Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Posts relating to techie things

How to Waste a Lot of Time in Two Weeks (or More)

After about two weeks of having my Windows XP box powered down because we moved to a new place, I found that the computer would suddenly freeze – just stop it its tracks – without any kind of error message or other indication of the problem. The mouse, keyboard, and even front-panel power switch all became inoperable. The freezing would generally happen overnight, awaiting my discovery in the morning.

What had happened since before the move that could have caused this? Well, the prime suspect in my mind was the move itself. Perhaps something had been jarred or [...]


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USB Mouse Hangup During Windows Install

Here's another one of those "in case you have this problem too" posts.

While doing a Windows-XP repair install, during the "Installing Drivers" phase of the install, a dialog popped up about my nVidia graphics board, asking if I wanted to install the unsigned driver. Yes, I did, but I couldn't tell it that because some short time before that dialog popped up, both my mouse and keyboard became unresponsive.

On a whim, I went out and bought an old PS/2 mouse (really a USB mouse with a PS/2 adapter), and with the PS/2 mouse, it could [...]
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WordPress Plugin Allowing File-based Posts

I use WordPress for my blog, which has browser-based post creation. I much prefer to enter and edit text in my favorite editor, so I created a plugin that allows me to do just that.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself, see my page on the file-based posts plugin.


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A Wasted Day Futzing With Networking

I had a miserable day fighting with networking issues today. You don't want to hear about it, unless I ended up solving the same problem you have (which is why I'm writing this -- for the search engines to pick up).

A few days ago, some web sites suddenly seemed mostly unaccessible (accessible, say, 5% of the time), while others were just fine. Since most Yahoo! sites were among the missing, this was a big problem.

The other day I was able to pinpoint that the problem occurred when I used my router (Corega BAR-SD) inline between my ISP [...]
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Fixing troubles after upgrading to Firefox 1.0.6

After recently performing a Windows Update on my WinXP box, my Firefox no longer worked. It would start up and some of the button bars would render, but most of the screen would be blank. It was odd.

After much wailing and grinding of teeth, I found a way to solve it, although I'm not exactly sure what "it" really was, or even if it was related to Windows Update.

After shutting down Firefox, I renamed my extensions directory, which for most people is within

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\random.default\

I renamed it to extensions-X, the started Firefox [...]


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