computoman

One thing I like about servers is that clients or users can run an application from a server. That means software only has to be installed and or upgraded once at a time. What a savings in support time. Places such as Sourceforge.net have many programs that can run from a web server. Three of the most common programs that people use are a spreadsheet, word processing. and a database. One such program although it was not in the package I used was a relational database. A flatfile database could be created in the spreadsheet. The program I am talking about is eyeOS. eyeOS is sort of a computer desktop for your browser.  That means the software should be platform independent.  That means you can generally use any touchpad, desktop, laptop, or anything with a browser. No per se special setup is needed in most cases on the user side. You do need a web server to host the software. A lamp, wamp, mamp, or similar type server should work. We use Apache a lot.The neat thin...

We have no trouble about backing up our personal computers. What do we do about what we have on-line? I found a fairly easy solution for one site called Blogger.com. Guess what it is?  That good old wget command. You could download a site with: $ wget -c -r www.whateverthesitenameis.com The command will recursively get all of the website it can and stay on top of getting the site till it is done. So then (if your computer supports long file names), you would have a directory called www.whateverthesitenameis.com. Cool. You can also go to www.archive.org and have them back up your site. This is great for any site you do not want to lose. Then I thought about it and wanted to go one step further. That is directly put the files on another local server so I could access them at will. Also did not want to interfere with the existing web pages. So we need an Apache web server that supports virtual hosts. On that server where you have administrative rights. You want to set up yo...

Just a couple of quickies you might be interested in. The one coat hanger laptop stand: http://www.instructables.com/id/One-coat-hanger-laptop-stand/ Laptop lamp: http://www.instructables.com/id/Yet-another-usb-lamp/ Note: Turning on the faucet is fatal..... Oh goodness, how could I forget the Ipad stand: http://www.instructables.com/id/Ipad-et-al-holder/ . The stand can also be used with the PCpad. An Android tablet is coming soon!

Most every software now a days is mouse or gui (graphical user interface) driven, but the real power comes when you can use the command line or what some people would call a dos environment. They are nothing alike. Even Microsoft, one of the biggest gui advocates is going back to the command line with MSWindows server 8 if what I am told is right.  Well, the Linux, Bsd, Unix, and other like operating systems never lost that advantage. (Note: you will need to be connect to the internet). One of the more popular variants of Linux uses a command called tasksel which can be invoked with: $ sudo tasksel What does that do for you do you ask? it allows you to install various environments with just a few keystrokes. The above command brings up a menu allowing you to choose what environment or package you want to install. This can be everything from choosing a desktop to installing a variety of servers. Package configuration     ┌───────────────────────┤ Software se...