Modem works - Woo Hoo!

My Linux box is now back online! If you don't know the history of this, you can read about it here.

After getting entirely too frustrated with not being able to use the Linux part of my computer for anything meaningful, I embarked on a short and not-very-exhaustive search for a new modem. I found an eBay auction for the exact model that came preinstalled when I bought the box and which worked flawlessly with Linux. A couple days and one good bid later, I was the owner of a new modem. It arrived yesterday but I didn't have time to [……]

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Xupiter (and it's ilk) are the enemy. Ad-Aware is your friend.

Oy! I really hate scummy programs that install themselves on your computer with neither your approval nor even your knowledge.

This morning when I started up my browser at work, I was greeted with a new toolbar that I didn't put there and that wasn't there when I closed my last browser window last night. I also had a new home page. The culprit? Xupiter, one of a string of parasitical programs that install themselves on your computer for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue for their makers or sponsors. These have been called drive-by downloads and for [……]

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And away we go...

How I used the occasion of a flaky PC problem to begin my journey into Linux. Here's the story.

Recently, my PC starting acting quite goofy - hard drive problem type of goofy - so I pulled the drive and took it to work so I could try to backup some data from it before it went totally kaput. I was also going to run some diagnostics on it, but my box at work didn't have enough memory to do a lot with it. I burned a CD with the data that I pulled off and, with that and the drive [……]

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