riari

Okay. Either it's my hands sucking more (aka losing flexability thanks to whatever I have and as such I need to work on it) or my keyboard needs cleaning or I need to slow down to make the keys depress enough to get the letter I want, but something needs to be done.

I think it's time to dunk the keyboard. Anybody got a bathtub I can use? ^_^ I kid I kid. Though I have heard that does work. You just have to let the keyboard dry COMPLETELY. Otherwise, bye bye keyboard.

Good thing there's a new can of air in the house. Maybe I can finally fix some of the stickier keys. :>

Current Mood: being driven nuts

Power supply fans so LOUD. Give it up, fans! Just don't die on me. I don't have the money to replace a power supply at the moment.

Ugh. No can of air around the house too. I used it up trying to clean out the case and see if that helps. Hopefully more will arrive today.

Also, very static-y today. Hopefuly I will not zap my computer innards while cleaning them out.

Current Mood: cold

So I'm reading an article about the MD5 security algorithm being cracked, which by the way has been known for YEARS, and this sentence pops up at me:

"Until now, however, the vulnerability was dismissed as a theoretical possibility due to the amount of PlayStation 3 game consoles at a cost of $657."

What the hell? Maybe I'm not all awake yet, but what the hell do PS3s have to do with a security algorithm? Luckily, I'm not the only one. The commentors are also confused.

I am amused though that I knew that MD5 had been broken already. Thank you, security course in college. I wonder why AES isn't being used though. It's not been broken. Or maybe it is. I certainly don't know.

Current Mood: nerdy

Oh goody.

Okay, sinuses, whatever spicy food I ate last night is not a go ahead signal to bring back my annoying cough. Seriously. I'm back using cough medicine again. Oh yay. Trying to control this before it redevelops my cold again. Then again, the sinuses draining really didn't ever stop. It just lessened enough so my cough went mostly away. *sigh*

And a new development in my computer equipment. My Palm won't charge. Before you laugh, a Palm is a computer so there. :P And one I use often. I plug the cord in and no charging is happening. It's been finicky on particular cord angles needed to charge ever since it fell with the cord plugged in, but if I can't charge it, I have to get it fixed. The battery only lasts so long. And it's half down already. I wonder if I can pop it open somewhere and take a look.

The Zire 72s I believe are still around and maybe cheaper than when I bought mine. I bought this particular one when the model was just introduced. But I really do not want to buy a new Palm. I rather get this one fixed. ETA: Hehe, well, yeah once again I'm behind technology. Zire now only has the Zire 22 model. Looks like the Zire 72 model has been phased out. Oh goody. Though I did see some at Frys last year. So that's pretty recent I think.

Add that to the computer freezes I'm getting randomly, with the power supply fans being louder than they should be sometimes and who knows if any of the other fans are trying to die... Yeah, the computer gods really do not like me much.

ETA2: Bingo! It's the charger. Which can be replaced easily. Thank goodness. I forgot that my mom got a Zire 72 after I did, but she's not using it. So if mine ever died I can probably get hers. :> But I tested the charger on it, and it didn't charge at first. But twisting the plug around a bit got it to charge again. And it works like that on my Palm. So, yeah, the charger.

Current Mood: sore

First off, there's been a bit of hacking going around on Livejournal. There's at least one bigger LJ I read daily that's been hit. While you can't really stop a determined hacker outside of taking the machine off the network, you can slow them down. They seem to be hitting e-mail addresses like Hotmail that are attached to the LJ that the user no longer has control of. And while they seem to be hitting larger journals, it never hurts to check what your account is listing. (E-mail management is here.)

Here's some posts about it, including several from

copperbadge which was one of several who's been hacked. An account of the hack from

copperbadge's side.

Three Things to remember before freaking out Which is a good summary of what to worry about.

1. Most importantly: If there are any email addresses associated with your LJ account that you no longer have control over, remove them remove them remove them remove them now. If they are the originating email address on the account, uh, reopen the account or contact LJ support to get it removed, I suppose. It can be done -- they removed my hotmail address permanently.

Another community hacked and what to do if you've clicked on the link.

Besides being hacked, the hackers delete all the journal entrys and post a "hey go look at these awesome lyrics" post, which has a keylogger on it when you visit it. Fun, huh?

