The last stage of the metamorphosis of my grandfather’s old office desk (rescued from the real Ma Bell) is nearly done.
The first step was to clean up the desk and refinish it. From what I discovered, the desk was made from a combination of oak and/or silk wood. With 5 coats of hand rubbed [...]

Well, for some unknown reason, all of my network devices went into a cascading failure. Actually, I think it was some network packet monitoring software I was running for work. Anyway, it caused my wireless to fail, then my wired networking.
Fortunately, my HDD was still good. I used a large USB2 HDD to copy off [...]

Is it turned on ? - that may sound like a stupid question for a 20+ year computer geek but one of the issues was the fact my new X60 has an “off switch” for the wireless. It got bumped somewhere along the way.
Verify you backups. - I would have been up and running a [...]

I’ve used “voice over Internet protocol” or VoIP for many years. It’s not my primary phone service but it is an important one. I don’t have a traditional telephone “land line” or POTS but that’s only because I’m in the process of moving. I rely on a cellphone most of the time. Once I get [...]

This video was referenced over on Vowe dot net. I agree with most when I saw “I WANT ONE” !
Two things came to mind when I saw the video - the concept definitely has applications (and one would be as a rich interface to PersonalBrain) and the second thing is it reminded me of [...]

This may be a very rare situation … then again, it may be more common than I think …
If you ever get a pre-configured Windows XP system which “auto-logins” and you don’t know the password, not to worry. There are two things you will need …

I use a Thinkpad X60. I love the ultraportable form factor. I especially like it when I travel as the long battery and small size makes a light bag!
The down side to the X60 is the screen. I miss the screen real estate of my home desk monitor. I’ve been trying out various methods of [...]

For years, I’ve used “spoken” prompts for my cellphone as well as various computer alerts. Most of these have been created using the text-2-speech demo from AT&T.
Today, I entered “Welcome to theSalmonFarm blog.” What I got was something very different. Given I had chosen a British female voice, the results sounded very much like a [...]

As predicted, I ended up uninstalling both Deskloops and RocketDock. I’m onto a much simpler (aka more old school) solution - multiple virtual desktops. I have installed the Microsoft PowerToy, “Desktop Manager”. It is a very small extension that gives you 4 desktops. You can use a hotkey (or taskbar icon) to switch between desktops [...]

If you work from a home office - i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !
With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. [...]

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with [...]

I had to nuke my T40 today and dig out the OEM Windows XP CD. I figured it would take me a couple of hours … I never learn !
I was 34 minutes into the install and I didn’t have the key with the CD so I spend a half hour digging thru my old [...]

I came across an interesting article about an alarm clock …
About 3 months ago I bought a new clock radio. Last night, I found that I needed to use the alarm for the first time. So I looked at all the buttons, took a wild guess as to how to set the alarm, and [...]

The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) computer uses a very different interface from what most people are accustom. The interface is called “Sugar”. Some think it is childish. While it was designed for a computer targeting children, and it uses very simple colors and visuals. This is partly because it is targeting children and partly [...]

I have tried to describe the OLPC to people and feel I am not a good spokesperson … too many words (I suffer from verbosity). So, it’s YouTube to the rescue !

You can also read what David wrote for his New York Time Online article.
The only correction to David’s information is that the G1G1 program [...]

Doing sufficient backups, building virtual machines, and storing my transient video collection “on-line” requires storage, storage, and more storage. With three computers now getting sufficient backups to give me moderate peace of mind, I needed more storage than my RAID1 NAS (network addressable storage) was ready to serve. I had 2 750GB drives but [...]

A few days ago, I mentioned I was trying to forgo carrying a laptop when traveling for non-work and when  I knew there would be some form of computer at my destinations. Well, I did "OK" using Potable Apps but I decided I wanted to see if things were better or worse using MojoPac. So, [...]