David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ve alluded in the past to why it’s a good idea to make a DMZ with two routers, but I’ve never gone into depth about how and necessarily why to do it.
If your ISP gave you a combination modem/switch/access point/router and it only supports 100 megabit wired and 54-megabit (802.11g) wireless and you want to upgrade to gigabit wired/150-meg (802.11n) wireless, here’s a great way to make the two devices work together and improve your security.
How do you make a Lionel train whistle? Well, you need a whistling tender and a transformer with a whistle button or handle. If it’s all wired correctly, pushing the button or handle while the electric train is moving will make it whistle.
And if it doesn’t, let’s try to figure out why.
If you have a Lionel electric train whose lights flicker and (possibly) runs erratically, I have an easy fix.
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Can I make one page landscape in Word? Yes you can. In Microsoft Word, it’s not difficult, but it’s anything but obvious. Here’s how to make a single page landscape in Word. It takes three steps.
This is useful when the document contains an image that’s wider than it is tall, and you need to make it fill the page to make it easier to see.
There are buttons on the ribbon to switch between portrait and landscape. But they switch the whole document, not your selection or the page you’re on. I’m sure you have already tried that. Here’s how to switch it for part of the document.
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Late Thursday morning, AT&T sent a subcontractor out to bury the cable strung across my yard for U-Verse. He buried the cable, but tore it up in the process. He knocked on the door and asked my wife to see if anything worked. It didn’t. Then he told her to contact AT&T and left.
That’s customer service. Poor customer service. But customer service, nonetheless, right?
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Last year, a flood of $99 tablets built with extremely low-end hardware running dated versions of Android appeared. This year, slightly better tablets running slightly less dated versions of Android are readily available, sometimes for as little as $60. And I have to admit, these devices got me thinking. I didn’t quite pull the trigger. But here’s what to watch (out) for on the low end.
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I like Turnkey Linux, which is a collection of pre-built server appliances based on Ubuntu. When you need a server fifteen minutes from now, it’s about the only way you can make it happen.
But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t mount USB drives automatically. That’s fine; these servers are designed to have the minimum necessary for their stated purpose in life and nothing more. Here’s how I mount a USB drive to use for making backups.
Partly due to flooding in Thailand pushing up disk prices, and no doubt partly due to the natural progression of new technologies driving down the prices of flash memory and related components, enterprise SSDs are now cheaper (at around $2 per GB) than enterprise 15K RPM HDDS (at around $3 per GB).
Ars Technica posted a nice writeup on Nginx, a cut-down webserver that does less than Apache does, but does the few things it does much faster. That’s nothing particularly new, as smaller and faster webservers have existed for as long as I can remember.
What makes Nginx different is that it can work with PHP. And therefore, it can run WordPress.