![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In more techie news...
1. I've been pondering Twitter. At first, the whole idea of "microblogging" seemed pretty silly to me. And, given my incurable penchant for unexpected verbosity*, not particularly well-suited to me. It has been nice seeing LoudTwitter posts from some of you, particularly the ones who don't often have/take the time for more substantial posts. A little pointless at times, though, given that it often means reading half (or less) of a conversation... But it's exactly that which led me to realize that, when you get down to it, Twitter is really more of a multicast IM platform than a blogging tool.
I almost never start IM convos and a lot of my IM friends seem to have drifted off to other formats. So maybe, on that basis, it's worth signing up, after all? I'm not sure.
*That is, "longwindedness."
2. Finally switched my router's firmware away from the official version. Was put off for quite some time by the scary thought of using third party firmware. If something goes wrong, you're pretty much up a creek. But the fact is that things were going wrong. Linksys WRT54G firmware is flawed. For one thing, it keeps track of IP addresses for too long. If you connect to a lot of different computers (say, by using P2P or torrent software), the buffer overflows and the router crashes. For another... this one seems to have gone beyond the point where power cycling can help. Even relatively small problems required a hard reset.*
Luckily, Linksys is one of the few companies with open source router firmware, so there are several third party options. Many of them free. And, unlike the Linksys firmware, still being updated, even for older versions of the router. So, after a bit of research, I finally took the plunge and switched over to Tomato.
It was so easy. Took seconds. I didn't even have to power cycle the router. And now it's got stability and spiffy new options and better control and I can download torrents without crashing it.
*Press and hold the reset button for 30 seconds. Unplug. Press and hold the reset button for 30 seconds. Plug in. Wait for boot-up. Log in. Reenter any changes from factory default settings. Wait for next crash. Repeat.
3. Braniac IV recently had an unexplained spate of bluescreens. No sign of spyware or adware or viruses or rootkits or anything else I could think of to scan for. And after the full treatment from Registry Mechanic (which has been very helpful for a few comps I've known in the past)... it bluescreened again. No set pattern to them, either. No rhyme or reason. Except, maybe, that a few of them seemed to happen while McAfee AV was updating itself. But that could just be a coincidence.
Anyway... was getting all set to call in Dell Support (after all, why pay for a support plan - particularly the little bit extra for the North American support plan - if you're not going to use it when things start to go boom?) but decided to wait for one more instance, so I could get the exact error messages. I knew it was something to do with a Page Fault error, but didn't remember what type or what location.
And, of course, that's exactly when it stopped crashing. The one right after the Registry Mechanic sweep was (AFAIK) the last one.
So... here's hoping Brainy is feeling better now.
(Of course, now that I've posted that... *sigh*)
1. I've been pondering Twitter. At first, the whole idea of "microblogging" seemed pretty silly to me. And, given my incurable penchant for unexpected verbosity*, not particularly well-suited to me. It has been nice seeing LoudTwitter posts from some of you, particularly the ones who don't often have/take the time for more substantial posts. A little pointless at times, though, given that it often means reading half (or less) of a conversation... But it's exactly that which led me to realize that, when you get down to it, Twitter is really more of a multicast IM platform than a blogging tool.
I almost never start IM convos and a lot of my IM friends seem to have drifted off to other formats. So maybe, on that basis, it's worth signing up, after all? I'm not sure.
*That is, "longwindedness."
2. Finally switched my router's firmware away from the official version. Was put off for quite some time by the scary thought of using third party firmware. If something goes wrong, you're pretty much up a creek. But the fact is that things were going wrong. Linksys WRT54G firmware is flawed. For one thing, it keeps track of IP addresses for too long. If you connect to a lot of different computers (say, by using P2P or torrent software), the buffer overflows and the router crashes. For another... this one seems to have gone beyond the point where power cycling can help. Even relatively small problems required a hard reset.*
Luckily, Linksys is one of the few companies with open source router firmware, so there are several third party options. Many of them free. And, unlike the Linksys firmware, still being updated, even for older versions of the router. So, after a bit of research, I finally took the plunge and switched over to Tomato.
It was so easy. Took seconds. I didn't even have to power cycle the router. And now it's got stability and spiffy new options and better control and I can download torrents without crashing it.
*Press and hold the reset button for 30 seconds. Unplug. Press and hold the reset button for 30 seconds. Plug in. Wait for boot-up. Log in. Reenter any changes from factory default settings. Wait for next crash. Repeat.
3. Braniac IV recently had an unexplained spate of bluescreens. No sign of spyware or adware or viruses or rootkits or anything else I could think of to scan for. And after the full treatment from Registry Mechanic (which has been very helpful for a few comps I've known in the past)... it bluescreened again. No set pattern to them, either. No rhyme or reason. Except, maybe, that a few of them seemed to happen while McAfee AV was updating itself. But that could just be a coincidence.
Anyway... was getting all set to call in Dell Support (after all, why pay for a support plan - particularly the little bit extra for the North American support plan - if you're not going to use it when things start to go boom?) but decided to wait for one more instance, so I could get the exact error messages. I knew it was something to do with a Page Fault error, but didn't remember what type or what location.
And, of course, that's exactly when it stopped crashing. The one right after the Registry Mechanic sweep was (AFAIK) the last one.
So... here's hoping Brainy is feeling better now.
(Of course, now that I've posted that... *sigh*)