The PatchPanel Closet

News of the wierd

feeds@yuku.com (Monkeypro) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:32:52 GMT

Thought I'd pass along the neatest thing I heard today. Apparently some Greyhound busses are now offering wi-fi internet on board. A friend of mine said he was actually able to "pirate" an internet connection off a bus he was following as it drove down the road. Now *that* is some serious piracy...:-)

:-) :-) :-)

microsoft word

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:09:18 GMT

So, in recent years it seems bloody impossible to use Word. Seems to me in the old days, if your computer had Word, you could just use it. But now you need to set it up somehow, enter product codes that... we simply don't have. I mean the program is pre-installed, but it asks for codes from a CD case, and we don't have a CD for that program. So we just can't use the program. Mostly I don't worry about this, because I'm perfectly happy using Wordpad. But my sister had to...

address bar

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:24:27 GMT

For many years, I could type URLs into the address bar omitting the prefix "www," but lately it seems that often when I do that, I get directed to ask.com or things like that instead of the site I'm trying to go to. It seems to work if I actually type in "www" or sometimes I even need to go to the extraordinary length of typing http://www, but I think sometimes I can still omit all that. Or not, I'm not sure. I just...

Self running video in posts

feeds@yuku.com (Monkeypro) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:42:34 GMT

I would encourage Padre to prevent posters from including videos that run automatically in their posts. If a poster wishes to include video, it should load in a frozen condition with the typical "play" button displayed. The reason is if a thread contains a number of these self-running videos (all trying to run at the same time), it can cripple both bandwidth and the CPU of the viewer.

I noticed a self-running video in a recent post by Freeborn titled "Ass Bombs: The...

Not a problem, just something odd

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:53:15 GMT

I dunno if I've mentioned this before. But with the program I use to play DVDs and make screencaptures from stuff I've recorded on DVD-RW, there'll be some black space around the edges of the image... on the left, right, and bottom, though the top doesn't seem to have a black border. Anyway, after I make caps, I go through them using Irfanview, and cut off the edges before saving the images to upload to my galleries. The weird thing is, the number of pixels of the border will...

blocking applications

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:24:53 GMT

How come is it that when my firewall pops up a message about something trying to install it, and I check the "do not show this message again" box before clicking "block," it still keeps popping up the same message over and over, until I finally shut the computer off?

System Security

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:13:19 GMT

This is the most annoying thing ever. It keeps trying to sell me bogus virus protection, popping an ad up repeatedly, and there's tons of applications that it won't allow to run, including any programs I might use to try to get rid of the infection. There seem to be a number of websites with instructions for getting rid of System Security virus, but I'm not sure if I can trust them... or if anything they suggest will even work, because this damned virus seems to be pretty good at...

Puzzling keyboard problem

feeds@yuku.com (ecgordon) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:56:47 GMT

This has happened to me several times recently, the first I recall was a month or so ago and again a couple of weeks ago. I had a viral/trojan horse invasion last week, but I'm pretty sure that was very recent and had nothing to do with the keyboard problem. I finally got that cleared up, but the problem cropped up again this evening. Each time it has happened I restarted my computer and everything was fine, but I'm stumped about what exactly the problem is.

What is...

list of running processes

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sun, 17 May 2009 06:29:13 GMT

looked at a list of running processes with cntrl-alt-delete. There are very few that I know what they are. The rest... there are surely some that are necessary even if I have no idea what they are, as well as some that are surely malware, but I just don't know which are which. Though I'm suspicious of any files that appear more than once on the list, especially "servises.exe," which has the added trait of being misspelled. Unless maybe it's British, or something.
...

hijacked links

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sat, 16 May 2009 18:52:28 GMT

It seems that lately, when I click on a link to a site I've found in a Google search (and I imagine this would happen with other search engines and maybe even if I enter the URL directly in the address bar), instead of going to the link, I get redirected to some advertisement, or possibly something more malicious.... I do have time to see the URL in the status bar and hit stop before actually going there, go back, click the link again, and this time to to the appropriate site...

