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 [...]

It so happens that my employer has made a most welcome decision to replace the aging creaky old Novell GroupWise mail software with Microsoft Outlook, joining the rest of the modern corporate world. Now, there is little love in my heart for GroupWise, but it does have one feature that the new Outlook configuration will [...]

Jim Robinson over at Money Talks News has put together a nice article giving five basic steps for getting a jump start on your paperless life.
Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise.
“Backup, backup, backup” made number four on [...]

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 [...]

I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it.
Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent enough [...]

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.