From the category archives:

Tech Notes

Installing MS-SQL Express for those not familiar with it

15 November 2009

First of all, it’s really stupid I have to write a blog post on how to install the free Microsoft SQL express package, but it just isn’t that easy to do. It’s nice they give it away for free for people like me to learn it all, but they assume you already know it in [...]

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Prepaid U.S. Mobile Phone Howto for U.S. Visitors

23 August 2009

This is a guide to how to get a prepaid phone that works in the United States if you plan to visit here. Information about how to do this is hard to find because the phone companies don’t want you to just use a phone for a week or so and toss it basically. [...]

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Installing Diablo 2 on an Intel Mac

5 July 2009

Back in the day (2000-2003) I played Diablo 2 — a lot. A bit of nostalgia and the upcoming release of Diablo 3 meant it was time to give it another shot — but I couldn’t find my CDs anywhere. No problem, I went out and purchased the Diablo 2 Battle Chest which includes [...]

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Removing backups from Apple’s Time Machine

27 May 2009

Apple’s Time Capsule is a neat device that provides both wireless access, router functions, and a hard drive for doing automated backups from one or more Macs in the same network. It’s very easy to use and “just works.” If it runs short on disk space it starts to automatically trim the oldest backups automatically. [...]

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Using the Linksys SPA-3102 as a VOIP ATA

12 March 2009

In other blog entries I’ve been discussing a larger project of setting up a personal Voice over IP (VOIP) Asterisk server using the Linksys SPA-3102 VOIP gateway device. An ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) allows one to use old fashioned phones on a voice over IP network, or you can just use IP phones. An ATA [...]

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Getting around Comcast port 25 block

8 March 2009

Comcast started blocking outbound port 25 on my cable modem yesterday. I can understand why — it stops a lot of infected machines from spamming the world. But it also broke the ability of my security webcam from sending me pictures to my server whenever it detects movement, and the cam firmware has no option [...]

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Importing a mirrored disk pair into new Windows 2003 Server

2 February 2009

At home I run a Windows 2003 R2 Server configured for Active Directory and file service for my couple of computers in the house. Way overkill but I originally did it for the learning experience and now maintain it so I don’t lose touch. Since I’m in management now, I don’t do much “real work” [...]

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Personal VOIP/PBX using Asterisk, part 2

19 January 2009

This is part two of my series on how to set up an asterisk server for home use on a Linode VPS — but is applicable to any host that doesn’t have additional hardware telephony devices installed in the server. Please refer to Part 1 for how to set up the dummy timing module. Also, [...]

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IP Telephony Codecs

17 January 2009

My first stumbling block when installing and trying to get Asterisk PBX working were the codecs and mismatching. If both ends of a connection can’t negotiate the same codec, the call won’t complete. I grabbed the recommended asterisk config for gizmo5 and when attempting to place a call to my gizmo call-in number which should [...]

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Personal VOIP/PBX using Asterisk, part 1

11 January 2009

Background Voice over IP is simply placing phone calls over the Internet instead of traditional phone lines. This means the calls are usually cheaper, but not free in many cases since often the telco lines have to get involved at some point to either originate or terminate a call. However, true voip calls are almost [...]

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WordPress migration to new host

28 December 2008

I purchased a new VPS (virtual private server) host and have been moving many blogs I host for myself and others to the new host (Linode — which I’m very satisfied with and recommend highly). There’s multiple ways to do this, including just saving the mysql table as a backup, and reimporting, but since I’ve [...]

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