In my last post I was lamenting the premature demise of my old Squeezebox server, caused by a nasty plague that afflicts tech gear: burst capacitors. After a long search, sifting through eBay listings, reading the fine details of each offering, comparing options, I was able to find a nice newish Shuttle server, sporting good [...]

If you find yourself dealing with wonky hardware problems, such as a PC that doesn’t boot or frequent BSOD when watching video, pop open the case and give the caps a gander. You might save yourself hours of troubleshooting effort.

Do you have a shared computer somewhere in your life? A computer that anyone and everyone uses in order to hop online to do a quick web search or to print a document? I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer [...]

Do you still have an old machine kicking around in the basement or the back room, long forgotten? For no cost and almost zero effort, you can set it up as a dedicated network appliance, using one of the many turnkey products from the open-source TurnKey Linux project. I’m serious. You don’t need to know [...]

I have to admit that I mocked the device from the outset. I sort of chuckled as I said “Boy, they really hit the ball out of the park with the iPhone, but this thing doesn’t know whether it is a laptop or a iPod Touch. Why would I want one?” I have a nice [...]

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

Life is too short to keep trying to figure out which side of a cable fits where. Here’s my silly little tip for simplifying one miniscule part of your life.