yorkspace.com

Until recently, I’ve had a dedicated PC running SUSE Linux serving as network attached storage and a backup server. I really wanted to get rid of the necessity of running another PC 24/7 with all the noise and power consumption. I decided to revisit a solution I had looked at a year or so ago, the Linksys NSLU2.
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I was recently shopping around for a new set of speakers for my PC because I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with my current low-end Labtec set. They’re not bad for what they are, they just don’t have very good low end response when listening to music. I was really thinking about going 5.1, even though I mostly think it’s pointless to have surround sound for your computer desk.. I guess unless you’re a big gamer, of which I am not. However, the other reason is that my laptop docking station has a digial coax spdif output, which would be awesome for 5.1 surround.
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We recently had a storm come through that knocked out our cable internet for a day. Adding to the torture of being without internet for almost the whole weekend, my router started to wig out when the connection did come back up. I was able to plug my machine directly to the modem, and get a connection, but I got nothing when connected to my Linksys WRT54G.
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So, I’m a regular VOIP user now. I’ve been using Skype for over a year now to make PC to phone calls and I’ve been very impressed. Over the last few months I’ve been using it much more heavily and I just purchased a Skype In number to receive calls from regular phones. However, it isn’t always convenient to use a headset attached to my PC to make and receive calls. I decided to try one of these cheap little USB to phone adapters.
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This is just a quick little hack that I did on my MythTV box some time ago. The motherboard that I have did not come with a cable for the S/PDIF audio output and it would have been $10 - $20 to purchase one. So, I did some searching around and found out it is actually quite easy to make one myself.
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I picked up this Logitech MX 610 mouse a few months ago at buy.com for $30 after rebate. Since I’ve been using it awhile I decided it’s time for a review.
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I was recently “working on” a new Dell Dimension C521 running Vista Home Basic. I wanted to do a system restore to the original factory condition. The documentation provided with the machine tells me that CTRL+F11 is the magic key combination at boot, but that probably only applies for Windows XP. Apparently they haven’t updated their documentation yet.
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Ok, this has been something that’s been annoying me for quite some time. Who’s bright idea was it to come up with the Function Lock key? Apparently it was Microsoft. No surprise. If it was just another useless key like SrcLk then I wouldn’t care. But the fact that it totally changes purpose of ALL of the F-Keys and others. It’s really annoying. Here I’ll talk about my experience with a couple F-Lock “enhanced” keyboards and what I did to “fix” them.
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This is awesome. It’s a Mac vs PC video making fun of how the pre-installed software bloats the PCs.

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Although I was diligent to update my Pocket PC for the new Daylight Savings Time, I failed to update my KnoppMyth MythTV box. Fortunately, I didn’t miss any recordings. Here’s my update instructions.
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