Some things to backup your LiveJournal with, which by the way, is also good for the uber rare occurance that the LiveJournal database servers go down in flames with their redundant backups: ( Backup links )

Interesting thing I found from the commentors was this Firefox addon - Keyscrambler. It's interesting. And it does have an IE component.

Test your typing speed! I'm roughly 68WPM. How about that. :> If I don't get too flustered because of the ticking clock that is. (And subtract all the errors I make...)

Now, for fun: The Brave Superhero List in response to the Evil Overlord list.

So for the TL;DR version: check this when you're logged in, if you don't have control of any address listed there, remove it.

Current Mood: geeky

The computer gods are giving me unsubtle hints about upgrading my computer again.

*curses at ethernet adapter not behaving this morning*

Thanks,

lantyssa, for helping me with my computer problems again.

Current Mood: annoyed

Fun. It only took two hours of use after being turned off for nine hours before I got the checker board pattern again on my monitor. Fantastic. And I was only browsing the internets. Actually, not long after load I was getting random screen blackouts, and little squiggly squares around the start menus. I think the video card is dying and dying fast.

So, either I get a temporary solution of a case fan, and even then that might not work. Find/buy an old AGP video card I can use. Or talk to my dad and see if he can't help me build a new machine for about $500. And maybe I can use my current harddrives with the new machine.

Great.

Current Mood: very annoyed

Well shoot. Okay, what computer deity did I piss off this year?

Maybe it is past its prime, but my computer is certainly still working. Today was the day that I spent pretty much playing City of Heroes because of Double XP weekend. Last one this year I believe. (I'll have to check out the CoH calendar to make certain.)

I definitely did not get my highest level Blaster Sirian out to 47 like I had hoped. But I did get him to 45.4. ( Description of Double XP in City of Heroes on Sunday. )

( Curse you video card! )

So, yay, video card's overheating again. Goody. I've lost the last two video cards to fans that tried to die on me. This one's fan is moving but I don't know how much airflow I should be feeling from it. Its going to sit off overnight and I'll see how it behaves tomorrow.

I wonder if those loud plastic snaps I've been hearing was from the video card. The snap sounds like when you depress the side of a water bottle and when it pops back out again by itself... that's the sound I've been hearing. I've heard it three times now, once tonight.

Also, if you're wondering, I'm posting this from my mom's machine.

So overall, this weekend wasn't a total bust gaming-wise. I did level Shelke up to level 24 on Friday, so that's going well. And at least I got Sirian closer to level 50. One of these days I'll get there. :>

Current Mood: curious

A 25.7MB patch turned into a 104MB file fix. Thanks, City of Heroes Updater!

(And probably Vista since part of it downloaded was while the Vista machine was doing the Internet Connection Sharing for the network.)

Well, that'll take a few nights to knock down. Hopefully I don't have to redownload the patch.

Current Mood: annoyed

Oh wow.

Okies, I was playing some game trailers on my computer since I can play them now without the dreaded green screen (and I was wasting time while trying to figure out another computer problem). Media Player crashed or something and after I brought it back up, the Corporate skin had this extra black space on the bottom of it no matter what I tried with resizing and digging through the menus. The only movies it didn't seem to show up on was the massive 1280x720 trailers. (I run at 1024x768 unless I'm playing City of Heroes. :P )

So I look and search over Microsoft's website to try to fix this. No luck. I went ahead and downloaded Media Player 11, in hopes that it would fix it and well I wanted the newer player. No luck. All right, well I consider possibly uninstalling and reinstalling. But, before I do that, I google trying to fix the Corporate skin.

And low and behold, its not screwed up. A page listing some bugs in Media Player 11 listed the same problem I was having. Then they realized what it was and posted the fix. Somehow, the captions got turned on. Turning them off fixed the extra black space. I didn't even think it was the captions doing that. Should have tried it. *shakes head* Ah well.

(I can claim that my attention was drawn away because of the other problem, right? ^_^ )

I also now have Firefox 3.0 running on my machine. Pretty neat so far!

Current Mood: relieved

Have I mentioned the annoying thing that happens half or more the times I try to watch videos on my machine?

