computoman

This section requires knowledge of bash. Please get a professional to help if you are unsure. The root partition of the official x86 OpenWrt image is not very big, about 50 MiB.  Many find it too small after installing a few add-on packages.  Here I will cover the steps to expand it.  The resultant image can be used in a live USB (see Easy Live USB for x86 OpenWRT ) or copied to a hard disk. Procedure Outline Get an uncompressed disk image. Pad image to desired size Attach the image file to a loop device Edit image partition table to enlarge the root partition Resize the file system in root partition Detach the image from the loop device. All commands below are run in Bash. Uncompress Image File Use whichever method you like to download an image file from OpenWrt ( http://downloads.openwrt.org ) and uncompress it using gzip.  For example, these two commands download and uncompress the 10.03.1-rc6 disk image. bash$ wget --quiet http:/...

Installing OpenWrt x86 This is a great project to put an old pc back to work. Openwrt is a cousin so to speak of DD-WRT that  is installed on many brand name routers to increase their capabilities. Openwrt will also allow a pc to act as an expensive router without the big price tag. Of course, you could easy use some of the router distros such as ipcop and many others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_or_firewall_distributions ). openwrt is so much more upgradeable and expandable. Did this with the original image on a pentium2 and it worked well. If you want the gui, you may need to install the web add-on. Installing OpenWrt x86 on a PC. ( Try this at your own risk!!! ) Requirements: An X86 compatible pc (i386) or greater with at least 16MB of RAM, 2 network cards, and a hard drive. With newer versions of openwrt require higher hardware requirements. Check openwrt.org for more details. OpenWrt binary file, for x86. Old: http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamika...

Happy holidays and thank you for visiting us. Breakdown by area: Breakdown by operating system.

VMware Fusion users can now install Leopard, Snow Leopard in VMs!! as per: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/vmware-fusion-users-can-now-install-leopard-snow-leopard-in-vms.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

The new file cabinet or what is called network-attached storage (aka nas) is very useful for a business. Network-attached storage is a computer(s) that are dedicated to acting like an external hard drive for your computer network. Not that you could not share files from your local machine, the nas allows more than one person access under certain rules load and save files to the unit. It is basically a computer dedicated to serving out files. Just a new name or buzz word for a traditional file server. Nas units are generally oriented to the home or small business where management or administration of the file server is or can be reduced. You can get a nas in what is called a turnkey package off the shelf from your local electronics store. Generally you might pay a premium for such a setup. But then you know it should be supported well from the manufacturer. Hewlett Packard is a prime example of those units. Now everyone under the sun is selling some sort of system billing themselves a...

Statistics can be very important especially for a business. I like to know how the instructables are dong. Which are the top viewers, so it gives me an idea of what project to do next and trending of views over time. You can do the same thing with the products you may or may not want to keep in inventory. If it does not sell why keep it on hand. Though the instructables do not cost me anything, I have on occasion deleted what I thought was a dead instructable. Lost a few views, but it overall gives a better picture. (Have a program that gets all the data from the site, so the figures do not have to be typed in manually.)

What happens when computer people get together much like old car talk. What's in you machine? You want to say more than I don's know. The newest devices such as the touchpads, some netbooks, and etc. today are pretty much unfortunately throwaways. As for desktop computers,  at least for a while you can upgrade them. It is very useful to know what equipment and and in some cases what software is on the inside. For insurance purposes, you would be well advised to have such a list tucked away in a safe deposit box or where ever. So I went on a little research expedition to find out what might be used to find out what is in my computer. OS/X: (textedit to view) You can go to the system profiler and output a text list of the hardware. More info at: http://www.intego.com/services/systemProfiler.html and http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/26204-howto-list-your-installed-applications.html Microsoft windows: (notepad to view) A script for older systems: http://richardspowe...

Run Android on you pc from a cd on your pc. http://www.android-x86.org/ caveat emptor.

Want to run Andriod on a PC? Try this gadget: USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station

Preface: There is a computer programming language that is oriented towards new developers. That language is called Python. It is available for most every platform. (i.e. MSWindows, OS/X, BSD,. Linux and etc.  Though there are no fancy graphics in what was done in this project, you could surely add that feature. Just wanted to show a bare bones project that anyone could use to start with. One of the reasons I like to do page scraping is to get the data I need without having to take time to use a web browser such as Firefox and or a newsreader to get the specific data I need. Letting the computer get the data for me and making a summary file of the data I need is therefore letting the computer be my secretary and or research assistant. Have been doing some page scraping, but i was not able to get the weather from their (Google) site. Then read they have it sort of hidden. Was able to get a page of the xml they use to show the data. Aha!   Then found a short piece ...

This is probably a better look at the change in resolution. I did a text scrape of a spreadsheet I wrote. Before:  After:   A bit bigger(or smaller as the case may be).....

Note: This also works for the graphics mode. Do this at your own risk as I will not be responsible for any issues: One of the biggest complaints I get is the text screen is too small. I generally agree. More recent computers actually have the ability to use a higher resolution, but do not take advantage of it in the default mode. This article is for more advanced users. Please get help before starting this project if you are at least the little bit. unsure. You will need to have the documentation for both your video card and for your monitor. You will see numbers like 640x48 800x600 1024x768. Take those numbers and use the lower of the two from the video card and the monitor settings. If you can only use 640x400 then stop here. The 640x400 is the default. There is a 320x200, but I have not see that in years, In my case the highest resolution for the monitor was 800x600. Still a boost over the default 640x400 screen. Lastly you need to find out what your linux system uses to bo...

