Tag Archives: DIY

What’s that connector?

Computer hardware posterIf your someone that only opens up a computer every other month, or your upgrading something from a few years ago it can be hard to work out what that connector is that your trying to interface into. Well luckily Sonic840 has put together a poster to help in such situations. Check out the full sized version over at Deviantart

Components Covered Include

Ram (Both Notebook and Desktop)
Hard Drive Connectors
CPU Sockets
Processor Card Slots
Processor Card Sockets
Power Connectors
Peripheral Cards
Motherboard Back panel ports (Audio/Video/Data)
Desktop Card Slots

WordPress Three dot o dot one update

WordPress 3.0.1 is now available. So it’s time to update. Just remember to backup first, you might want to check out our blog post about backing up your Cpanel WordPress installation.

Here is an extract from the WordPress Blog about the latest release:

After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress

This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

More information at the WordPress blog.

Buy Cables in Bulk to save money [Tips]

Buy in bulk to save on computer cables.When working with computers you can almost never have enough cables. The main cables in use are

  • IEC Power cords (also known as Kettle Cords)
  • Power Boards
  • SATA drive cables
  • Molex to SATA power adaptors
  • VGA, DVI, HDMI video leads
  • USB cables

It’s rather annoying when starting on a project and you get held up because you don’t have the correct cable for the job. (You new mother board came with 2 SATA, and your trying to install 3 SATA devices). So by investing in a little bit of cash now you can save yourself time, effort and energy down the track.

I recently needed a couple of extra SATA cables for a job and some other upgrades. Instead of going to shop and buying them for $5 each I was able to pick up a bulk pack of 10 for under $7 online, with free shipping. That’s a saving of over $43, plus 1 hour of my time (remember time is worth more than gold these days) because I didn’t have to waste that 1 going to the shop.

Overkill Router for any small business (or advanced home user)

Small businesses generally have an IT budget of 0, but need the best performance that money can buy.

Most small businesses rely on their little modem/router/wireless access point combination plastic box to perform all the needed tools and utilities to get the internet around their network to all their uses. But sometimes there comes a day where the little router just doesn’t have the functions required for the expanding network. (Such as complex block lists, cache, VPN functions etc). But at the same time, any left over IT budget goes into upgrading staff machines, rather than the network infrastructure.

But you don’t have to pay a lot for these extra features. If you have an old machine lying around the office, the only major upgrade that you might have to do is spend $15 on a new PCI network card and 10 cents on a CD to turn that machine into a fully fledged Firewall/Router/Proxy Server/etc.

What we are doing is turning that old Windows 98 machine into a dedicated (i.e you can’t use it for anything else) firewall and router for your small business network.

Basically all you need is a copy of either of the following operating systems:

And a machine with 2 network cards.

*Endian calls itself a Unified Threat Management & Requires better hardware than the others listed. It can perform virus and spam scans on the data in real time as it passes though the firewall. Pretty cool ey.

Check out Episode 718 of Hak5 to see how they turned a few parts they had lying around (Motherboard with a Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, 250GB IDE harddrive, please note they do stress that what they are using is an overkill but the process is still the same. Ed Note: The current Firewall at the office here is a simple 133Mhz processor, with 32 mb of ram & a 3 GB hard drive, it runs 24/7 and serves upto 8 users, IPCop or Smoothwall can run on almost anything) into a dedicated router and firewall.

Once you have it setup, just plug it into your network between the modem and your switch and let it go.

How to clean your Blackberry’s track ball

A user on Lifehacker has recently posted a video on how to clean the little track ball on a blackberry. (I would say it works for any mobile device with a track ball).

I tested it out on my Blackberry which was having issues scrolling to the right and it fixed it up.

All that required is a blank piece of white paper and you just need to rub the trackball on the paper to clean it. Check out the video

[YouTube via Lifehacker]

Another method that I used just after Christmas involved pulling out the track ball assembly and cleaning the rollers.