( THIS!! )

It doesn't seem to matter whether it is a avi, mov, or mkv. It goes green. Restarting the movie is the only way to clear it, providing it doesn't happen again while watching the restarted movie. And it does a lot, of course. I get more green videos than not.

I've asked about this before, and we think its hardware. I've uninstalled and reinstalled codecs, video drivers, and so on. I haven't tried a full OS reinstall, but that's the absolute last resort besides buying a new video card. Because it will take days to redownload all the patches. I'm thinking about trying reseating the video card and seeing if that helps. Though this was happening before this current video card I believe.

This bothers me most right now since I'm trying out Code Geass and I can't get the second episode to play without going green before the first subtitle shows up. I think the first episode playing fine was a fluke. A horrible, teasing fluke. Oh sure, play Fafner -Right of Left- fine. I've already seen that one. :P

Bah. Bah, I say!

I wonder if I should ask the CoH tech forums about that. Though it doesn't seem to be affecting CoH, that I know of. Hmmm...

ETA: Ahahahahaha. Less than ten minutes after making this post, I tried again and what do you know. The episode played fine. Aw man, Code Geass looks like its going to be awesome fun. I'm so looking forward to August for the first release. Bandai's got some convoluted release plan for it but once some details are finalized, I'm going to pre-order (once a job is aquired of course). :>

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Mrs. Butterworth's Geico commercial!!

Nothing like looking at your computer desk while half-asleep and seeing your LCD monitor on the floor to wake you up fast.

Fuck.

Luckily, very luckily, there is no damage that I can tell. It was against the wheels of the chair but there wasn't any physical damage. I plugged the power cable back in (the only cable to rip ot actually) and powered it back up. It came back up fine.

I had heard a crash sometime this morning but with having cats in the house, I'm used to random crashes. I was just too tired to investigate.

*sigh*

Meanwhile, I'm craving cake.

Current Mood: relieved

Tonight, I decided to finally get my work machine on the network. Now begins the trial of getting the machine to talk to my Window 2000 machine. It sees the other XP machine on the network, but its also saying its not a part of the network. So, yeah. It was configured for a wireless network before so I think I fixed that part. Right now its downloading the month of virus definitions the machine missed. After that's finished, I'll try to get the work machine to talk to all of the machines.

It would be easier if I could switch the monitor cable easily. Or had a second monitor for it. *shrug* Ah well.

Current Mood: working

*headdesk*

WHY? Why is it everytime the two computers on my network are not talking to each other, it's because of the damn McAfee firewall on mom's machine?!?!

I've forgotten how annoying it was to make an XP machine and a 2000 machine talk to each other. Sometime this last three days or so, they decided to ignore each other and I didn't realize it until today. Why? Because if I don't run the phone line to my machine I get the internets from her's. Yesterday I couldn't make it work, so I just ran the line to me. Today apparently was the day to figure out why.

Windows 2000 seems to be an easy networker. Just name the computers' workgroup on the peer-to-peer network all the same, make sure connections are there, and that TCP/IP are on every computer, and Boom! Instant Network! XP? Nope, you got to run the networking wizard and then it tells you to make sure you run that network setup on the other machines. What it doesn't tell you? That network setup doesn't work on Windows 2000 machines.

Well, at least I gleaned something from that networking class.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: home

Ugh. I think my primary harddrive is having difficulties.

A while ago, I pushed power on the computer and saw it report that it didn't see the primary drive. I turned it off then rebooted and it showed up properly. I decided to leave it alone for then, maybe it was just a fluke. I've also had it report that it couldn't find the Windows bootsector and after a restart it ran fine.

I did do a backup of one of the partitions after that first primary misread on one of the shiny new drives I had just gotten. Just in case. Nothing else happened for months so I didn't worry.

Now today it didn't see the primary drive on load. I didn't see that part because it runs by fast. It then spent time on the Novell Netware screen cycling through some numbers. When it cycled through the first time, I restarted. After a couple of tries to coax it on, I cleaned out the case a bit and made sure both fans were running properly. (The video card fan had been making noises again lately.) I cold started and went into the BIOS. I had let the BIOS just auto find the drives, but its now set to each specific drive for the primary, slave and second primary and slave spots. It found it with no problems and booted up Windows.

