Inefficiency at it's very finest

Tweaks is now converted to Wordpress. As mentioned before TextPattern had way too many quirks that I just couldn't have. My traffic is taking a nose-dive right now because of the odd-ass way TxP would handle internal linking and all that. It's murdered some of my search engine results.

Anyway, the install is complete. The links that I have control over have been updated, and with any luck traffic will pick up sometime again.

The Question and Answer section should actually be a little easier to manage now because I like the way WP handles comments and all that better.

Hooray for having to do effectively the same thing twice, but luckily there was a tool to import my posts from TxP into WP. All I had to do was edit the categories and all that.

Seagate can suck my balls

Well, Seagate has managed to lose me as a customer. I bought a brand new drive some time ago when I first built my machine. Around 8 months later the drive took a dump on me, and I was forced to put in a 40 gig Western Digital hard drive I had lying around.

I RMAed the Seagate and a few weeks later was sent a REFURBISHED drive. "No biggie", I thought to myself "I'm sure it'll work fine". Wrong. The refurbished drive lasted all of two weeks before taking a dump of it's own.

I then RMAed THAT drive, and in the RMA I specified what happened and specifically told them to send me a new drive. I didn't buy a refurb from the wholesaler, I don't want a refurb from them. Well, they sent a damned refurbished drive.

I just got done Ghosting my WD to the Seagate and I suppose we'll see how long this one lasts. My theory is that this drive will last just long enough to where I get comfortable to wipe the WD and put something else on it. Just after that the Seagate will take a crap and I'll be forced to just buy something else and go through the pain of reinstalling Windows + all my apps. Luckily I backup documents and other things to DVD / one of my web servers pretty often so I shouldn't really lose too much work.

Stupid CMSes

I've changed my Home Networking site to WordPress. TextPattern had some good flexibility, and I liked the way it handled themes, but there were too many issues with it's permalinks structure and the way stuff got handled.

Throwing in ANY URL after the /category/ would return results when it DEFINITELY should have 404'ed. Ah well, the WordPress switch went fairly smoothly, and I was able to mod the templates OK (good thing I know some PHP).

I'll do the Tweaks site soon enough, after I get the kinks worked out with the much smaller networking site. I'm afraid that it's going to murder my traffic to the new posts and all that, but that's life I suppose.

Ergo-tastic!

I finally got around to installing my keyboard pull-out tray. During the move to Salt Lake City one of the slides got smacked and the screw that was into the super heavy-duty (sarcasm) particle board tore some of the wood out.

Up until now I've not bothered going and getting another peice of wood to use, even though it was only like $4 at Home Depot, or tried to repair the peice that I have.

As it turns out, repairing the peice was easy. I already had some long wood screws lying around, and some epoxy. What I did was take the epoxy, secure the bit of broken wood into the hole and then take a long wood screw and used that to attach the slider to the board.

Then it was a matter of repositioning the mounts on the desk because my layout is different now. My two monitors are at an angle from me so sitting straight facing the one edge of the desk would have sucked.

I'd attach a picture of the awesomeness if I had a digital camera handy, which I don't.

Hotlinking fun and adventure

I had to go through the hosting here and delete quite a few images that I had hosted that were hotlinked. The logs on the site were showing tons of hits that were nothing more than people loading images to post on people's MySpace comments.

Stupid freaking MySpace.

Q&A techy time

More junk on the computer repair site.

First, is a few questions from my readers on some various stuff like a Style XP login screen corruption.

I started TweaksForGeek's Question and Answer section because I figured I'd throw the answers I was dishing out in individule e-mails onto the site in the hopes that it'll help some other people out and with any luck cut down on the amount of e-mail that I get :) .

Aside from that not much else is new. I've not updated my spyware site at all because I just flat can't think of much else to write for it. I do need to go through and update the articles so that the screenshots show the current versions of the programs, but I just keep working on the other sites, as well as for clients here locally. (although Salt Lake City is a bit slower for me client-wise than St. George was. Gah to starting over)

So, that's what's up for now. I'm off to bed.

Yet another reason to hate Norton

Once again, Norton AntiVirus gives me another reason to hate it.

Well, to be fair to Norton I don't know why this Payroll program was trying to write stuff to a Symantec directory, but even still it annoyed me.

I was working at a client that runs a retirement home. They were trying to install some payroll software from ADT or something like that (I think that's an alarm company, I'm not sure exactly what the name was) Anyway, the InstallShield would fail each time with Error 115. For some odd reason the install was trying to write something to the virusdef folder (I think it was actually a Symantec sub-component) and simply wouldn't work.

Nothing I did made it function, until of course, I uninstalled the AV and then everything went dandy.

That ALWAYS seems to be the fix for any Norton AV problem. Uninstall it.

OS X - Liger

The new Mac OS looks AWESOME...

This copy of Windows is not genuine - You may be a victim of software counterfeiting - Brilliant.

Update to the computer repair help site. I banged out a little article on how to get rid of the "This copy of Windows is not genuine" nagger.

That said, I think that it's a brilliant move by Microsoft quite honestly. Now computers the world over that are running jacked versions of Microsoft Windows will have an annoying little pop-up that is at the very least annoying, and at best embarrasing enough to make the person purchase a copy.

I imagine that Windows Vista will come with something like this right out of the box, or perhaps will cease to work completely if a priated key is detected. They may even eventually do that with XP, but I don't imagine they will for a while.

So, if you're getting the "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" message, check that out. Then go BUY yourself a copy of Windows!

Sootahcris template change, Tweaks CMS update

I got much more of TweaksForGeeks updated to the new system. So far it's been fantastic. I made a Q&A section and was able to answer several peoples e-mails ever so quickly while adding content to my site at the same time.

The networking site is coming along nicely as well, but I've not added as much to it. Sometime soon I'll have a couple of VPN articles up on it, but only after I've played with the VPNs I'm setting up for some clients more.

I also banged out an article on how to use the Emergency Boot CD to reset the Administrator password in Windows XP.

Finally! An update! (Not only to HERE, but to my OTHER stagnant sites as well. :) )

After several months of me being non-existent on here, I’m back. I did end up moving to Salt Lake, and while it’s made life quite difficult financially, it’s been a godsend regarding my sanity. St. George was soooo blasted boring for me at the end, not to mention some other drama that I had to deal with. Now that I’m far far away I’ve got a social life again as well as a nicer apartment. (It does cost me considerably more though)

Anyway, I finally did some updating to my Home Computer Networking site. I installed TextPattern, a quite awesome and flexible content management system and ported the few articles that I had actually written for that domain into it. Now updating isn’t a tedious drawn-out procedure. I can just log in, post something, and be done with it. Hoo-freaking-ray.

I also banged out an article on how to setup eMule’s ports in a Linksys router. eMule is great, but the fact that you have to setup port forwarding for it’s unsolicited incoming traffic sucks. I imagine that this makes it not work so well for the MANY people out there behind routers.

I’ll be updating my computer repair site soon as well to TextPattern. I’m just not sure how I’m going to forward all the traffic to my new pages and still keep my old search engine rankings for some specific terms. Hopefully a 301 redirect will do the trick. We’ll see.

Until next time, -Sootah