Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

I have been an iPhone user since the first day of it’s release in 2007. When Apple released the 3G model, and my town was stuck in EDGE misery, I patiently waited for AT&T to upgrade our area to 3G, and eventually, they did. Since that time, their network has slowly improved to a point [...]

Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 23:03 | 1 comment
Categories: Tech

Many folks with a first generation MacBook laptop are well aware of the list of issues that have shown up on them over the past three years.  Some of the top things I have seen are the staining that occurs on the wrist wrest due to Apple’s poor choice in a plastic, and the habit [...]

Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 15:02 | 0 comments
Categories: Apple, Tech
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Apple’s move to make the unibody MacBook become the low-end of the MacBook Pro line marked a few changes.  Most notably, the addition of FireWire 800 and the “non replaceable battery”. The change of the battery made upgrading a hard drive slightly more difficult, as there is no panel that opens to do that anymore. [...]

Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 18:20 | 0 comments
Categories: Apple, Tech
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Have you ever upgraded the hard drive in your Windows PC?  It’s usually not a big deal, right?  You open the side of the case, undo the data and power cables from the drive, and remove some screws.  Moments later, you’re installing the replacement. Mac’s have not always been the most friendly machines to perform [...]

Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 10:49 | 0 comments
Categories: Apple, Tech
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At times, I have the need to help a user to remotely solve PC related problems.  The difficulty with the built-in solution for Windows (Remote Desktop), is that it requires port mapping in your firewall and configuration that the user may not be efficiently capable of.  A similar situation exists when trying to use VNC [...]

Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 11:20 | 0 comments
Categories: Tech
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I was recently doing some SMTP diagnostics on an Exchange 2003 server.  Everything seemed to be working great, except for the transaction times.  Averaging at 5.2 seconds, it wasn’t horrible, but in the “warning” range for an average mail server. Why is the transaction time important?  It can mean the difference between receiving or not [...]

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 20:17 | 1 comment
Categories: Tech

In case you weren’t aware of the exciting news, Wolfram Alpha just launched this evening.  While quasi-geeks are typing up there comparisons of Alpha vs. Google (apple vs orange), I thought  I would ask this new computational engine the most important question of all: What is the meaning of life? I was pleased with the [...]

Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 21:44 | 0 comments
Categories: Tech
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A solution for making a functional VPN tunnel between pfSense and SmoothWall.

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 17:32 | 0 comments
Categories: Tech
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iStat for iPhone is a great application that gives you remote monitoring of essential Mac workstations or servers.

Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 19:33 | 0 comments
Categories: Apple, Tech, iPhone
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Handbrake is a wonderful, open-source, utility for converting DVD movies to other formats.  In my case, I use it to convert my DVD collection for use on my Apple TV.  It works great. Today, a new version (0.93) was released.  It includes a long list of improvements from GUI updates to fixes for the lingering [...]

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 00:44 | 0 comments
Categories: Apple, Media, Tech