Erik Novales

I just spent the last couple of hours discovering that my U-Verse gateway’s DNS server (serving the internal network) decided, for fun, to persist old IP addresses for some of my computers. The end result of this was that, while their external/NATted access was fine, local network services that were reliant on DNS would fail [...]

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I’m pretty sure this will be one of a million “stories about Apple” that will be going up tonight, prompted by the death today of one of its founders, Steve Jobs. Like many of my peers, the Apple IIe was one of the first computers I ever used, and one that I spent a huge [...]

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Our new apartment has a nice layout, but with regards to home wi-fi, there are a few key differences from our old place: There are many more neighbors here who are also using wireless networks. They’re also closer to us than in our old place. The construction of the building itself may be contributing to [...]

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I decided to try setting up Calibre on my machine to manage my e-books, and rather than use the e-mail sync functionality with my Kindle, I figured I would just sync it via USB. I attached it through another micro-USB cable that I happened to have attached to my computer, but I had weird issues [...]

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I had some issues setting up my increasingly old and decrepit phone with my new machine – I installed the Windows Mobile Device Center, but it refused to recognize my phone when connected by USB. I seemed to be having some other issues at the time, and had an aborted attempt to install the proper [...]

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Two unrelated stories: We’ve both recently been the target of hacking attempts originating from China. Of course, the attack they suffered was much more serious and alarming than mine, which appeared to be a bot trying to log into my wireless router (running Tomato) and was mindlessly trying every entry in a password dictionary. I [...]

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I decided to try running Windows 7 Ultimate on my netbook (an Asus EEE PC), since I had heard that it was nearly as fast as XP (and much more modern). I installed it by burning the ISO (acquired by virtue of being an MSDN subscriber) and then booting the netbook from an external DVD [...]

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I recently picked up an ASUS Eee PC 900HA, after having seen and used one of the earlier EEEs when I visited my sister in September. I was pretty taken with the idea of having an inexpensive, lightweight PC. I’m actually writing this entry on it — touch typing on its smaller keyboard requires a [...]

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Sandy recently got an iPhone 3G, and I’ve been fairly impressed with the web browsing experience (through Safari) on it. While the JavaScript support is somewhat flaky, the mobile browsing experience on it is close enough to the desktop experience to be acceptable. The responsiveness of the browser is also quite good, at least on [...]

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A few months ago I wrote about getting rid of old hard drives safely, by destroying the data contained on them. I was going through some more old stuff recently, and came across some relics — 3 1/2″ floppy disks. None of them really contain anything sensitive or that I’d want to keep, but at [...]

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