Why Is this Flash Drive So SLOW?
USB has been around since the previous century. It was a quantum leap forward from the old serial and parallel ports we pioneers struggled with in the 80’s and 90’s. USB has evolved in that time. It’s gone from slow but reliable to screaming fast. So why is it taking an hour to copy this […]
Self-Cleaning Robocopy Backup Batch File
Earlier, I posted a simple batch file for sysadmins to keep a number of backups. Here’s another one that’s more sophisticated. It creates a folder with today’s date and time as a name, copies over the tree of the folder you wish to back up. Then it keeps 50 copies, and deletes the oldest. It […]
The Lifechanger
The lifechanger, quite obviously, was my first computer: a hand-built based on a 486SLC2/66 motherboard I obtained from a computer shop in Siloam Springs, Arkansas in December 1993. But a case could be made for my father-in-law’s Packard-Bell 386 he obtained a couple of months earlier. I spent ten or twenty hours playing around on […]
Printing Fix for Ubuntu 20.04
Something really crappy happened to Ubuntu between 18.04 and 20.04. When I upgraded, I discovered that my printing was broken. Network printers were found, and they even worked for a while, but they soon broke, the computer unable to communicate with them. Here’s how I fixed it: Go to the CUPS admin interface in a […]
Robocopy Backup Routine for you Windows Sysadmins
This creates a total of 20 copies of c:\shared to d:\backup. I run it daily. d: cd backup rmdir /s /q dailynew20 rename dailynew19 dailynew20 rename dailynew18 dailynew19 rename dailynew17 dailynew18 rename dailynew16 dailynew17 rename dailynew15 dailynew16 rename dailynew14 dailynew15 rename dailynew13 dailynew14 rename dailynew12 dailynew13 rename dailynew11 dailynew12 rename dailynew10 dailynew11 rename dailynew9 dailynew10 […]
Ransomware Is Your Biggest Nightmare
Ransomware, a hack that scrambles your files, rendering them useless until you cough up money to the extortionist, has gotten huge. The Garmin corporation, makers of GPS’s, actually shut down for several days while recovering from a ransomware attack. If these scumbags can bring a big company down, they can do the same to you. […]
Thanks for the Reminder, Microsoft. You’re Still Evil.
Microsoft sent many of us to Apples and Linux computers in the early oughts. Bill Gates was no prize, as far as ruthless billionaire CEO’s go, but his fat pal Steve Ballmer pushed evil to new heights, presiding over the Vista fuster-cluck, and calling Linux a cancer. But since the new guy has taken over, […]
Stay Safely Backed Up Offline
There are some real baddies out there, folks who can and will turn your hard drives into jumbled nothing until you pay them hundreds of dollars. Protect yourself with offline backup. There are many free alternatives out there, including iDrive, Opendrive, and Google Drive. Synching allows you to back up to a friend’s computer, another […]
Don’t tie your VOIP phones to an internet service!
BUSINESSES: The major Cox internet outages over the NWA area highlight how you have to be smart with your network. If you run Cox VOIP phones, you are at their mercy. If your Cox internet goes down, so do your phones! If you go with an alternative VOIP system, you can have dual internet failover, […]
Bad Updates
Microsoft has succeeded in getting us used to bad updates. We’ve grown quite accustomed to stuff like broken programs, forgotten settings, and even forced upgrades. Millions of Windows 7 users woke up to find they had Windows 10 the next day. Microsoft has gotten away with being such a jerk by being the only game […]