Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
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27
Jan
2011
Oversaturated Forums
Online forums are a thing of the past for most people now. There’s a few slow ones I still hang around once every month or so but I don’t keep up on any forums like I used to.
But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.
So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.
Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.
3
Nov
2010
Computer Things that Don’t Make Sense
Today we upgraded our modem, and this new one happens to be a modem/router, so I’ve had to get around the router part that I don’t want (nor are you provided a password for).
Part of this was moving my old router to 192.168.4 from 192.168.1, to make sure there wasn’t a conflict.
This was bound to have a few other hiccups, and I had to reset the new modem 4 times (and it has the longest boot time I’ve ever seen for a device like that) just to be able to play a game. It was lagging horrendously and terribly unplayable. But eventually I made it into the last 15 minutes of the match to watch my team get creamed.
The next problem that arose was my dad not being able to print. His computer is hooked up to the same switch as the printer on a router upstairs. My sister is on this same router and she could print fine to the same printer.
How is it that someone farther from the printer (in terms of network devices) can print when he can’t? The problem must be with his computer!
After rebooting things a few times I remembered that we set a static IP for the printer a while back so we could print even though it was behind another router. I switched that to the new 192.168.4 address space and voila, he could print.
And my sister got her internet back.
Somehow that is connected.
WTF.
6
Dec
2009
99 Steam Games
I have 99 steam games. That is significantly larger than I have physical games. There are two reasons for that:
- Steam offers me many, many deals, especially on older but still relevant games.
- Steam offers large packs of games at discounted prices.
I began using steam back in 2004 when they were throwing around Half-Life 2 with every video card, but before it came out you could play the older games. And a $10 upgrade got me Day of Defeat: Source and I could keep the back catalog. $10 for Half-Life and all associated mods PLUS a new game that I was waiting for? Sign me up. Read the rest of this entry »
7
Sep
2009
Patch Tuesday
I just wanted to mention something that a lot of people don’t know about, Patch Tuesday. That would be that scheduled Microsoft patched are sent out the second Tuesday of every month. The only exception is that critical patches become available as soon as possible.
Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.