Most of us use the keyboard that came with our computers. I did that too for a few years.

But then I saw and fell in love with Microsoft Natural Keyboard. Naturally, I had to have it. After all, I did write touch, and the old keyboards aren’t too comfortable.

Then a few years passed, and I saw a keyboard on sale, with a really nice mouse that I’d already tried an loved. Hmmm… So I bought it. That was the Logitech Y-SD5. It’s a clone of the Microsoft keyboard, except smaller and flatter. And it became my new favorite. I’ve been using it for years.

And recently I thought, hey, what if I wear it out? How will I get a new one? So I went looking. The only model I found currently in production was the

Logitech Cordless Comfort Duo

It’s a similar package to the one I bought. If it feels the same way mine does, GET IT!!!

I was about to say I’m not getting any percentages. But then I realized, hey, they sell them on Amazon! So up the affiliate link goes. Amazon also has a nice display of similar keyboards, if this one doesn’t look right to you. Oh, but if you’re in Norway, remember not to buy US keyboard. Go to Logitech Norway instead.

I just think it could help people who have carpal tunnel syndrome, or other ergonomical problems. And it’s a really good keyboard to boot. The mouse in my package was the M-BA47, which is a wonderful mouse. Built to the contours of my hand. Not sure the new one is that good?

Well, if you don’t write touch, you’ll hate it, of course…

I’ve written a story about cleaning your hard drive. Like I’ve noted here before, computers will almost grind to a halt if they’re running out of space.

I’ve written an article on some simple steps you can take to make your computer run faster. This one is probably especially useful for the many of you still using an older laptop. They usually came with tiny hard drives, and Windows 98.

Enjoy!

Disk cleanup

And if you’ve got smart additions to the article, corrections or comments, please feel free to comment here.

I got an e-mail today that this account has used 100 % of it’s space. I thought that was odd. I shouldn’t have used that much.

So I used the Disk Usage Viewer to try and figure out where something had gobbled up a lot of space.

Turns out it was the guestbook directories. That thing is creating backups over and over until it eats up your space. The last few days the backups had increased exponentially in size. There’s a lot of almost empty space in there. I don’t have any idea how that happened.

Anyway, the moral is that automated scripts may gobble up a lot of space without you realizing, so keep an eye on things.

And if you’ve got Advanced Guestbook installed, it may suddenly start gobbling up space, even if it didn’t before. Weird…

Second update: Oh no, the guestbook ate itself totally! 53604 pages of nonsense!

UPDATE: And then I find out that my old e-mail address that I’d used a challenge response system on, has been piling up on the server, instead of being fetched by that system. I’m downloading 2135 messages now. The majority of which will be junk. But that should free up a lot of space, at least!

My router can be tricky sometimes.

It’s blacklisted the IP behind this website twice.

This has happened only since the last firmware update.

So if you have persistent problems with a website (especially your own), and pings from other locations on the net reach it fine, and the traceroute stops at THAT particular IP number. Then try clearing the automatic blacklist on your router…

That blacklisting is of course wonderful, when it blacklists attackers. But not quite as wonderful when it blacklists your website’s IP number in the middle of an FTP session, which is what happened today. Over a hundred small files were to be FTP’d home, and my router blacklists the IP number in the middle of the session…

This is an actual case.

A guy had an older laptop with about a 6 gigabyte hard drive.

He phoned me and complained that his machine had crashed, and as it was rebooting, it checked the hard drive and found errors in the File Allocation Table. I guided him through that.

Then he told me that he couldn’t open mails in Outlook Express.

Since it had crashed while he’d tried, I played it safe and told him to close the computer and NOT use it anymore until I could have a look. Just in case the computer had locked up on one of the OE files. You see, he hadn’t done a backup in five years…

You know, he WANTED to install adaware, and thought that was why his computer was so slow…

So he asked me if he could do a backup to another laptop, this one with a slightly larger hard drive. I told him to forget about it, he’d have the same problem with that one (if not right away, then surely after a while).

I told him a laptop has a finite life. The first to go is usually the hard drive. Because of the mechanical jolts a laptop will experience throughout its lifespan, the hard drive WILL stop working at some time. And recussitating it is not an option if the heads go out of alignment, which happened on a few I’ve seen. It’s way too expensive.

