TP-LINK routers are best sellers on Amazon, and I like my new one a LOT. I had a 5-year old Vizio router that did yeoman’s service, but had started to drop connections and in general behave like an amnesiac hash addict. I liked the reviews, which said that TP-LINK routers were dead easy to set up. It was not. I…
The Google Maps interface has changed, and it’s hard to tell how to share a location from a dropped pin or a business you want to find.Perhaps you’d like to make an easy short link to your house that you can share with people again and again. It just took me five minutes of Googling to figure it out, and…
Have you tried to delete CrashPlan from your Applications folder and gotten the message that the “CrashPlan app is locked” in a popup? Here’s the solution: Shut down the CrashPlan app in the system tray. You may need to elevate permissions or use ‘sudo’ to perform some of these commands. Open a Terminal window. You can find Terminal under Utilities…
Ever wondered how Frankenstein’s Creature learned to speak? He listened to an impoverished professor reading aloud and explaining one of the greatest books of the Enlightenment. Those of you who recently saw the brilliant Frankenstein/Creature role swap done by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller by the National Theater will remember that De Lacey used Paradise Lost to teach the…
I have a lot of sites that by themselves, aren’t terrible for me. I won’t spend hours on Facebook or Buzzfeed or Twitter or Gawker or Huffington Post…but I have found myself spending hours on Facebook AND Buzzfeed AND Twitter AND Gawker AND Huffpo. I looked at some helpful productivity extensions, and I like this combination: 1. New Tab Redirect…
I rebuilt a box this morning, and when I installed openssh-server, I found a different option set as default in the config file–one that I believe is less secure. Where previously, the default Authentications section looked like this: # Authentication: LoginGraceTime 120 PermitRootLogin yes StrictModes yes The default now looks like this: # Authentication: LoginGraceTime 120 PermitRootLogin without-password StrictModes yes…
I’m glad I keep good backups. When backing up your Kubuntu box, do not just drag and drop one home folder from a hard disk to another hard disk. Your ssh keys will not be copied over, even though you may have opened the Dolphin file manager over with the command sudo dolphin To ensure you have admin privileges over…
We’re all aware that there are issues with Flash and playing streaming videos on Linux. You can’t play AIV on Chrome; you’ll get that annoying “If you’re using the Chrome browser with Linux, you must disable PPAPI to continue using Amazon Instant Video. You can also use a different Web browser, like Firefox. Learn more” message. Just use FF for…
This process needs to be much easier, but until then, here’s a script to get you set up. This is an update of an older post here: http://thetarah.com/2010/10/12/how-to-batch-scan-using-xsane/ to make this more intuitive. Instead of having you follow a long list of instructions, I’ve been testing out scripts to get my common tasks done upon my numerous Kubuntu rebuilds. I…
Have you had this problem in KDE? I’ve clicked a few times on a Google Chrome shortcut, and after 20-30 seconds of a bouncing Chrome icon, it disappears. The Chrome process never shows up in the System Monitor or in running processes, either. / Greetings, Madam. $google-chrome –enable-logging –log-level=0 Fontconfig warning: “/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf”, line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.…