Category Archives: computer tips

Tip: shock protection unnecessary if you have a SSD!

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The Lenovo X220 ThinkPad, as well as many Dell & HP laptops, ship with a form of anti-shock protection enabled by default. This is great if your laptop has a conventional hard drive that can be easily damaged by a fall or drop. The laptop is smart enough to pause disk activity and ‘park’ the head (or other similar techniques) to prevent disk damage. However, if your laptop is exclusively using a SSD (solid state drive) then that protection is

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Using iTunes with Android devices

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After transitioning away from iOS devices, I still have iTunes as my main music management software. So, I have been looking into some solutions for interfacing iTunes and Android. Thankfully with the right software they can play together pretty nicely 🙂 Top 5 Android Apps to Sync iTunes on Androidhttp://androidflip.com/top-5-android-apps-to-sync-itunes-on-android/DoubleTwist is a free media player app which rivals the default player of Android phones. The app not only play music files like audio/video in a clean user interface but also…

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Monitoring Apache2 bandwidth usage by individual VirtualHosts

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At Weblogs.us we have been going through bandwidth at a fast pace lately. We use Apache2 as our web server,  and while we have some rough bandwidth monitoring tools, we could really use a more granular view of bandwidth usage. The ideal solution for us would be a time configurable view (i.e. hour, day, month, year) of bandwidth usage on a per VirtualHost basis. While researching solutions these were the most useful links I found: Apache Virtual Host Bandwidth Monitoring

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Lenovo X220 ThinkPad Long Term User Review

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This is a placeholder  for additional content as the review is added to… X220 purchase date: 2011.12.17 Specs: Processor Intel Core i7-2640M Processor (2.8GHz, turbo 3.5GHz, 4MB L3, 1333MHz FSB) Operating System Pre-installed Windows 7 Professional 64 – English Keyboard/Pointing Device UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) Total Memory 8GB PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz SDRAM SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM). Hard Drive 320GB, 7200RPM Serial ATA 2.5″ Hard Drive Display USB 3.0 12.5” Premium HD WXGA (1366 X 768) LED (IPS Panel) Yes Graphics Intel? HD Graphics

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Easily copy a bunch of links from a webpage

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If you ever need to copy a bunch of links for a project it can be very tedious to right click ever single link and select “Copy link address” then paste that into notepad (or wherever you are storing the links) over and over 🙁 Thankfully there are some simple, and free, plugins to help make this task MUCH easier: Copy Multiple Links to Clipboard with Link2Cliphttp://www.nirmaltv.com/2010/05/10/copy-multiple-links-to-clipboard-with-link2clip/About the Blog NirmalTV.COM is a daily updated technology blog which was founded in

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Swap the Lenovo X220/X230 ThinkPad Ctrl and Fn keys

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 Thank goodness you can swap the ctrl and fn keys on the X220/X230! Just go into the BIOS (press F1 at boot) and adjust the Keyboard/Mouse settings 🙂 Step-by-step instructions: Turn on the laptop, Wait for the ThinkPad screen, and then press F1. Enter BIOS Navigate to the Config screen using the  arrow keys Choose Keyboard/Mouse Set Fn and Ctrl Key swap to enabled. Press the Esc (escape) key and go to the Restart screen Choose Exit Saving Changes

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7mm SSD list / 7mm HD list

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UPDATE 2012.05.30: added a list of 7mm SSD and 7mm HDD at the end of this post… The most-excellent Lenovo Thinkpad X220 laptop supports a rather odd thickness for its hard drive/SSD: 7mm This is unusual since most laptop drives are 9.5mm and some are fatties coming in at 12mm or 12.5mm. However, the 7mm thin drives are likely to become more and more common as Ultrabooks and other similar devices require thinner drives to maintain their low profile 🙂 So,

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How to install telnet for Windows 7 [SOLVED]

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I occasionally need telnet to login to a remote power switch at the Weblogs.us datacenter. Frustratingly, Windows 7 ships with telnet disabled (or “turned off” in Win 7 parlance). Thankfully, with a bit of navigating around in Windows, it is simple to turn it back on: Start button Control Panel Programs (Programs And Features) Turn Windows features on or off Telnet Client (scroll down and check the box) Turn Windows 7 Telnet on (enable the feature) Click “OK” You are all done

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