Rants and musings, without care for substance.
Posted in troubleshooting on Mar 26th, 2012
The Panasonic KX-T3968 is a very old 900 MHz cordless phone, but still functional. Manuals are not available on Panasonic’s operating manual site, but it’s easy to program auto-dial or speed-dial numbers using either the base station or the cordless handset.
Note: Buttons to press are indicated in bold type.
To store a number on either the [...]
Posted in technology, troubleshooting on Aug 23rd, 2011
I haven’t had land-line phone service in more than a decade, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t missed it. If I’m on a two hour conference call I don’t want to be burning up the minutes and battery on my cell phone (or be tethered to the wall where the charger is plugged in), [...]
Posted in computing, software, troubleshooting on Feb 28th, 2011
When attempting to use TaxAct 2010 with CrossOver Mac, I experienced the same frame buffer problems as last year with Tax Act 2009. It makes the software pretty useless, since without the Q&A you may as well fill in the paper tax forms.
Fortunately, the same fix worked this year. Just install Internet Explorer 6.0 to [...]
Posted in housing, troubleshooting on Jan 10th, 2011
When troubleshooting lack of heat being produced by a natural gas furnace, the home repair books tend to gloss over the flame sensor (and more importantly, the fact that it needs to be cleaned).
And thus a megillah begins…
A few years ago in the coldest part of winter, I woke up to a cold house. At [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Oct 28th, 2010
A few months ago Verizon decided to block outgoing SMTP connections from its residential customers. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got dial-up, DSL, or FIOS. The thinking was that zombies could be prevented from sending out spam. I’m not sure how that strategy is working out, but it does make getting daily reports from your [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Jul 18th, 2010
For the last couple days, the cron job for updating my SpamAssassin rule set has been throwing an error:
Argument “1.39_01″ isn’t numeric in subroutine entry at /usr/bin/sa-update line 81.
It turns out this is a bug with the Archive::Tar module that was released a few days ago, not SpamAssassin or CentOS per se. The fix — [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Feb 15th, 2010
When I set up software RAID, I have any errors sent to me via email. I recently found the following email in my inbox.
From: mdadm monitoring
To: root@foo.tld
Subject: DegradedArray event on /dev/md0:foo.tld
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on foo.tld
A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
Faithfully yours, etc.
That’s it. [...]
Posted in software, troubleshooting on Jan 24th, 2010
I use CrossOver Mac when I need to run Windows applications on my Mac. It isn’t that often, but I’m glad it’s an option. I picked up a free download code a few years ago, before I really had a use for it; I’m not one to pass up a $40 package for free. CrossOver [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Dec 19th, 2009
Every once in a while a friend will refer some side work my way, usually fixing home computers. Most suffer from performance problems stemming from spyware and malware, usually from running with administrative privileges. Some problems are more exotic, like having two different anti-virus suites fighting for resources. While fixing malware issues is a fairly [...]
Posted in housing, life in general, oddities, troubleshooting on Mar 30th, 2009
I had a small group of people over after we closed out the show. At one point during the evening, one of my guests approached me and whispered into my ear, “your toilet is broken.” It was in the same tone as someone would use when they say, “where’s your plunger?” Fortunately it wasn’t a [...]
Posted in software, troubleshooting on Dec 9th, 2007
I’ve got to research some options for remote access. The goal is to provide a Windows-based application — which is rather expensive to license and tedious to manage per-seat — to a group of remote users. The licensing is all taken care of from my perspective, so the remaining requirements are as follows.
Sessions must be [...]
Posted in cars, life in general, troubleshooting on Dec 7th, 2007
The oil pressure warning light on my car has been flickering lately. After a day or two it began to bother me. I’ve had lots of tech support moments where people complain about something but then can’t describe the circumstances, so I began to pay attention to when it was happening so that I could [...]
Posted in advertising, software, troubleshooting, web sites on Jul 26th, 2007
I find ProcessLibrary to be incredibly useful when diagnosing Windows systems. The site — with a refreshingly clean interface despite it being an advertisement-page-disguised-as-a-tool — will tell you all about processes that you find listed in Task Manager. A quick summary of whether it is good or bad, but with details of what it does, [...]
Posted in complaints, troubleshooting on Jun 15th, 2007
So I was bitching this morning about 1&1 refusing email from my mailserver. One of my subscribers complained to 1&1 technical support and got a tech named Jiggy to remove me from their blacklists. Amazing, but with amusing responses from technical support.
Posted in complaints, troubleshooting on Jun 15th, 2007
In the past two weeks 1&1 Internet has stopped accepting mail from my mailserver. I get the following error whenever I send an email to them or one of their customers: “421 mails from 71.127.149.126 refused: local dynamic IP address 71.127.149.126″
Now I utilize greylisting so I’m familiar with sending the user a 450; essentially [...]
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