Talk Is Cheap » Computer Stuff

Bad computer behavior

Bluexiii — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 23:39:40 +0000

Started up the computer, everything fired up normally, no signal from the video card to the computer. None, the monitor stays in power save mode. Tried hooking up another monitor to the video card, nothing there either. System doesn’t detect the card at all. Plugged the flat panel into a different computer, it doesn’t work either. My question is, is it the card? Or worse, could it be the PCI express slot? Any ideas?

“Spam”

Scott — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:38:02 +0000

Some of you have claimed to be getting “spam” from hadleysplace.com lately. I took effective steps awhile back to thwart people from using my server to send out spam. However the “spam” I think you are seeing is email sent to you when comment spammers leave comments on posts you wrote here. WordPress automatically sends you an email notifying you that somebody had commented on your post. Since the comments were obviously spam, it seems to you that spammers are using my domain to send out junk. That’s not really the case, it’s just this blog notifiying you.

That won’t happen anymore. I turned off the “email me when somebody comments on my post” setting. I believe you can override that when you make a post, but if you don’t want the chance of the few spams that get through my filters here, sending you those emails, then just leave it off.

There are literally thousands and thousands of spam comments left on this site every month. My filters catch 99.687% of them and they don’t get shown. A few get through and I’m sure you’ve seen the notification emails. That will stop now that it just won’t email you about your post anymore =)

Flash Update

Scott — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:48:15 +0000

Protect yourself! It’s not just for WoW players.. this can be used against you for any other sensitive info. Adobe vulnerabilities aren’t generally made known through mainstream information outlets. Here’s a heads up for you though.

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and Adobe Reader/Acrobat 9.x, and could potentially be used to target World of Warcraft players and accounts. The newest available version of Adobe Flash 10.1, Release Candidate 7 (available at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/), does not appear to contain this vulnerability, and we recommend that everyone upgrade their Flash player as soon as possible. Earlier versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat, specifically version 8.x, do not appear to contain this vulnerability, either.

It’s a fast install of the plugin.. whole process of D/L to install took me about 30 seconds that was including virus scanning it. Don’t get hacked.

Ace Wallpaper

Scott — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:05:16 +0000

So.. opening day is upon us. Getting into the baseball mood and I can’t help but think about the best Royals T-shirt I’ve ever seen.. the Greinke Ace one. Thought it would make a good desktop wallpaper.

I did the best I could with the fairly small size of images I could find.. click it to see in full size (1680 x 1050) and tell me whatcha think about it.

Winner!

Scott — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:42:27 +0000

That would be me! Every day before my vacation, I’d log into mountaindewgamefuel.com site and rack up as many points as I could. I considered it my daily quests =) and it paid off.

Without any notification, email, whatever.. well my name was listed in the official list of winners for the mouse drawing I had entered for on 07/05/09 but I never checked there each day to see if I’d won. I always figured they would just send me an email saying as much.. but no. They just sent me my new Razer Deathadder gaming mouse in the mail!

It’s not the fanciest-smanchsiest mouse out there.. but it’s a great shape and size for me and the texture of the top is.. well hard to describe.. like a really really fine suede type buffed feel to it even though it’s plastic. For free it’s an awesome mouse =)

The amount of gold you can earn per day from click through stuff has steadily increased… right now it’s sitting at 800 gold (points) per day. I found a nice set of links for all the click throughs so I don’t have to actually go to all the facebook/twitter/myspace/other partner websites/etc to get the click points. There’s about 450 points of videos that take about a minute to click on all of too.

The chance of winning a Mountain Dew t-shirt or a messenger bag are pretty high.. but I spent most of my points on entries for the hardware stuff.. mouse, speakers, keyboards and a 100 or so for the Alienware laptop they give away one of each day too. There’s usually 2 or 3 million points entered for the laptop though so I don’t expect my 100 to win that ever.

I had resisted merging my warcraft account with a battle.net account.. but I did for the promotions and the battlebot pet/fuel. I figured that it wouldn’t be long before they required it anyway. The login trouble that plagued so many the last few days was only striking those that had not merged their account with a b.net account yet. A change from the early days of the merged accounts that had initially had login issues.

Old Guy Eyes

Scott — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:17:16 +0000

Ok.. I really like my larger monitor.. but now that I have Old Guy Eyes it’s tougher to comfortably read everything on this screen now that the stuff is so small at this higher resolution.

I switched back to Firefox browser recently and use the noscript addon.. now I’ve found my 2nd favorite one.. nosquint! Let’s me set the text and image zoom level for each site and remembers those settings. You can make a zoom level the default for all pages if you like.. something you can’t do in Firefox by itself. I usually keep the images set to normal 100% and bump up just the text to 120%. Keeps things from looking stretched, fuzzy etc but makes the text readable on this 22″ monitor for my aging vision.

3rd favorite addon? Xmarks.. hands down. The ease that we can all synchronize all our bookmarks (remember.. four kids and four computers) across all the rigs and all the browsers is so nice. Have access to your bookmarks from anywhere online too at the xmarks.com website too.

Others I like are Personal Menu to get rid of the menu bar.. Mouse Gestures even though I only use like 2% of it.. and Read It Later.

Back up and runnin

Scott — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:25:43 +0000

The site was taken down due to flooding of the “useronline” function I had set up and it was causing a Denial of Service against my web host due to the server errors it was causing.

Was coming from somebody in Canada through Shaw Communications… so maybe the Canada Crew folks need to throw up a firewall and see if they have something malicious spamming out of their machine they don’t know about.. or it’s just a coincidence with a script kiddie from there, which could be.

If it’s one of you guys doing it intentionally, all I’ll do for now is ask nicely for you to please stop. I don’t wanna have to take wide measures against ya all.

Thanks,

Scott.

Ways off, but…

Special K — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:29:37 +0000

I wanted to start reading up on the latest and greatest in building a computer. I imagine I am at least 6 months or more off of getting one, but with WoW having issues I need something to do. There was a website/forums that I used last time I built my computer and for the life of me I can’t recall it’s name. I think you turned me on to it Scott so I hope you know what I am talking about. I know you said you didn’t like helping people build a computer because you get jealous or whatnot so I’ll try not to bother you too much about it.

-K

Has the time come? Is it possible???

Bluexiii — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:50:52 +0000

On May 1, it was announced that Blizzard has obtained the domain name Diablo3.com. Previously, it was dedicated to those who were huge fans of the Diablo series (myself included, but didn’t even realize the fan site til I went to Diablo3.com). So, are we going to see an announcement soon of the continuation of the Diablo series? Me, personally, I hope so. I loved the game, and there were still some questions to be answered at the end of the game. Now, my opinion might change should it go MMPORG though. I don’t care for those types of games, nor do I have the time to play those type of games (I don’t have the time right now to even play Oblivion, The Game of the Year Edition). I thought that Blizzard went the wrong way using Warcraft as the basis for their MMPORG instead of Diablo, but that’s a different rant.

So, what do you folks think? Has Blizzard set up a major announcement coming soon…or are they just continuing to tease those of is who thought that Diablo is one of the best (PC) video game franchises of all time. After all, it was Diablo that put Blizzard on the map.

I don’t even know what to say

Bluexiii — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:47:54 +0000

Got this from a co-worker at Argosy (and I thought gaming geeks were only at Ameristar). But, this was too ridiculous to pass up and NOT post it here. Read some of the comments as well.

http://gizmodo.com/361539/chocolate-master-chief-penis-helmet