Dark Side of the Carton

I usually upgrade to the newest version of Firefox, currently 3.5.2, as soon as it becomes available. In the last week or so I noticed that certain web forms with text boxes begun to display very odd characters regardless of what I was typing. I could copy this text and paste it into notepad and […]

Synergy is one of those DotCom era buzzwords that you still occasionally hear from an out of touch executive giving a bad presentation. Synergy also happens to be a piece of software that has significantly contributed to the clean up of my desk here at work.

I’ve been a staunch supporter of Windows Vista since well before release. I’ve used it for well over a year and defended it’s use for a long time before arriving at this conclusion. That changes today. As Microsoft would say, my support has gone EOL. For you non-techs out there, EOL stands for End of […]

If you didn’t already know, consider yourself now informed that installing SP1 for Vista removes the GPMC from Vista. Running the GPMC from a Windows Server 2008 or Vista machine is the only way to access the 700 additional Group Policy settings available for Vista and Server 2008 machines. With the release of SP1, Vista […]

There is no denying the speed or convenience of using instant messaging for communication. Phone calls are good, email is better, and IM is the best. Since about 2006 I’ve been using Trillian for my IM needs. Trillian uses an XML based client side file to store your buddies and their aliases. The lack of […]

It’s probably rare that someone who has worked in the IT industry as long as I have managed to wait until 2008 to buy their first laptop. I thwarted the evil deed of dropping lots of money to take my computing on the road, but today I gave in and bought the family a nice […]

Back in November, Wal-Mart was running a few pre Black Friday holiday sales that included an awesome deal on the Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player. As a supporter of HD-DVD, and now both formats, I was lured in based on the $98 price tag. Given that the player had been going for well over $200 just […]

I’ve been waiting for a good time to pick up a PS3 since it launched just over a year ago and that time finally arrived. With the almost extinction of the 20GB and 60GB models available for purchase I decided to pick up a refurbished 60GB model from Overstock this evening for about $470, $129 […]

My home computer isn’t exactly a smoking machine. For those interested, it’s a 2500+ w/ 2GB of Ram. After running Vista Business for about 13 months I finally conceded that my machine was just not up to snuff when it came to running Vista smoothly. I was forced to downgrade to XP Pro and I […]

phpBB 3.0 was released this week and the default theme, Prosilver, has the post content on the left and the poster’s profile on the right. This is reverse from most forum software and the subsilver theme of previous phpBB releases. I’ve taken the time to tweak the CSS and code to flip the poster profile […]