- Published:
- January 21, 2010 – 1:17 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Gone is my 500+ channel television subscription along with the required boxes necessary to decode all of that content. The DVR, which has been a mainstay of my family’s television viewing habits, has been ousted. In it’s place is a kick-ass system that keeps the DVR functionality for many of the TV shows that we usually watch, brings in much new content, and also saves me a few bucks each month.
Let’s face it, you don’t want all of the content that your cable provider offers. Cable providers have fought a-la-carte programming tooth and nail for this very reason. Much of it is specialty programming, and though I admit it is nice to know it was there, my family and I rarely watched any of it. My new setup brings many new sources as well as a CHOICE to what you want to view. I am very happy with the results so far.
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Reviews,Software,Television
Tagged: acer-revo, boxee, cable, home-theater, htpc
- Published:
- December 27, 2009 – 12:16 am
- Author:
- By Dave
I’ve decided to replace my cable plan and DVR box with something a little more… functional. Sure we get a ton of channels from Verizon FiOS, but we hardly ever watch them. Our television viewing habits mainly consist of a few programs that my wife watches and a few programs that I watch, but we almost never watch them live. We typically DVR them and then watch them on our own time. For the few instances where we would like to watch live TV, for example when a Penn State game is on, we would like to be able to watch that. Normally the games are on ABC/NBC/Fox so premium cable channels such as ESPN aren’t necessarily needed. There will be some instances where a game may only be available on the Big 10 network or some other premium channel, but honestly I am not that big into sports and….
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Software,Television
Tagged: boxee, replace-cable, Television
- Published:
- December 23, 2009 – 9:26 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
We recently did some speed testing on a few of the servers on our network, and we were not receiving the speeds expected considering they were sitting on a physical 100mbps ethernet port. The servers were indeed on physical 100mbps connection, however wget (TCP/IP, HTTP Port 80) download tests showed only a max of about 1.5MB/sec (note the 8bit/byte conversion, so this translates to about 12mbits).
Categories: Linux,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: Ethernet, kernel, Linux, network, speed, tcp/ip
- Published:
- October 30, 2009 – 6:40 am
- Author:
- By Dave
I put this together for a project in a class I am taking, and thought it would be handy for others as well. The goal is to access a Windows filesystem and reset the password for a user, for example if someone forgot the Administrator password or the account is locked out from too many bad password login attempts. This works on all modern Windows Operating Systems: Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Win7 etc. Make sure to create a backup if you want to make sure you don’t corrupt your Windows install, as it can happen. Tools used: Unetbootin Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop ISO One flash drive, 1 gig or larger chntpw Accessing the Filesystem First we use unetbootin to install Ubuntu 9.10 to a flash drive. The flash drive needs to be at least 1GB to install the image. Select “Diskimage” and then the .iso file we downloaded of the….
Categories: Other Technology,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu,Windows
Tagged: chntpw, livecd, password, Ubuntu, Windows
- Published:
- October 29, 2009 – 5:03 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
At some point in the past, Google removed the Oldest » link out of everything except for your inbox and labels. This makes it hard to find the “first” or an early email of any sort if you have a lot in your search result. I wanted to find an email of which I had a lot of, to see what was the first one, of 10000s. Fortunately there is a workaround for this! Updated 4/11/2010! There is a simple URL you can visit to get to the last page of all of your messages. This will show you the first message you ever got in Gmail, and when you signed up for Gmail. Simply visit: https://mail.google.com/mail/#search//p99999 This will return an error, then send you to the last page of all of your messages, inbox and archived. Thanks to commenter Josh for this tip! 1. Perform your search. To search….
Categories: Google,Other Technology
Tagged: gmail, search, tips, tricks
- Published:
- October 16, 2009 – 9:12 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Did you ever have a situation where you needed to access a website that had an IP restriction in place? I recently had a situation where I needed to access the web via my university connection (due to IP restrictions placed on accessing databases of research papers). They do not have a VPN setup so it is hard to do this off-campus. I do however have access to a linux machine on campus. I am familiar with port forwarding using SSH but I had never used it to actually tunnel web traffic using a web browser on Windows. Turns out it is surprisingly easy! The ssh command to use is: 1ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 username@remote_host This command sshes to the remote_host, and creates a tunnel on your localhost, port 8080. Note that you need to have private key authentication already set up for this host – it will not work….
Categories: CentOS,Linux,Security,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: Linux, proxy, Shell, VPN
- Published:
- August 12, 2009 – 6:50 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Update 10/27/2009: Google Voice now supports adding voicemail to any old cell phone number without the “Do not disturb” trick. Simply go into ‘Settings’, Enter the ‘Phones’ tab and then click ‘Activate Google voicemail on this phone’. It will give you directions on call forwarding, which are the same as below, customized for your provider. Disable the “Do Not Disturb” setting to set your Google Voice account back to normal. Thank you Google! For those lucky enough to have a Google Voice account, you’ll know the advantages: forward calls to multiple phones, visual voicemail and audio to text transcriptions. But, since you are not yet able to transfer your current phone number to Google Voice, it is hard to give up your old phone number and start having family, friends and business associates use your new Google Voice number. Also, there is the whole confusion as to your outgoing caller….
Categories: Cell Phones,Other Technology,Software
Tagged: Cell Phones, Google Voice, Hack, Voicemail