During all this, he mentioned that he’d downloaded pictures from his digital camera unto the laptop (turns out it was about a gigabyte worth of pictures), and I was pretty sure of what was causing his immediate problems: Not enough space on the hard drive.

I must have mentioned the possibility of using a separate hard drive. He’d never thought of that, but a local electronics chain had one of those with a discount, so he went there to buy one, happily. You see, this meant he could extend the life of the computer.

By this time he didn’t trust himself, so I did the honors. By that time he’d deleted the cache and tmp files (in c:\windows\temp), so he was up from 40 megabytes to about 60 megabytes of free space.

And the mailbox he could list but not open mails in, weighed in at 407 megabytes.

So tell me, you expect a mailbox measuring over 400 megabytes to work on a machine with 40 megabytes free space?

Pfffft!

Rule of thumb: For a windows 98 machine, you need at least 500 megabytes free space on the main hard drive, otherwise it will grind to a stop and crash frequently.

No buts about it.

You know, his USB CD-burner had stopped working, you’d think that would have tipped him off? It requires much more than 500 megabytes free space to work properly.

So if you’re in the same situation, think about getting a separate USB hard drive to load some of your pictures and whatnot on to, then deleting them off the hard drive.

You’ll see the speed of the computer will perk right up!

The reason I’m writing this out, instead of not saying anything, is that I expect this story to be VERY common. I think a lot of people don’t understand why their machines are crashing and unreliable and slow. Yes, spyware can have a lot to do with it, but NOTHING helps if your machine doesn’t have enough free space. It NEEDS that space, especially since older machines (especially laptops) frequently don’t have enough internal memory to avoid swapping to disk.

I’ve had a Muvo MP3 player for quite some time. I wanted a new one though. One with a display, random play and recording. But I had the old one…

But I lost the battery compartment lid on the old one, and came across a discounted new one - and splurged.

Came home for easter, and asked my mom if she wanted the old one. She said YES! I didn’t think she’d get that excited…

I’ve removed the noisier tracks, kept some of my favorites and loaded up some decidedly tame ones. Taught her to use it, and expected her to turn it off, saying ..later.

But no, she’s sitting in her recliner, listening with a contented expression. My absolute favorite track went straight home with her, and she’s relishing the thought that she was given a teenager’s toy. Never mind that she’s topped sixty…

She does a lot of walking, so it made sense to her to use this one, small as it is.

I just had to share…

What was really nice, was that the new player had a plastic holder that fits over the battery compartment. The players are the same size, so I swopped the holder, and now my mom doesn’t have to worry about the battery falling out or dirt getting into the compartment!

I caught an article on Lockergnome about distribution of (legal) video through BitTorrent.

It’s brilliant.

I’ve been thinking in terms of FTP servers before. But if you’ve got a number of interested parties, in a relatively short time frame, then BitTorrent is more bandwidth effective. My DSL line is narrow for uploads, but with BitTorrent I wouldn’t be the only one uploading.

Just brilliant.

I see lots of people still pulling down the feed on this blog. The spam hunting has been moved to spamhuntress.com, so not much is happening here, except for the odd post on cats, theology and technical stuff.

While you’re at it, you can read this article:
More about the Bulgarians

I got an entry in my error log today.

Someone had tried to access the awstats script in the cgi-bin. Only there’s no awstats script in the cgi-bin.

The explanation is that older versions of the scripts are vulnerable.

Shame on you, hacker:
200.162.230.111

Today as I was turning the computer on, I didn’t have access to the internet.

So, what’s wrong?

My DSL line is up, I have sync. But no internet.

Hmm, do an autodiscover on the router. VPI/VCI has different values. Hmmm.

So, what if my new ISP switched the cable between one DSLAM to another without telling me? So I’m on the horn to the new ISP, who I haven’t heard from since I told them I’d be switching. I had about three months left on the old one, so no need, right?

Turns out they don’t know anything about anyone switching any cables. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Could have been someone from the phone company that just did mine even though it wasn’t time yet.

Sooo… I’m waiting for new DNS server setup and some other configuration details I need to get online.

Meanwhile, I’ve got the laptop and I’ve hit the road to find a friend with internet access…

Should be online soon again, though…

But I just have to say, this is very weird. Sort of Mickey Mouse operations. Nobody knows what’s going on…

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Just have to test something. Not sure trackbacks are working on my other blog. So test spamhuntress