computoman

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...

It amazes me that it is that news reports have estimated that Microsoft allegedly earns close to a half billion dollars off the Android platform. To my knowledge, they have yet never told the public what they have done to earn that money. According to reports, Microsoft alleges that it violates some kind of patents. Since Microsoft is a "public" company and has been under the scrutiny of the courts for being a monopoly, do they not owe an explanation of all this. As far as I can see they have allegedly muscled their way to get a free ride off of Android. Microsoft has had their own problems with being on the wrong end of a patent. For some reason Microsoft has to do everything in secret. That is not what this country is about and they seem to be downright un-American. A host of a popular video podcast exclaimed why should anyone go with Android? The host recommend Apple products instead because they are more standard. What the host either fails to realise or does not want the...

GM has decided that tracking and selling GPS data from canceled OnStar subscribers is not such a good idea! DUH! Due to a firestorm of protests they have reverted to their old Terms Of Service. At least they realized they made a really dumb move. OnStar Reverses Decision to Change Terms and Conditions

It seems to me that every social media company except for Facebook has peeked and declined. The ever "loved" Zynga - maker or Farmville and Mafia wars has seen a huge decline in revenues. How long can Facebook continue? Chris Nerney at IT world has an Interesting take on the state of social media companies. Air coming out of social media IPO bubble

Ever wish you could stay by the baby, but get a little rest from holding the child. Linux has your answer. Just tie a string from the cdrom tray to a baby rocker. Put the following code in a shell fine and make it executable. (chmod +x babyrock.sh) babyrock.sh [code] while [1 = 1] do #eject cdrom eject #pull cdrom tray back in eject -t done [/code] Run the code and enjoy a bit of free time. $ ./babyrock.sh Note: Please, do not leave children unattended.

Say you just need one bit of information off the web such as the latest football score. That means you have to start your browser, use a bookmark (or manually type in the url), and then finally scan the page for the information you need. In another case, you are logged into a server via the command line where no web browser is available. Page scraping is the answer to your needs. This may not be the best example, but say you want your horoscope for the day. All you need to do is to fire up a terminal if you are not already in a terminal and just type a few letters and boom there it is. Here is the page we want to get the data from: You can use just a small bit of program code to solve the problem (Use your favorite editor to create the program and the datafile and then make ghp executable with "chmod +x ghp"). ghp: [code] # Get today's horoscope echo "--------------------------------------------" # character width cw=60 hsign=$1 hsign="`echo $h...

No computer or it's software is perfect. The way you are informed of issues can vary from one system to another. Microsoft's way to display problems has become part of folklore. It has become know as the infamous BSOD. The blue screen of death aka bsod has changed yet again, but this time you do not seem to get a clue to what is going on. As much as I never liked to see the screen of death, I did appreciate the detail of information presented to use to diagnose issues with your computer. In the latest iteration, that seems to be missing. WHY???  Which bsod screen would you prefer to have?   The Win 8 BSOD: Now if you look at the older bsod screen shots , you see that you at least get some kind of error code to deal with: And the BSOD message was immortalized in this photo:

Arm cpu's have been around a while. Actually a lot of your home routers are using the Arm processor as the brain. Some of them have enough hardware so that you can run alternative operating systems based on 'nix such as dd-wrt, openwrt, and a host of others. I am also acquainted with the Arm processor in the Cisco Linksys Nslu2. it ran at a whopping 100 or so megahertz. Even at that speed I was able to run the Debian flavor of Linux on it. It was a real computer. Used it as a web server, music server, and etc. Had an old unix terminal connected to it as the front end. Wish I had a picture of it with the tiny server and bulky terminal sitting working together. Still have the Nslu2 , but put the original firmware back on it. Since then I put linux back on it. It will interesting to see what is going to happen with these Arm units. Even the Arduino , a hobbyist micro-controller board will eventually have an arm processor version. It is more than likely that you will have a...

What if your new tablet or phone had twice the processing power, but used less power than current crop of devices? That is exactly what Nvidia is cooking up with it's new Kal-El Tegra ARM processor. The Kal-El Tegra is Nvida's next generation Tegra processor. It will actually be a 5 core processor with the 5th core being a special super low power "companion" core. The extra core will have just enough horsepower to keep important things going that don't need a 1.5 GHz processor. This is things like music, phone calls, email syncs, notifications, and background tasks. In doing said tasks, it will use very little power. The other 4 cores are full processors that run at the full speed of 1.5 or even 2 GHz. The chip can power each of these 4 "regular" cores up or down as needed. Moore's law is certainly still working with ARM processors. The performance is doubling every 12 months. No wonder Microsoft is supporting ARM processors on Windows 8....

