If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern [...]

You know the feeling: you are involved in some intractable problem that has all kinds of weird angles and you just can’t get your head around it—perhaps you feel like you are inspecting an elephant, one square inch at a time, or maybe you simply feel like you are herding cats.
There are plenty of different [...]

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 anything at [...]

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products.
I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle your [...]

Several weeks ago I was sitting at the dining room table with a family friend going through a stack of documents and letters. Her husband had passed away suddenly some weeks before, and I was doing the best I could to help her untangle the paperwork and understand what was what. This unfortunate scene made [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues.
As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a file [...]

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!”
Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router is [...]