I really enjoy the Chuck series on NBC, so every Monday night at 8 EST, I’m parked in front of a tv. When I can’t watch it at its normal time, I depend on Hulu.com or NBC.com for my fix. Hulu usually has the episode available about 1 AM Tuesday.
Monday the 9th I couldn’t get to a tv at 8, so I was looking forward to catching it on Hulu, but no luck. NBC doesn’t have it either and as of Wednesday, I haven’t been able to find any explanation or press releases to explain why it’s not on either site.
Did I miss something of global importance that pre-empted the show?
After a normal restart yesterday, my Aspire One booted into just a black screen. No POST, no BIOS, no hard drive light activity, just the power button LED on and the fan running fast. I was not very happy…
I went to the Acer Aspire One User Forum and started looking thru the Hardware section. I found this thread Dead aspire one and it looked like many others had a similar experience. After reading many stories of warranty repair or replacement, I was just about to dig up my receipts when I found this post: Re: Dead aspire one.
It seems that a lot of people had success reflashing the BIOS from a USB drive using tools provided by Acer. I don’t know if it’s officially supported by Acer or if it will void your warranty, but if the computer’s a paperweight now anyway, what the hell? Read the rest of this entry »
Touchpads drive me crazy! Fortunately, Acer was kind (and smart) enough to make Fn + F7 toggle it on & off. And, as an added bonus, this also works in Puppy Linux 4.1.2 retro k2.6.21.7!
If I could see better, or had taken the time to read the manual, I may have discovered this on day one. Maybe this will save someone else some frustration! Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had a lot of .pdf files to read recently and thought pretty seriously about buying a Kindle so I could carry them around with me. But, after a little research, and some thought, it looked like viewing .pdf’s on a Kindle was iffy at best and potentially a PITA if I had to convert all my documents.
I’ve been carrying around my AA1 and doing most of my .pdf reading on it, but have been a little frustrated trying to find the right combination of magnification and page width to get the most legible view.
It’s that time of year again – time to find a printable calendar for 2009. I should have done this months ago, but I didn’t.
My all time favorite for planning purposes is David Seah’s Compact Calendar: Click here to go to his site, read the philosophy behind “The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design” and download. There are Microsoft Excel templates if you want to customize it and .PDF’s if you just need to print and start using it.
WordPress 2.7 has been out for 3 weeks or so, and I have yet to hear of any reason not to upgrade. I’m just now getting chromick.com updated due to holiday insanity, but mostly because it’s been such a PITA to upgrade at this webhost.
However, after upgrading, I discovered that 2.7 has the ability to do ftp via the admin interface and I was able to update all my plug-ins by entering the ftp info & clicking!
Lorelle on WordPress has a great post here on upgrading, with a nice collection of links to more info for specific issues & questions.
This is a very simplistic VBscript I hacked together to help deploy the patches for MS08-078 / KB960714. In brief it checks the registry to see if Internet Explorer version 6 or 7 is installed and then runs the appropriate updater.
Things you should know:
Automatic updates will probably do this for you
The script does no error checking
It was tested on XPPro, running as an administrator, from a network public share
MS08-078 lists a bunch of switches you can use with the installers. The only one I’m using is “/passive”
You’ll need to download the installers from Microsoft and put the correct path in the code where you see \\SERVER\SHARE
If you use this script, you do so at your own risk. I take no responsibility for any damage to your computer, data, hairline, or anything else. This is intended as an example of something you could do, not something you should do. If you have any doubts don’t use it!
Code:
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strValue = objShell.RegRead("HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version")
intVersion = CInt(Left(strValue, 1))
If intVersion = 7 Then
strCommand = "\\SERVER\SHARE\IE7-WindowsXP-KB960714-x86-enu.exe /passive"
objShell.Run strCommand, 1, True
Elseif intVersion = 6 Then
strCommand = "\\SERVER\SHARE\Windowsxp-KB960714-x86-enu.exe /passive"
objShell.Run strCommand, 1, True
End If