*Sigh* Don't have the money for a new drive. Nor the bandwidth to redownload all the patches after Windows 2000 SP4. (I'm pretty sure I have a SP4 disc around here somewhere. Need to make a current version. Or upgrade to XP.) It's running again though right now and I'll run backups again tonight.

Ah well. We'll see.

That does remind me that I need to figure out which of the three harddrives I have in this machine is the primary one. That way I'm not taking out two different harddrives to find the one I need.

Current Mood: geeky

Saw this interesting article today on my Yahoo mail main page:

U.S. colleges retool programming classes

It's interesting yet depressing that computer science majors are becoming few and far between. It's probably people being drawn into other majors like Biotech and even information systems (that's what I'm trying to earn a bachelors in right now). I can kind of understand. I was considering computer science but I didn't want to program all the time. The technology college I was visiting suggested computer engineering and when I wasn't interested in that (read that as not doing so well in my courses but still interested in working with computers), information systems. Yay databases!

But the robot they're talking about in the article is very neat. I wouldn't mind taking a course like that if I wasn't so close to graduating.

Current Mood: calm

So, Daylight Savings Time starts in just a few hours and here's some helpful information to update some computer devices since this is different than the usual DST.

For people with Palm devices:
http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst.html?sssdmh=dm13.130177

And for all Windows users other than Vista:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues

I had to manually change my Windows setup since I'm running an older OS that's no longer supported by mainstream support. ^_^;

Current Mood: tech-y

Soooo, has anybody updated their Java lately? Because, I updated it before the end of the year last year and I've been running into Java Runtime error after error since. Livejournal especially have Runtime errors. I get one every time I post, to which I just hit cancel because it's asking to debug and it still does what its supposed to.

Now I'm having major troubles with SkillPort due to its heavy Java usage. And I have to use this site for my class homework. It's highly annoying having a lesson on site interrupted every seven to eight pages due to 'Java.net.SocketException: Connection reset' errors. It's slow enough as it is due to me being on dial-up. That error just adds on the minutes.

Am I the only one having this sort of troubles?

Java plug-in build I'm using is 1.5.0 (build 1.5.0_11-b03).

Current Mood: annoyed

For a bit of techy computer fun:

http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/5317151.html

The usual Mac vs PC (lightly done) but the Glinda comment set was the best.

Current Mood: geeky

Uughhhh... Now I remember why I haven't purchased a new motherboard yet and resulting new install of Windows that would have to go with it. It took me near four hours trying to remember and work with XP to get my new work computer even close to how I had my other one this morning. And now I need to remember my XP class, because now I'm working with that system at work. And its stupid fade in start menu which I can't find the option to turn it off, even though I have everything as close as I can get it to be Windows 2000.

Before you go "huh?", well, 2000 is very, very familiar and I really don't like the double sized start menu that XP has. And I'm picky about how I run my system. It runs as clean as I can get it. (Don't believe me? Here's an example: I have five to six icons total on my desktop and the only others I allow are text files of the incoming weekly shipments.) With the new system being a cheap Dell, it has a bunch of crap I don't use or like having on the system. Even though most of it was off by the time I got it, I was still killing things off.

So, it was mentally exhausting and of course I stayed two hours past my leaving time to deal with it. Mainly because I need a working system on Monday to deal with another Otakon order and the monthly Diamond order. Crap. Which reminds me, I forgot to bring the July Previews on Friday. And because I'm weird like that.

Still need to figure out if I want to continue with the Omoikane name or pick a new one for it. All my work machines have been called that so far.

So ends the ramble on my new work computer.

And there was cake today. And we had to leave a poor delicious cake in the fridge when a delicious ice cream cake was brought to us.

Current Mood: restless

Profile

riari

March 2012

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 24th, 2025 03:00 pm

Entries tagged with computers

Keyboard issues?

LOUD. SO LOUD.

Wait what...?

Computer mishaps

Few things, some of fair importance

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade?

More video card fun

Downfall of a video card? And Double XP Weekend Report

Oh THANKS

The simplest answer is usually buried in a submenu.

My Nemesis! Greeeeeeeen!

Close call with computer equipment

More computer technobabble

Oh network!

Fun times with computers

Science!

DST Annoyance

Java Fun

Geek fun

Installation tired