David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
John C. Dvorak comes full circle in his column about IBM possibly dumping its PC business. He starts off saying it makes little sense, but by the end of the editorial, he has his mind made up that IBM should have done it years ago.
Of course, this was probably written before word got out that its talks are more of a joint venture or spinoff than a complete sellout.
I serviced a PC last week while my Internet connection was up and down like George Bush’s approval rating. It was making a lot of loud noises and at first the owner thought his hard drive was crashing. But when he described the sound to me, it sounded like a fan.
He sounded relieved and said he’d ignore it, but I told him I should take a look at it.Noisy fans are more likely to die than quiet ones. And while a lot of computers have enough fans in them that they can survive if one of the case fans dies, the likelihood of surviving long with a dead CPU or power supply fan is slim. Case fans should be kept in working order too, just because life expectancy roughly halves for each 10 degrees Celsius the temperature rises.
By opening the case and powering the system on, I was able to quickly isolate the noise to the case fan. It really wasn’t terribly loud–he commented that it quieted down a lot when he brought it to me–but I figured since he’d brought the computer over and I’d looked at it, I might as well do something useful. I peeled back the foil sticker on the fan face that hides the bearing and applied a drop of oil. Use 3-in-1 or a similar oil, or for that matter, a drop of 10w30 or another automotive oil if it’s all you’ve got. Do not use WD-40 or a similar penetrating oil. WD-40 does a great job of stopping squeaky doors and freeing up locks and preventing rust, but at best it’s a mediocre lubricant.
Also, with oil, more is rarely better. The excess will shoot out of the fan and weaken the adhesive on the sticker. It’s much better to put in a little and have to add more later than it is to put in too much from the start.
I replaced the sticker and put the fan back in the case. I powered the system on. It was noticeably quieter.
I don’t know if that fan’s life expectancy is now measured in weeks, months, or years, but it’s a pretty good bet that it’s been lengthened, and it’s going to annoy a lot fewer ears.
If you’ve ever tried to run Knoppix on a Compaq or HP Proliant with a Smart Array controller, you probably got a rude surprise.
Here’s how to make the hard drive(s) show up.Open a shell window.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) to become root.
Type ‘insmod cciss’ — you may get a message that it’s already installed.
Type ‘cd /dev’
Type ‘MAKEDEV cciss’ (this is case-sensitive).
Now Knoppix will see your drives so you can mount them and/or edit the partitions with qtparted.
Grisoft has offered a free edition of its AVG 6.0 antivirus software for several years. Unfortunately it has discontinued the product and will stop offering updates on 31 December.
The solution is to download their new free version.It’s a pain, but unfortunately, free things almost always have some kind of strings attached. To be entirely fair, for-pay antivirus software often has some strings attached too.
So if you’ve been using AVG, or you have friends who have been, download (or get them to download) the new version and update it.
Some people have been complaining lately about AVG not updating their definitions as quickly as the other vendors. The result is that some viruses that Norton Antivirus would catch go undetected by AVG. If you can afford better virus protection, buying it is probably worthwhile. If not, the AVG free edition is still better than no protection at all.
That got you going, didn’t it? At least I hope it did. I know I’m not the only one who has a problem with the screw-in posts on the back of computers coming off. I’m talking the posts next to your video port, your parallel printer port, serial ports, and all that.I was working on a computer tonight that had that problem and I finally thought of a way to keep that from happening. It’s an old trick I first heard of more than 20 years ago, but I only just now remembered it.
Glue those posts into place so they won’t turn on you. Before you screw something into them, of course. Permanently attaching your monitor to your computer isn’t a good thing.
Superglue works just fine for this. For a bond that’s less permanent–and less manly–but nearly as strong, use nail polish. I’m sure there’s a proper way to apply it but I just brush on a little bit like paint. It doesn’t take much.
Make that minor modification, and then after King Kong comes and tightens all of your connections on the back of the computer–I know my house isn’t the only one he visits, but I do wonder how he manages to put everything back exactly the way I had it–you’ll be able to get those cables disconnected without taking all of your posts with it.
At around 9 PM last night, Southwestern Bell lost a data line. My DSL connection became sporadic and my telephone became so full of static as to be unusable for voice. Within an hour, I lost all use of my voice line. DSL would drop and come back occasionally.
They are aware of the problem and gave an ETA of 10 PM on Wednesday of clearing it up. The DSL has been reliable for a couple of hours now, but that’s not really an indicator. We’ll see what happens.
You probably don’t want to know what I was searching for on Ebay that matched this.
But, whatever people want to collect, I have no room to talk.
I’ve been playing around with the perspective correction feature in Gimp 2.0, and while it’s invaluable, I’ve noticed that it really has a tendency to blur up a picture.
You can reduce this some by not editing JPEGs–it’s always best to convert JPEGs into PNG or TIFF format before editing anyway–but it only reduces the problem. And Gimp’s sharpen tool leaves a lot to be desired.
Enter SharpControl.There’s something of a tutorial available online. To be honest, I really don’t know what most of the things he’s saying mean. What I do know is that I can just load an image into it, take the defaults, and get a better-looking image than with any other program I’ve ever used. And if I fumble around a bit, sometimes I can get lucky and improve it even more.
Hey, I was trained as a writer. I had to stay after class one day to get what little Photoshop training I did get.
The program only speaks TIFF or JPEG, so you’ll have to convert to TIFFs if you decide to load into the program from files. The alternative is to paste the contents of the clipboard into the program, manipulate the image, then copy it back to the clipboard and paste into your imaging program.
It’s a free download, so if you’re playing with fuzzy images, go download it now.
It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. The time of year when nostalgia runs high and ancient toy trains come out of the basement or the attic and get set up again until sometime after the new year.
Well, hopefully they make it that long. Here are some tips for getting old Lionel, American Flyer, Marx, and similar electric trains running again.
Lycos has released a screensaver that combats spam. It just tries to repeatedly download the web content of known spammers in hopes of driving up their bandwidth costs.
I am famously opposed to screen savers, but…