Happy twentieth birthday Vim aka (Vi improved). Sort of the Linux command line version of Notepad. Vim leaves notepad in the dust for features.  http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2011/11/vim-celebrates-20-years-happy-birthday.html Thank you to Barnes and Noble for having the guts to stand up to Micro$oft.  http://lxnews.org/2011/11/16/microsofts-dirty-patent-tricks/

Free OTA TV is a good thing and maybe I have harped on it a bit much, but soon we plan to go to the next step of Free Satellite Tv. You have to be real careful because there is a lot of misinformation and people who would like to take advantage of you for that. A site called www.ftalist.com has shed light on the right way to get into FTA. We have been using it as a guide on how to set things up. One of the biggest drawbacks to technology is that things are changing all the time. To get into FTA (Free to Air) tv does require and investment of several hundred dollars and if the technology changes that equipment is worthless.  To offset any start up costs of FTA, we have been looking around at resale places for the equipment one might be able to use. So far the investment has been less than twenty dollars for two receivers. The only thing left is the dish and the responder(s).  Updates coming...

I haven’t posted much in the last month as I just went through a move. I ended up going from a small city of 20,000 to a rural town of a 1,000. Lucky for me DSL was available here, I hate the thought that I might of had to use Hughes Net Satellite at home as I do at work. I had cable at the old place because Dish could not install a dish on that house due to extensive tree coverage. Of course Time Warner Cable has great features and is trouble free, except that irritating bill that shows up each month. I have had DSL and Dish for 2 weeks now and the first bill that came was a credit for $42.00. I could use some more bills like that! The whole system for phone, internet, and TV with 2 DVRs is half of what Time Warner charges by the month. So far things are pretty good, the TV line up is not quite as good as cable and the DVR does not have “Start Over” but there is much more HD than on cable. The DSL internet seems to work just as good for me, however I am just a surfer and not a power u...

It is time for the United States to become more inventive. We need to stop depending on other countries for our needs. We also need to stop being bullies about patents and software copyrights. It is killing the U.S. in that it is not allowing the U.S. to compete against the world in the marketplace. In my own situation, there was a tool I needed. I looked everywhere in the stores locally for a brace as I believe it is called. I just call it a hand drill/screwdriver. What I needed was to be able to work late at night building things without making a lot of noise. I also needed a hand tool I could use if the power was out. You still have to be able to work on computer equipment even when the power is down. Ironically, you can get most any other hand tool from a local store. You can get the brace from the web, but most likely it will have been made overseas. Not good enough. Do not know who said it, but I think it makes real sense. If you can dream it, you can draw it. If you can draw...

Resizing desktop icons is a lot easier than it used to be. In this first video, we will see what it took to do it on MSWindows XP. In the last article, Robert showed you how to change the icon size in Microsoft Vista. Now we will look at how to do it with Ubuntu 10.02 LTS with the Gnome desktop. That's all for now.

I have a really bad habit of leaving my computer on all the time, and we have a few cats. Most of the time the cats try their typing skills; that ends up looking like this, This morning my little kitten decided to take a nap on the keyboard and change some desktop setting on my Windows Vista. All the icons ended up getting very very small, after a quick search on Google I found a fast fix. It was as simple as clicking on the desktop and hitting "Ctrl" and using the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the size of all the desktop icons at once. This should also work on Windows 7? I thought this was pretty cool, and it could come in handy even if you don't have a cat/hack.

Adobe haas announced they are discontinuing flash development on mobile devices: Adobe Kills Flash for Mobile . I could not resist posting this link to a web comic commemorating this event. Flash’s Swan Song (Comic)

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...

The basis of this article is based on the dialog from the movie known as "The hunt for the Red October". In the movie, one of the key lines was I think "One ping and one ping only". Pinging was a method by submarines equipped with sonar to detect what is around them. Normally you would use more than one ping. In computing we also have a program called ping that does the same thing to detect what is around on the network. There is a very powerful program called nmap that usually automates such activity. That usually takes some kind of administrative power to implement. We will be using a simple linux batch file (could be easily converted to other platforms) to detect what is around us. This tool is perfect for the home network. It will probably not detect what is known as "Man in the middle devices", but at least you can see the visible systems on your network. The code. ping.sh: (do not forget "chmod +x ping.sh) [code] for i in {1..254} do pin...

One nice thing is that if you find a page with a tool that you need, under certain circumstances, you can save the page for later use. In some cases, if it is going into an educational environment, the advertisements have to go away. That is what was done with this web page. Before: After editing the source code: So there are more uses for knowing html, javascript, and css than for just creating your own web page.  One of many sites to get free code: http://www.free-javascripts.com.

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notice: Comments are correct the scripts need to be updated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Do not have time to do it now , but it isin the queue...... Someone had written a script to grab the weather from the web. A script is like a todo list for the computer. Even if you are not a programmer, you will see the added lines give the script more potential or power. Everything becomes less and less cryptic to use. How you interact with it is sometimes considered what is called the user interface. lynx -dump "http://mobile.weather.gov/port_mp_ns.php?select=3&CityName=Woonsocwa That yielded: National Weather Service __________________________________________________________________ Woonsocket, RI Current Local Conditions a...