Adventures in stupid technology

  • Seagate Goflex Home disk maintenance

    I’ve been generally happy with my Seagate Goflex Home NAS device. I purchased the 2TB model at COSTCO a year ago and have been running Acronis backups to it for the past eight months. I have Acronis configured such that incremental backups of all my computers are copied to the NAS six days a week…

  • Cloudflare

    About two months ago I read about Cloudflare on the Interwebs and decided to give it a whirl. This review is reflects my experience using a free Cloudflare account for just over one month. Cloudflare is essentially a Content Deliver Network (CDN) with some interesting additional offerings. While the free account doesn’t give you all the…

  • Set Up Exchange Email on your Android device

    Need to know how to add your company/corporate email to your new Android phone or tablet? Here some nicely detailed instructions on how to set it up. I am always walking people through these steps over the phone and without an Android device in front of me this can be tricky. [update] Here are some…

  • Increase suction on a bagless vacuum

    I’ve got this great little vacuum (Hoofer Flair S2200) from Amazon a few years back for about $35 bucks. It does a good job of cleaning cat hair and the occasional litter pieces off of my hardwood floors, it’s light and easy to maneuver and easy to empty. A year after I got it, though…

  • View message options in Outlook 2010

    In versions prior to Outlook 2010, finding the message options button to view the email’s Internet headers was a relatively straight forward task. In Outlook 2010, however the message options button is no longer on the ribbon. Here’s how to put it on the ribbon so you can once again analyze those message Internet Headers…

  • Transfer texts and settings from an old iPhone to a new iPhone

    So I finally got to upgrade to the iPhone 4S. All’s great with the new phone, but I’d like my recent call list, texts, and settings from my old phone thank you very much. Here’s how: [the problem] You want to somehow transfer settings, texts, recent call lists, etc. from an old iPhone to a…

  • Hotkey toggle the default audio output device

    So I got this beautiful Sony TV and hooked it up to my work computer via HDMI. It’s great for watching movies and SageTV Client from my computer and every once in a while I even use it as an extended desktop. I also have a set of speakers on my desk that I use…

  • Clone Mac with Boot Camp to a new Hard Drive

    My MacBook Pro has been running out of hard disk space for some time. I’m down to less than 1GB of free space on both my Macintosh HD and the Boot Camp Windows 7 partition. So I hopped on NewEgg and got a WD Black 500GB notebook hard drive and 8GB’s of RAM for $150.…

  • HTML Tidy broken in Notepad++

    If you’re running Notepad++ on Windows 7 x64 like me, you’ll notice that after a clean install of v6.1.1 you can no longer use HTML Tidy. This plugin is very useful if you spend lots of time looking at or cleaning up other people’s HTML code. I don’t know where I’d be without HTML Tidy.…

  • Google+ App for the iPhone

    Dear Google, I understand that your primary focus for development of mobile Apps is the android platform, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to slack on building apps for other platforms. Especially if it involves your second endeavor into Social Media. Shouldn’t the focus here be to make your social network as accessible and functional…