From Burton:
“Whether you’re running to catch a flight, riding the subway or lugging your shit into the lodge, the Amp Pack makes it super simple to flip through your illegally downloaded music library.”
Category Archives: Computers
My New Toy
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Mmmmm… 64 bits…
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Computer Fixin’: AOL 9 Crashes
I got a call to fix the computer for a kid whose computer kept crashing whenever he started AOL 9.0 on his windows XP machine. I figure, piece of cake, it’s gotta be MSBlast or welchia; just need to apply the security patch and make sure the worm is cleared off.
After about a half hour of going through all the prerequisite steps to do this, I’ve got a problem: the system is still restarting whenever it goes online. Really, just as soon as AOL connects and begins to authenticate, it crashes, hard reboot style. No such luck, but I did manage to figure out the problem….
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Panther Printing
Being the crazy early adopter that I am (do NOT try this at home), I installed Mac OSX 10.3 Panther the night it went on sale (we went to the launch at the Apple Store). I love it — one great new feature is an enhanced printing system, which includes the return of Desktop Printers (apple’s slowly putting back all of OS9’s functionality), better windows printing, and overall better compatibility using the Gimp Print open source drivers.
Despite the improvements, one problem I had was that my Brother HL-5040 printer was not working after the upgrade. Read on to find the solution!
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God Bless Javascript.
I’ve been playing around with CSS layer positioning in my web designs lately — it’s so powerful and simple, but the real problem is some major inconsistencies across browsers. Namely, the “position:fixed” element — to place a DIV in a consistent location on the page, regardless of the browser’s window size or scroll position.
The biggest problem is that it doesn’t work in Windows Internet Explorer 5 or 6! Works beautifully in Apple’s Safari (my browser of choice) and Mozilla/Firebird/Camino etc. And while it works in IE5 on the mac, there’s a major bug that causes any links within a fixed layer not to work.
There are a number of purely CSS hacks (here and here, for example) that I tried to no avail, so I finally decided I’d try a javascript route. I managed to do it, and while it’s not as elegant as pure CSS, it works! Read on to see how I did it.
Why Friendster Sucks
Something I’ve been meaning to post for a while:
I’ve had some problems with the whole Friendster thing — I signed up, but I feel like it’s a fad that isn’t going to last very long… here’s something I read at Marc’s Voice calling into question the whole methodology of friendster:
A is my sister. B is me. C is my meth dealer. D is his “debt collector.” My relationship with my sister includes her trusting me not to introduce her to known criminals. Any service that proposes to remove me from deciding which introductions to broker doesn’t get my business.
Update: How To Switch
Just found a program called Outlook2Mac that looks like it simplifies all the problems I tried solving transferring from outlook to a mac entourage (as mentioned in the last post). It’s only 10 bucks, and of course requires a pc and mac (still no way to just translate a PST file, alas).
haven’t tried it, but if I run in to this problem again, I will…
How To Switch
Yesterday I helped transfer a client’s MS Outlook data from his PC to Entourage on his new Titanium PowerBook.
How’d I do it?
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Tales from the Trenches: Rough Day
Man, it’s been a couple rough days on the computer repair front.
Today was some ram installation in the west village, and then an msblast casualty from Boerum Hill, the owner of which I convinced to bring in-store, instead of me traveling to him. I think we’re going to give up on service outside of Williamsburg; it’s just not worth it — too much time to travel, and no direct access to the supplies at the store.
Yesterday I spent about 7 hours on a compaq that had stopped accessing the internet. Damned if it didn’t escape every possible attempt I made at getting it back online, until finally I backed up and made way into a quick restore (using Compaq’s original disks to return the computer to it’s factory-new state) — which still didn’t work!
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Tales from the trenches: RPC exploit / worm!
UPDATED
In case you haven’t heard, the Blaster worm has made some serious headway. We’ve seen dozens of computers in the last few days affected, with a variety of symptoms, from email not being sent out to the common system restarts. Wild stuff…
Weird confluence of bugs (did I just say confluence?) today. Guy drops off his laptop; it persistently, while he’s online with RoadRunner cable, shuts down, alerting him with a message about some RPC service error needing to quit… I plug his computer into the network to run Windows update, and another computer gets the same shutdown message… 15 minutes later we get a call from someone with the SAME problem… God Bless You Microsoft.
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Tales from the trenches: Brand New Computers
I had a client today who bought a new Compaq and wanted the old hard disk installed as a second drive. The machine had never even been turned on, and I was stunned by a couple of things:
- how long it took to start up the very first time (At least 10 minutes of various Please Wait… screens)
- The ridiculous number of shortcuts for various services and offers on the desktop: AOL, Yahoo, RealOne, and half a dozen other free-for-now, pay-us-later jobbers.
From the Trenches: IBM Intellistation Pro M
Today’s entry is about an IBM Intellistation Pro M that won’t boot. Won’t even power on, no nothing. Tried replacing the power supply, but that didn’t seem to be the issue. IBM’s support docs suggest reseating all the cables; done and done. Most likely it’s the Power Switch; we’ve ordered a replacement from mdpparts.com and we’ll see if that does the trick….
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