computer tips | J.D. Hodges

Category Archives: computer tips

Google Refine: a Few Sample Transformations and Helpful URLs

Wednesday, 2011.05.04 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Google Refine is a powerful tool to help cleanup data from a variety of sources. I’m gradually becoming more familiar with it and the powerful transformation tools that it offers. Here are: a few sample transformation expressions, and… sample data the result “=” after the transformation is applied The first example provides labels and explanations, the rest of the examples omit the labels and explanations but follow the same syntax. I hope these are helpful to you! NOTE: there are

Plugin: Regenerate Thumbnails ERROR undefined [SOLVED!]

Sunday, 2011.05.01 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Question: I’m a big fan of the Regenerate Thumbnails WordPress plugin, howeve, recently some of my photos aren’t able to have their thumbnails regenerated! All I get is the following error 🙁 Regenerate Thumbnails All done! 0 image(s) were successfully resized in 2 seconds and there were 1 failure(s). To try regenerating the failed images again, click here. To go back to the previous page, click here. Please be patient while the thumbnails are regenerated. This can take a while

HOW TO do a (relatively) clean install using Windows 7 Upgrade DVD

Saturday, 2011.04.23 J.D. H. Leave a comment

In the past it seemed like you could do a straight-up clean Windows 7 install using an upgrade DVD on a new PC. Last night we tried a clean install on my buddy’s new PC, using just such a Win7 x64 “Family Pack” upgrade DVD, and everything installed just fine (selecting “custom install” instead of upgrade install). BUT, after booting the Windows product key wasn’t accepted… So, the solution was #1 to go ahead into Windows (by not entering the

Installing VMWware ESX Server 3i (ESXi) on an Intel Atom & USB stick

Wednesday, 2011.04.20 J.D. H. Leave a comment

I have a couple Supermicro X7SPA-HF-O Atom boards that I’m planning on putting IPCop on. #1 is an Atom motherboard as the primary firewall (for Weblogs.us) #2 is another identical Atom board as a secondary backup firewall. Here’s the motherboard in question: X7SPA-HF-O Supermicro X7SPA-HF-O Atom Dual-Core D510/ Intel 945GC/ RAID/ V&2GbE/ Mini-ITX Motherboard, Retail – Motherboards SuperBiiz.comhttp://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-X7SPAHF&title=Supermicro-X7SPA-HF-O-Atom-Dual-Core-D510-Intel-945GC-RAID-V-2GbE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard-RetailSpecifications Mfr Part Number: X7SPA-HF-O CPU: Intel Dual-Core Atom D510 processor (1.66GHz, 1MB L2 Cache) Chipset: Intel 945GC & Intel ICH9R Memory: 2x

Google Refine / Freebase

Tuesday, 2011.03.29 J.D. H. Leave a comment

It’s always fun to come across awesome new sites! I found Jeff Foster’s site Fatvat when I was searching for some info about Oracle and Larry, Prince Of Darkness… after reading about it on Engadget. Anyway, after all that, here’s some really cool stuff that should be very helpful to some of my database projects: Google Refine, an intro by Jess Foster http://www.fatvat.co.uk/Google Refine is a toy for playing with data, originally developed by the team behind Freebase. It’s a

How to change iTunes backup Windows 7? [SOLVED]

Friday, 2011.03.25 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Here’s a great tutorial on changing the location of the folder that iTunes uses to backup iPhones/iPods/iPad. Change the Location of Your iTunes Backups on Windows Vista or 7 (iPhone and iPad) | The iPhone Guru http://www.theiphoneguru.net/2010/12/30/change-itunes-backup-location/Fortunately, Windows has a way of doing this using a concept known as symbolic links (symlinks, or in M$ speak, NTFS Junctions). A symbolic link is similar to shortcut, but… Specifically, the folder to be moved is “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup”. Moving this off our your

Overcoming the Kindle Clipping Limit

Thursday, 2011.03.17 J.D. H. 3 comments

The Kindle is a wonderful reading device, unfortunately it has some arbitrarily imposed limitations that severely impact its usability for serious study or research work. One of the most limiting aspects, is the limit on “clippings”. These are the exported text highlights that you make when reading a book. If you find yourself reading a book for an assignment or article and have been fastidiously making highlights of important sections, you may very disappointed when you go to retrieve those

UnRAID preclear disk commands and notes (WD 2TB Green EARS drive)

Saturday, 2011.03.12 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Notes and misc info, some from the unRAID wiki/tutorial… How to preclear disk sdc preclear_disk.sh /dev/sdc How to save the preclear results (then accessible via network share “flash”) grep preclear /var/log/syslog | todos >> /boot/preclear_results_2011-03-12_WD2TB-Green.txt Samples results from: WDC_WD20EARS-00M_WD-WMAZA122XXXX Mar 11 12:59:23 Tower preclear_disk-start[2404]: smartctl version 5.38 [i486-slackware-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Mar 11 12:59:23 Tower preclear_disk-start[2404]: Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ Mar 11 12:59:23 Tower preclear_disk-start[2404]: Mar 11 12:59:23 Tower preclear_disk-start[2404]: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Mar 11