computoman

Years ago there real was not a terminal that you could cozy up to to do your computing. In the beginning  there was a punch card machine. You would type in your data, your program in to 80 column punch cards. On this cards you would also have to number them. If the cards went into a pile, there would be an unpleasant experience reorganizing them. Used one of these for writing programs in Fortran. Eventually systems came with enough storage, that you did not need to carry the punch cards and you could print out what you keyed in and the results of what you were working on with the printing terminal. Finance company I worked for had one of thes that connected to an acoustical modem contract the credit bureau.. The finally we get a crt soft of like a tv with a keyboard.  Worked much like the printing terminal. You could even edit what you were working on in real time. Saved a lot of paper. You can not see it very well but the text was in green. Used one of these ...

You just bought a new computer and the first thing you want to do is to turn it on and play with it. DON'T. You will want to make a pristine duplicate of your computer's hard drive first. Why? Because that way you can be sure that you can go back to the beginning if you need to. In fact, I recommend getting two extra drives unless you have a server with plenty of space. Why two drives?  The first drive will be a duplicate of the virgin hard drive. The second drive will be a duplicate of the modified and  setup system you can use as a base in case you have problems.  After setting up thousands of systems in the corporate environment, the words come from experience. You will also need software to back up your drives without it having to be installed. You will have to do some research as they change all the time. The two I have used most is Clonezilla and Ghost. Clonezilla is free for personal use. Best to read the manual before using the software. Eve...

The ability to get data from one computer to another is essential for one or more computers on a network. What happens that one computer essential becomes a host/server and the other computer the client, A good example of this might be a networked game, but it all starts with a simple peiece of code that can get more complicated as the need arises. The server code for this simple example. Server.c #include <sys/socket.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #include <arpa/inet.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <errno.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <time.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int listenfd = 0, connfd = 0; struct sockaddr_in serv_addr; char sendBuff[1025]; time_t ticks; listenfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); memset(&serv_addr, ’0′, sizeof(serv_addr)); memset(sendBuff, ’0′, sizeof(sendBuff)); serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET; serv_...

Traditionally if you wanted to use multimedia content, you would download the media and then play it with a local program. That is all fine and well, but what if you have several systems such as the ps3, xbox360, Roku, and a host of other devices. Instead of copying the files all over the place, we can use a server and keep the media all in one place. One way to serve the media is to use what is known as upnp. This protocol now comes pretty standard on most servers. Think that Roku uses something called Plex, Plex can also be installed on traditional servers last I looked. What usually happens you point your device to the upnp server and the server will list the media files for access. Pretty nifty! Don't usually have much video to store, but lately I have been downloading quite a few files. Wanted a way to take advantage of upnp. We use XBMC to view or listen to media. Xmbc will even go to the internet to allow you to view video. We also make our own videos that we wo...

You are probably using Linux without even knowing it. http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/03/invisible-linux/

According to this news report from https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221717/PC_makers_should_brace_for_drive_shortages , hard drives will be in short supply for about a year. How can you get around that? There are several ways to do it. Some of which I have talked about a little before. Well you operate the computer without a hard drive. At first that seems ludicrous. but it is actually very viable. There are two ways that this can be done. Both are based on what is known as the PXE or pre-execution environment where the hardware in the network interface card can load all or part of an operating system into a computer from the network. A major advantage of using diskless clients is that all software management can be one from virtually just one point. All software maintenance and upgrades are done on the server(s). That means, you do not have to send out a software technician to a user's desk to maintain the software on their system. Reduced Information technology suppor...

Why do we throw so much stuff away? Maybe there is a case for the management of this country both business and government to become a bit more technically knowledgeable. We need to teach them or alert them on ways to become more reusable conscious so to speak. in his article: http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronics-for-teaching-children/ the author points out there is so much good equipment that can be reused with just a bit of street science smarts. Imagine how much overburdened school systems could save you in tax dollars if they were a bit street science smart. Where I used to work, my former employer sent off to auction literally thousands and thousands dollars worth of equipment that could have been re-purposed. For example an old Dell GX110 which sold for nickels and dimes at auction could have been converted to a disk-less thin client (see http://www.instructables.com/id/PC-personal-computer-into-a-sort-of-thin-client/ for an article on how to do this). They were replac...

Had an old machine that had some problems with the ide (legacy hard disk) controller. Though most machines now use what is called "sata", I did not want to throw it away. Actually this is a great idea for small offices, schools. and even families. Instead of having to buy all new computers, you can purchase one machine as a server and then just reuse the existing machines as thin clients. A tremendous money saving move. That is what we did and saved a fortune. If you go completely open source, you do not have to worry paying for software licenses either. It saved us ten thousand dollars to dump proprietary software in addition not having to buy new hardware. So really it saved us much more than ten thousand dollars. Also you are helping to save the environment not to have the old machines go to a landfill. Happen to be talking with an MSWindows admin about disaster recovery. He was talking about how it was a challenge to do recovery. I made a bet that I could ...