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 ...

There are two basic types of computer set ups. First is a workstation (touch pad, laptop, or desktop) that you or I might use. Then there is the server that does just that. it serves out software (programs) and data (aka your files). Generally there is no sitting at the server using it as you would your workstation. They should be pretty much standalone units. Whether you use a workstation or a server, you still have be able to manage those systems. Traditionally in the Microsoft World the servers were gui (graphical user interface) or mouse oriented. Sounds easy that you can manage even hundreds of machines with a click. Unfortunately, that was time consuming and got old quick. I know as I did that for a living for many many years. There had to be a better way. Also when we consider a gui, that takes more instructions for the computer to have to deal with and therefore more memory or ram (random access memory). So for a server to deal with these extra instructions will not only sl...

If I was limited to only one tech site it would without a doubt be arstechnica.com.  They have a nack for good tech news pieces, good analysis, and a sense of history: UNIVAC: the troubled life of America's first computer .

It is clear that Window 8 will not have plug-ins in the web browser. ars technica has some good coverage. Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 ditches Flash, plugins The no plug-ins Includes Microsoft's own silverlight. HTML5 all the way baby! The adoption of HTML5 as a strict standard will lead to a rich variety of web applications that will run across a wide range of web browsers. It is still a bit strange to me to see Microsoft pushing strongly for web standards instead of proprietary web browser behavior. Now that both Apple and Microsoft have the same position on plug-ins, the rest of the industry will have to follow.

Just a video of my old Dell GX1 (p2) web/cloud server. Except for the videos on the web page, all software is local on the machine. Certainly could of had the videos local also. The same server also acts a traditional Itunes server, but that feature is not shown. What is really neat are some of the gui (graphical user interface) that a remote machine or even a tablet can use. Point one being that you can use the software on the server and not have to load software on client machines. Point two being that data is on the server and not the local machines. A tiny bit more security in some ways. There is no sound in the video. Still experimenting with different software and did not have time to set all that up. If you can bear with the video, you will see it is worth it. Not all the applications on the server were shown. Just gave you enough to whet your appetite. Yours truly wrote the software for the main web page and some of the applications. This is the wave of the future as to ho...

The Geek shall inherit the earth! My computing became more intimate using Linux, OS/X, Minix, AUX, Unix, and the like after reading "The Joy of X". Some people say they are an MS PC. Some people say they are an Apple Mac. If you use both, do you have a multiple personality disorder. What's the difference between a plumber and a sysadmin. One hates backups and the other loves them. Linux administrators have gotten a bad rap for being bad tempered. Just because they want to bash code with ncurses. Then again electronics people must like to meditate, because they are always saying ohm. Traveling with computers must be tough, because people always they have a hard drive. Older computer geeks must like to speak Spanish, because they were always saying K. Electronics people must really care about what Millie does, because they are always saying Millie what? Programmers when coding can be challenging so they cover their ascii. There is no place like localhost...

Ever try to go to a web page while internet browsing and you get the message that it the page is no longer around. Frustrating to say the least. That page had just the information you were looking for. Then you want to chunk your computer and pledge to never again use the internet. Relax as there may be a way to miraculously recover or access that page. All you need is the way back machine. What? No, not a another piece of equipment to purchase. It is a web site that has lots of historical information. So now how do we do it. You point your browser to www.archive.org, and then you will fill in the url (aka web site address) into the wayback machine box. I usually copy and paste the site I am looking for in the the wayback machine box to save typing and for accuracy. Not promising the page you are looking for will be there, but at least you now have a greater chance to get to the site you were looking for. Try it! Thanx for the comment!

Can you replace your everyday computer with a tablet and be as productive? Jacqui Cheng, Senior Apple Editor at arstechnica.com thinks so.... Masochist me? An Ars writer's iPad-only workday We are living in interesting times in the tech world! Soon we will carry our computing device in our pocket, but connect it to a wireless keyboard and wireless monitor on our desk. A top of the line smartphone has a dual core ARM processor. Soon it will have quad core ARM processor. That is more than enough power to run a desktop full of apps. What does the average person use a computer to do: web browsing, word processing, email, maybe a spreadsheet, and a few other odds and ends. That does not require a supercomputer. It does, typically, require more than a 4" touch screen. As soon as our mobile devices can seamlessly use our desktop screens and keyboards, the PC as we know it is toast. That is why Microsoft Windows 8 will be so drastically different from Windows 7. But,...

