes life easier all the way around. Simply go to our Tools section and click on the Short Links item from the list and go crazy. I hope you all enjoy this new feature!