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Photo of a Conway Scenic Railway locomotive

Quick Look: Picasa 3

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Having come back from my vacation with a bunch of pictures I decided to give Picasa another look. My camera is a Canon Rebel T2i and I kept it set for RAW+JPG when taking pictures. Picasa has the ability to read RAW files and with the latest update it properly reads the files from my T2i. The online web albums also provide the potential to be a nice offline backup solution. Another bonus is the software is cross-platform, with Windows & Mac versions. By way of background the RAW+JPG setting on the Canon Rebel T2i creates files with the same name, just different extensions. I copy the SD cards, both file types, to a directory on my Windows Home Server so they’re accessible from all my computers. Picasa met some of it’s promise but is still an incomplete solution for me. Read the rest »

Picture of a Cog Railway Engine

Traveling Gadgets

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My recent vacation trip was by car so it was fairly easy to bring along the gadgets I wanted. Now, it wasn’t my goal to spend the trip just playing with the same tech I had at home. I was heading to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and planned to enjoy myself. So this is what I brought along and how it contributed to that goal. The list is more or less in the order of importance. Read the rest »

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Security: DLL Search order Vulnerability

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This is a little old, reported about a month ago, but I’m just getting around to patching it and Microsoft isn't. The “Insecure Library Loading Could Allow Remote Code Execution” vulnerability was announced by Microsoft back in late August in bulletin 2269637. Unfortunately Microsoft has not rolled out a patch with their normal patch rollouts. Probably because of the potential to break apps. They did publishknowledge base article 2264107 which has a workaround to the problem. Read the rest »

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WordPress Caching Plugins

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WP Super Cache has long been my “go to” plugin for improving performance of WordPress. But that just changed. There was an update to WP Super Cache recently and I installed it. I had some time and did some testing beyond making sure the site didn’t break and what I found was that the plugin really wasn’t working. Unfortunately I haven’t been completely testing each and every change to the site. If nothing breaks I consider it good although I hadn’t gone so far as to verify pages were being cached. Somewhere in the past it appears the WP Super Cache plugin stopped caching many pages. I can’t say if it was an earlier upgrade to the plugin or if it was something I added/changed that Super Cache couldn’t handle. It wasn’t the latest update as another of my sites that was still on the older plugin had the same problem. This led me to chose two other caching plugins that provide a nice one-two caching punch. Read the rest »

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TrueCrypt: Full Disk Encryption

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After seeing how easy TrueCrypt worked when I used it to encrypt files (or more accurately, create a encrypted container to hold files) I decided to give full disk encryption a try on my new Dell Inspiron laptop. I was planning to take the laptop on my vacation trip and wanted to encrypt the data. The laptop was new and not a critical part of my workflow so if full disk encryption cratered the laptop, requiring a rebuild, it could wait until after my trip without causing any serious problems. Read the rest »

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TrueCrypt 7.0–Install & Encrypt USB Flash Drive

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With the arrival if my new Dell Inspiron laptop just before some planned vacation travel I decided to try out disk encryption. My plan was to encrypt a USB drive and add an encrypted container for files on my laptop. Using Windows Bitlocker would have required upgrading to a more expensive version of Windows 7 so I went with the free Open Source TrueCrypt. In addition to being Open Source, it’s also cross-platform and runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Read the rest »

Picture of a Dell Inspiron 15R

New Laptop Joins the Quest: The Choice

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I'd been without a capable laptop since my Macbook drank a cup of coffee over a year ago. It was time to get something more capable than my iPad or a netbook so I began searching for a laptop. While I didn't need something for my most demanding needs, I did want something that wouldn't tie me to a desk for 80% of my computer work. This article lays out my requirements and the choice I made, a Dell Inspiron 15R. Read the rest »