I’ve reminded people before how important it is to back up your data. Personally, I use Clonezilla for whole-disk or whole-partition backups periodically, in addition to my daily data backups. It’s pretty easy to use, and it gives you a lot of options as to how to store your data. For backing up my laptop,… Continue reading Backups and USB Flash Drive partitions
Category: Tech
Fixing your drive size
Last weekend, my computer froze up out of the blue, and then refused to boot. Since I got the dreaded “Unmountable boot volume” error, I figured it was the hard drive. My C: drive was a 250GB beast from when I built my first computer in 2005, so it was clearly getting a bit old.… Continue reading Fixing your drive size
Review: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Last weekend Julia and I ended the tyranny of our T-Mobile contract (even though the merger with AT&T fell through, I was sufficiently spooked by the spectre of giving money to AT&T that we bailed). AT&T being out of the question, as well as Sprint, our choice was none else but Verizon. Verizon had two… Continue reading Review: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Google and Privacy
Google unveiled its new privacy policy a week ago, and it has raised quite the commotion on the intertubes. Some people say that Google has gone too far. Members of Congress have sent letters to Google demanding answers. Some wonder if the FTC will get involved. Me? I’m worried in general about privacy, and I… Continue reading Google and Privacy
Windows 7 UTC Time Issue
I’ve had a problem with my computer lately with the clock being consistently slow, even though it is set to sync to an internet time server every day. Whenever I would manually sync it to an internet time server, the time would be correct for an hour or so, then suddenly lose time. Before, it… Continue reading Windows 7 UTC Time Issue
Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501
It’s been a while since I did a tech update, but nothing like doing OS installs on a Friday night. My nearly 5 year old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501, is on its last legs. The only thing I use it for is BOINC, so I figured that installing Ubuntu would give it a bit… Continue reading Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501
Closed-source software I use
As I’ve said before, I like using open source software whenever I can. So what close-sourced software do I use? Here’s the list below the jump:
Open source for school
I’ve said several times on this blog that I am a strong believer in open source software. I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to find open source replacements for most of the things you need to do on a computer on a daily basis. Then past year has shown that this applies just as much… Continue reading Open source for school
Computers break in strange ways
I’ve been incommunicado for a bit due to yet another computer malfunction. This was a truly bizarre one, and the diagnosis I made, strange and unlikely as I thought it was, turned out to be correct. It’s a reminder that computers can fail in rather odd ways.
Customizing Clonezilla’s custom-ocs
In a (very popular by search engine standards) previous post, I talked about moving from Norton Ghost to Clonezilla. Part of the move from Ghost to Clonezilla was creating a method of automatically determining the computer model I was imaging, and selecting the right image. This is possible by changing the custom-ocs file, and here… Continue reading Customizing Clonezilla’s custom-ocs