Lee.org

If you have TestTrack Pro 4 from Seapine Software, you might find the following useful. Change the email notifications as such and the emails will be in a much more readable format.
Continue reading ‘TestTrack Pro 4’ »

VNC SingleClick is a program that lets a person run a small (166k) program in order to let another user see their computer screen and/or control their computer. It’s way useful.

Here are notes I took on how to set it up (these instructions were ripped from a doc I wrote for another purpose. Sorry if it’s slightly unintelligible)

Continue reading ‘VNC SingleClick’ »

"SebastianBassi" from Rentacoder.com and Bioinformatica.info just finished pulling some 400 old posts from my pre-Wordpress journal into WordPress. I’ve now got 803 posts in WP. :-) It involved him doing a lot of manual file renaming, slight modification of HTML by hand and moving files around. It would have been a big bother for me. He did it for less than $200. I still had to do like 2 hours of review work and pointing out things he missed. But I'd recommend him. 

So is there actually a good news reader out there? I tried switching from Firefox Sage to something snazzier and I’ve been scorned twice now.

RSS Bandit is very pretty and has really nice management but you can’t tell how many comments are in a post using the UI. (this seems related to shoddy support/implementation of <slash :comments>).

RSSReader… I forget why I dumped RSSReader.

I’m swiching back to Sage. It’s silly though. I pull up a feed and then middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click all the entries to open them up. That seems ineffient or something but it works.

Here is how to set your RSS news reader to read Protected (Friends-Only) posts.
I mention this because I had some trouble getting this to work with the available instructions out there.

This is tested on RSS Bandit.

Create a new feed entry with a URL like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace “YourFriend’sUsername” with… I’ll let you guess)
Go to the Authentication tab and type in your Livejournal username and password.
Done :-) You can now use that feed entry to read your friend’s posts.

I read in several places that you should do this:
http://Username:Password@www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace Username, Password and YourFriend’sUsername)
I haven’t found this to work.

I submitted a T-Shirt idea to J!nx today. I’m just logging it here so archive.org picks it up if the idea ever sees the light of day. The abbreviation for the idea is: ISTOTI.

When you are at a public access terminal, it’s very possible that a keylogger is sniffing your keyboard. But sometimes it’s just so convenient that you have to use one of these machines anyway. To try and beat it, do the following:

1 Open notepad
2 Type part of your password in the password window
3 Using the mouse, go to the notepad window
4 Type some nonsense characters
5 Using the mouse, return to the password window

Repeat steps 2-5 a few times.

Make sure that the password window doesn’t show your password on the screen because bad people might have put a program on your computer that takes screenshots every few seconds.

(tip from Security Now Podcast, Episode 17)

If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.

I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!

You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!

Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)

I was up and running in < 5 minutes.

1-27-21 update:
I hadn’t been using Synergy for a while but with COVID, I needed a better computer setup. I’ve got 2 Windows computers with a total of 3 monitors. It’s wonderful! I paid $30 for it and it’s, no brainer, completely worth it!
I have 2 monitors on the bottom and 1 on top. So I used the custom configuration option to align the cursor movements better. Here’s how:
– Start Synergy
– export the current configuration with File | Save Configuration as…
– modify the configuration file with tips from Synergy (1)
Mine looks like this:

section: links
PSC-ALT-49:
up(50,100) = Tobuscus(0,100)
Tobuscus:
down(0,100) = PSC-ALT-49(50,100)
end

– Point Synergy at the config file with the “Use existing configuration” option.
– Profit!

I fixed that terribly annoying bug that IE users were seeing when trying to leave comments on my site. It was that the comment text-box would extend all the way to the right, underneath the right column such that you couldn’t see what you typed… terribly annoying.

Fixed.

So now everybody comment like moon-struck werewolves.

I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….

There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.

Cool beans.