It’s Apple’s turn for a security update this time. It hasn’t been pulled through automatic update yet (I have it set for weekly checks) but I decide now is as good as time as any since there’s been no changes since my last disk clone. I click on software update to start things off. The screen below sums it up. Information about the update is available here (apple.com). There’s not much to say. The download and update went fine and there’s no obvious problem after the reboot. Read the rest »
Firefox: One Too Many Closed Tabs
When Firefox 2 came out and had a close button on every tab I thought it would be great. Convenient and easy to find. Then I started closing tabs accidentally. Sure, they can be re-opened using “History” -> “Recently Close Tabs” but that doesn’t always get back the data when I’m using a web based app. So it’s back to the old style with the close button and the end of the tab strip. This has the added bonus of giving more space for the tab titles. To do this [...] Read the rest »
Project Pages Launched
This post is completely obsolete. Up along the top you’ll see a new tab called “Projects”. This is where I’ll be tracking some longer term endeavors. We’re kicking things off with two projects. The first is “Spam” where I’ll be trying to reduce the amount of spam that gets to my inbox along with how various programs and service handle spam and how e-mail addresses can get in the hands of spammers. The second is “Backup”. It’s time to review my current backup strategy and look at backup strategies for [...] Read the rest »
XDrive – Free Disk Space From AOL
After signing up for the AOL e-mail I was looking around the AOL website. Now that they’ve been losing customers they seem to have adopted the business model of dropping their price to free but making up for it in volume. They’ve gone Google and will try to make it up in advertising revenue. Anyway, one thing that caught my eye was their XDrive offering. It’s 5GB of disk space for free. They didn’t want any additional info beyond what they collected for the e-mail account so I signed up [...] Read the rest »
Windows XP Security Update
Microsoft sent a security patch to my Windows XP SP2 machine. It’s “MSXML 4.0 SP2 Security Update (KB927978). The details provided are: ————————————————— Size: 5.4 MB A vulnerability exists in the XMLHTTP ActiveX control within Microsoft XML Core Services that could allow for remote code execution More information for this update can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927978 ————————————————— I installed the patch and a reboot was needed. Read the rest »
AOL My eAddress
[Update: In December 2008 AOL made some changes to this service which I talk about here. Also, I never fully embraced this service. I still have the address and use it occasionally but it's not a important account. If it went away tomorrow I wouldn't miss it or the emails. While I never had any problems with this service I also never really felt AOL really wanted to support it.] Registration is straightforward. On the first screen you pick you .com or .net domain. If it’s available you can proceed [...] Read the rest »
Picasa as Host For Blog Pictures
When I started working on the Thunderbird Mail posting I figured I’d have a lot of screen shots. So I decided to try using a Picasa web album to host them. I’d already installed the Picasa plug-in for iPhoto. I took the screen shots as I was doing the install and I put placeholders in the article. To try an make life easy I numbered them in order. After I imported the screen shots into an iPhoto album and touched up a couple of them it was time to work [...] Read the rest »
Thunderbird (E-Mail Client)
With my recent mail fiasco and the continued increase in the number of e-mail addresses I have, I’ve decided it’s time to organize things. Apple Mail is my primary e-mail client but it runs only on my Mac. One of the things I like about the e-mail provided by .Mac is that it supports IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol). This keeps my local mailbox synchronized with the server. By using Apple Mail as the mail client for all my mailboxes I can save important e-mails to folders which are kept [...] Read the rest »
Yahoo ISP + Yahoo Web Hosting = Mail Nightmare
I thought I had researched Yahoo Web Hosting thoroughly and hadn’t come across any potential pitfalls. But things went downhill as soon as my domain was set up. Part of the problem was probably self-inflicted as I was using the Yahoo Mail beta software. What I didn’t know, and what wasn’t documented, was that the Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting service does not yet support then mail beta. In my defense, even now that I know what problems I had I can’t find any reference or warnings in the Yahoo [...] Read the rest »
FileZilla FTP Client and FileZilla FTP Server
FileZilla is a open source (GPL License) FTP program. It supports FTP and SFTP. It’s a Windows only program (Windows 2000 and Windows XP). There’s a FileZilla client and a FileZilla server. I’ll be installing both on my Windows XP SP2 box. The client will mainly be used for accessing my website. The server will be used to back up files from my other PCs. The server won’t be facing the Internet. The client is version 2.2.29 and the server is version 0.920. Read the rest »