Sell what? On what? To who? I guess the first thing you have to find out would be “What should I sell?” You may already have an idea or a business plan. It might be a existing business that you would like to expand, or a hobby that you think the world is ready for. This part of “How to sell online” is more of a questionnaire than a how to. I am going to pull a story from a business that I was involved in before the internet was available for selling, and use it as a model to see how it would translate to online selling. The company sold Mercedes-Benz auto parts by mailing out catalogs to Mercedes Benz owners. The company started out small, selling only to owners of mid 1980’s model Mercedes-Benz 300D Diesels and grew to a thriving business over a decade. Staying with a relatively small highly specialized customer base the company saw constant growth. Then one day the owner set his sights on expanding into newer model Mercedes parts, and poured all his resources into a new 190 parts and...

What in the heck is a program? A program is a logical set of instructions. When I taught computing at a local college, the first thing I would ask students to do is to write out a list of what needed to be done if someone were to take your place. Once they completed that task, I praised them for writing their first program. If we want a computer to complete a task we have to give it a set of instructions. A lot of instructions have already been created for us to use such as operating system (what manages the computer i.e. Linux) and applications software or tools for humans to use to take advantage of the computer without having to do everything from scratch (i.e. LibreOffice). How do we program or talk to the computer? Just as humans use several languages, we can do the same thing with computers to get them to do what we want. You can have instructions in Spanish, English, or a number of languages. Likewise computers have languages to that can be converted or translated to what it ca...

One of the major reasons I have not purchased a touch pad is that you can not easily program the devices for your own use. One thing I liked about the traditional personal computer is that you could develop programs fairly easily without having to buy both an expensive computer and development software just to get the device to do what you want. Not only that, you really can not use a program and easily port it from one device to another. That is just not right. Decided to look around for a possible solution to resolve the issue of not being able to create one's own software for the devices. There were basically three criteria. First you had to be easily able to port or move your program from one platform to another. The second was that you did not need an expensive machine and software for software development. Lastly, we did not want to have to be tied to some "APP store" to get our software. So what did we come up with? O'Reilly has some fine books. We prob...

Jonny Evans at Computerworld has some analysis on Adobe's recent announcement. Adobe brings Flash-free-Flash to Apple iPad - As I posted on September 7th, flash is moving towards obsolescence. Now further information is appearing as Adobe (the maker of flash)  has announced a work around for mobile devices that don't support flash or have poor flash performance.  Why do we care?  Better web browsing and video performance on smart phones and tablets is why.   The elimination of a major security headache on PCs would be great too.

One thing that really makes me want to laugh is how people or organizations are willing to take your old computers off your hands. Probably a good thing, but are those old systems really worthless and unusable? Here a just only a few examples of why they may not be. I have an old Commodore monitor from way back when. We also have a tv with the same kind of connections know as composite input. Tv stations and entertainment vendors would have you believe they are worthless. Not necessarily so. For example I still use my monitor as a tv with a digital converter and also as a monitor for one of my pcs. Since the monitor supports what is know as svideo, it still works great. To go even farther, we harvest old parts from computers for new uses as not have to buy what we already have. Actually, what is now called obsolete systems can be very valuable if you or someone you know can harvest them for you. For example, If you say want to use an old 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, most people would sni...

Local radio disk jockey wants you to purchase a particular brand high priced computer for your child to take to school because it will auto save all their work. Not a bad idea. If someone can not remember to save their work regularly, should they be in college? Am I missing something? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What is Linux and why is it so popular? Every desktop computer uses an operating system. The most popular operating systems in use today are: * Microsoft “Windows” (a misnomer because all OS’s use a gui) * Mac OS (now loosely based on BSD, a cousin of Linux.) * UNIX (largely being replaced by BSD and Linux.) * Linux (Ubuntu might be the most popular, but Redhat, Debian, and Others are also very much used). Linux is an operating system that is very much like but not UNIX and that has become very popular over the last several years. Operating systems are computer programs. An operating system is the first piece of softw...

