Late last year, I replaced my main desktop PC, after using it for just about 7 years – a pretty good run. I decided to just buy an off-the-shelf system from Dell, rather than build my own (which I have done many times in the past), since my current computing needs are not super unusual, …
Continue reading “Swapping Drives After a PC Hardware Replacement”
Because it was kind of difficult to find information about this, I figured I would post some details about a tiny little upgrade that I did to a Dell XPS 8900. It originally came with a Dell DW-1801 wireless adapter, which only supports 802.11 b/g/n, and not ac. Also, it doesn’t support the 5 GHz …
Continue reading “Upgrading the Wireless Adapter of a Dell XPS 8900”
I was looking to back up some VHD containers that I use to store files in Windows, and needed to trim one of them down before it would fit under the OneDrive 10 GB upload limit. Since it was a dynamically expanding VHD, just removing files from the container wasn’t sufficient to reduce the actual …
I just thought I would share an amusing anecdote from my time at Netflix, related to wi-fi networking in our office. Because many devices that support Netflix have built-in wi-fi, we would test streaming with wi-fi connections to ensure that the experience was still satisfactory. Pretty standard stuff. At one point, though, we ran into …
A few months ago I decided to update my desktop PC to Windows 8. I am somewhat ambivalent about the new Metro/Modern UI, but I figured that I would update anyway just to be on the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, after I updated, I started experiencing a lot of bizarre blue-screen crashes. At the same …
I recently picked up a Nokia Lumia 920, which I like quite a bit. I just figured I should try out the WordPress app for Windows Phone 8 — I might post more often if I can punch in a quick post or two on my phone!
I was having some issues with spam on my mail server (hMailServer), so I decided to set up SpamAssassin to filter things before they hit my inbox. While hMailServer has some native support for SpamAssassin, I figured I would write up the steps I used to get things running smoothly as a Windows service. Note …
Continue reading “Quick guide for installing SpamAssassin as a service”
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 …
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 …
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 …