screensavers

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:21:52 GMT

Lately screensavers... have been slow on my computer. Images don't move the way they should, if they move at all. And it can take some time to get an active screensaver to go away. It seems like a RAM issue, but I have trouble believing that's possible.

gah

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Fri, 15 May 2009 07:57:23 GMT

So, on neopets, there's this picture to click on, an imagemap, so depending on where you click, you can get different random results. Trying to collect berries to feed your pet. I do this every day. Basket can collect 6 items, and there's like 9 maps. Um, but none of this matters. Here's the thing. You know how if you hover over the upper left corner of an image, a box pops up with a few options, like printing or saving? Well, I wanted to try clicking on a certain spot in the...

the wrong gd*ed buttons

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:23:43 GMT

Why is it programs I use have to put buttons I use constantly right next to buttons I never use, that do annoying things? Like on Irfanview, right next to the "save" button is a "slideshow" button. It opens a window for a feature I don't want to use, which is easy enough to click out of, but after I do, whenever I hit the "save" button or the "open folder" button, the window for those things has been expanded way beyond what I want. It's easy...

Hey I just bought a new mouse.

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:30:07 GMT

No problems to report thus far, just thought I'd mention it. It's a mini mouse. I'd have preferred a bigger one I suppose, but... I didn't see any. Or if I did, they were of a different brand and I thought it'd be safest to go with the same manufacturer as the computer itself, not that I really think it would've been a problem to get something else, but whatever. The bigger ones and even some smaller ones I'm sure had more features than I want. Two buttons and a...

internet explorer disappeared

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:19:55 GMT

I was trying to clean up some things on my computer, and suddenly Internet Explorer is gone, and I can't seem to find a way to bring it back... I'm gonna keep trying because I can't just use firefox... but this is really weird. I never told the cleanup program to get rid of IE...

This is why I hate cleaning anything. I'm always super cautious to avoid getting rid of anything I might need, since I'm positive there's about a million things I need that I...

mouse annoyances

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:29:37 GMT

You know... lately it seems that sometimes my cursor will spontaneously appear somewhere on the screen other than where I left it, without dragging the mouse or moving the wheel or anything. So that's annoying. And then there are always the old problems of the page moving up and down erratically, as if I were turning the wheel when I'm not. And the cursor stometimes just sitting in place or moving sluggishly, just for a few seconds before it goes back to normal. Or things happening...

Internet Explorer 8

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:40:56 GMT

When IE7 came out, we switched to that. And it sucked, so we switched back to IE6. But the other day I discovered that abcfamily.com wouldn't let me look at their site anymore with IE6, which is totally lame. I can understand having video content that only works on the latest player, or whatever, but not letting you view the site at all without upgrading your browser? But anyway, I installed IE8 Beta, which so far is kind of annoying. I think at first my biggest problem was that I...

mp3

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:59:33 GMT

I have this mp3 player. A sansa. If I want to delete mp3s from the player, I have to sync it with my computer, and go to a list of tracks that are on the player, and delete it from the list, in WMP. But there's one song on my player that doesn't ever appear on the list of tracks, so I can't delete it. WTF?

irfanview

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:45:12 GMT

Okay, I generally like to have my files listed in "list" mode, which is normally what happens automatically when I open a folder in irfanview. However, all of a sudden they're listed in "details" mode. I can switch it to "list," but every time I open the folder again, it'll be back to "details." I've looked in the program's settings to see if there's any way to change the default, but I can't find anything. This is really weird...

screencaps

feeds@yuku.com (tek ni) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:30:42 GMT

This never ceases to confuse and piss me off. Okay, most of the time if I'm making screencaps from a DVD, I use WinDVD, which is fine. But sometimes I try another program like Real Player, just because WinDVD sometimes may for some unknown reason be a bit grainier or something. But anyway... sometimes when I use Real Player (or WMP), well it doesn't have a screencapture function, so I just have to hit the print screen button on my keyboard. And sometimes it works fine, and I can just...