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 Microsoft is improving boot times 30-70% in windows 8.  Great, but does it matter? Is it relevant?  I don't know how long my iPad takes to boot.  I almost never boot it. I think I have shut it down two times in the last four months. For it, fast booting is a moot point. The truth is: the concept of shutting down and booting will largely be an anarchism in a few years.  What will matter is a rock solid operating systems that never require a reboot. It has been done: mainframes, servers, home routers ... tablets.  I remember way back to a Novell file sever at the college that had an uptime of over 380 days!   Fast booting is great, but has Microsoft missed the boat?  Just make a PC that sleeps and pulls a 1/4 of a watt in standby. Invest that massive engineering expertise in making the beginning of day boot and end of day shutdown obsolete! Catch up with the cutting edge. It's the new norm.

There had to be a way to put an old laptop that just has a floppy drive (i,e ho hard drive) back to work. Well I remembered how some people turn them into clock and all sorts of things, so i went searching for dos based programs. The first one I really did not care for and I had to fix it so it would work right. Then I thought why not do one of my own, so I came up with this: Well being a geek I could not stop at that so I did a simple prototype of a binary clock. One can always make it fancier later. You just have to do at least one in your life as a geek.. Now to make an analog clock.... All for now.

Tom's hardware has an interesting tidbit regarding Microsoft's position regarding browser plug-ins and flash:    Microsoft Envisions a World Without Flash, Plugins . Apple has refused to support flash on the iPhone / iPad.    Largely, this has been no problem since HTML5 has become standard fare on most web sites.    When I first got my iPad last summer, many websites would not play a video embedded on the iPad properly or at all.    That quickly changed.    Now it is the odd-man-out web site that shows any video/flash issues on iOS Safari.    It is looking more and more like Steve Jobs made the right call regarding Flash. Android supports flash, but the implementation is poor.    It typically slow and also slows down the entire web page. Let's not go into the security issues that flash generates on Windows computers.    I hate having things run in my icon tray, but I leave the Adobe updating running because...

Interesting if you think about it in that offices started out with typewriters, accounting worksheets with a calculator nearby, and file cabinets. We still have the same equipment, but they have evolved a bit. First the typewriter became a command line editor, file cabinet became the database, and the spreadsheet/calculator combination became the early spreadsheet. You had to do a lot of typing to do everything you wanted to do from a command line interface. The eventually the mouse was invented and the graphical use interface was created to take advantage of it. Yet we are still doing the same old thing, but just in a different way. Another comparison could me made that hand painted billboards, mass mailings, and hand made newspapers went to desktop publishing and then were replaced by web pages. Anyway you get the idea…….

Web servers are awesome as you can do so much from home automation to what ever your imagination can dream up. If you have an extra computer this is a great way to put it to use instead of sending it to a landfill! One way we use our web server is with a Chumby. We like to use our Chumby (touchpad) in connection with our home server. The Chumby is not exactly portable. I love our Infocast Insignia (aka Chumby) 8″. Using it I made sort of an ipad clone and it runs Linux!! I control all the home automation from it and it is great for accessing our intranet based w eb server from the kitchen to access recipes and many other applications). Becoming addicted to php and mysql as well as html. May get a second one for a low powered server like I used to do with the Cisco Linksys Nslu2. Can not wait to see how well it works with mythwebtv. Need to build a new server first. 64bit here we come. Yep, we are bit behind using only 32 bit single core cpu based computers. Picture of a...

First of all let me give you my background, I run a on-line store and on-line auction for a transportation memorabilia art gallery, around 80% of our items are sold online.  I started out in graphic arts for print, so when I made the big jump to websites there was a major learning curve. I wasn’t lucky enough to get any formal training from school about websites, because when I started out in this business and went to school we didn’t have the world-wide-web, we bought printed mailing list and printed catalogs and send them out USPS bulk mail, and then waited for the phones to ring. And they did, and we sold stuff, and packed them in boxes and send them to people all over the world. Things have changed a lot, and they have also stayed the same. We still compile e-mailing list, and yes we still send out printed catalogs, and we post items on the website, and sometimes the phones and faxes still ring, but more people just click on buttons on our website, and the end result is we sell...

C://dos C://dos.run run.dos.run Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. It’s a hardware problem. ‎”Unix Airlines: You walk out to the runway and they give you a box of tools and some airplane parts. The passengers form into groups and start building twelve different planes.” There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue... The box said ‘Requires Windows 95 or better’. So I installed LINUX UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner Smash forehead on keyboard to continue..... Once I got this error on my Linux box: Error. Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue C isn’t that hard: void (*(*f[])())() defines f as an array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions that return pointers to functions that return void