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 […]
Category Archives: Computing
Compacting a VHD
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 […]
Tinfoil hat time
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 […]
DIY PC Troubles: The Darndest Things
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 […]
Windows Phone 8
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!
Quick guide for installing SpamAssassin as a service
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 […]
The U-Verse Gateway…To Hell
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 […]
My Reflections on Apple
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 […]
Home Wireless Networking…
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 […]
The Kindle is really picky about USB cables…
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 […]