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March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

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Articles in Hardware

iPhone 3GS OS4 Upgrade

September 4, 2010 – 5:23 pm
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iTunes for Windows must be one of the buggiest, most poorly written applications out there. In terms of wasted months of your life it definitely ranks up there with Lotus Notes and Media Player 12. I don’t know how well iTunes works on a Mac (I like computer mice with twenty buttons, so I never was a big Mac fan), but I think I read somewhere that iTunes for Windows is the leading cause of suicides among iPhone owners.

Gadget Review: D-Link DNS-321 NAS

August 1, 2010 – 10:51 am

The D-Link DNS-321 is among the least expensive dual-disk RAID NAS systems currently on the market. This small device offers an impressive array of features such as FTP, Samba, NFS, iTunes, DHCP, HTTP and UPnP …

Gadget Review: Sony PRS-900 eBook Reader

April 26, 2010 – 3:37 am

I have a ton of technical documentation in PDF format. Sometimes I need to browse this collection to find some specific piece of information. In other cases I may need to read an entire book …

Server and Network Monitoring with iPhone

February 25, 2010 – 6:53 pm
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What is a Unix sysadmin doing with an iPhone, you ask? It was a birthday present, if that’s all right with you. I know, I should have gotten something odd with a beta version of …

Building a Home Theater Computer

December 24, 2009 – 7:23 am

Ever wanted to build a kick-ass home theater computer? Here we have some highly detailed instructions for putting together just such a device. It is not a DVR like TiVo or your Verizon HDTV box. …

Working with Linux Driver Modules

December 22, 2009 – 6:57 pm
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You just replaced a failed network card, rebooted your server and now network wouldn’t start and your screen is filled with cryptic error messages about some kernel module doing something it’s not supposed to do. …

Printing from SuSE/SLES to a Windows Printer

December 10, 2009 – 5:05 pm

The following document explains how to configure your SuSE or SLES system to be able to print to a remote printer shared from a Windows server. The first step is to install Unix print support …

iPhone Photography: Making Photos Better

September 17, 2009 – 9:05 pm
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The is the first installment of the three-part review of the better photo apps for iPhone. In the follow-up reviews we will look at artistic photo filters and panorama applications. If you don’t want to …

More Bad iPhone Apps

August 13, 2009 – 1:19 am
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This is the second part of my review of iPhone apps unworthy of your ninety nine cents. You can read the first part here.
Certain applications are well-written and might have been quite useful, if …

Bad iPhone Apps

July 29, 2009 – 4:37 pm
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Oh quit your whining, you will say, they are just a couple bucks each, so no big loss if some iPhone apps turn out to be trash. True, but they are so addictive. My first …

iPhone: No Clicking Sound

July 16, 2009 – 4:58 am
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Many long-time iPhone users are familiar with the mystery of disappearing keyboard clicking sounds (among other sound effects). Here are a few things you can try before you take your fruity phone back to the …

Tracking Prices of Hard Drives

July 5, 2009 – 5:40 pm

It seems that only a year ago terabyte hard drives were a novelty item. Today they are on clearance at computer stores trying to free up the shelves for 1.5Tb drives and the 2Tb hard …

Palm TX: Review, Software, and Configuration

September 3, 2006 – 7:12 pm
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Recently I got a Palm TX and so far I like everything about it. Except for the $300 price tag. Built-in Wi-Fi card and a larger screen that can operate in landscape mode are the …