Recent content by Kimmo Jaskari

Does it have to be DNLA? The "gold standard" for streaming music from a server to the hifi system would be the Squeezebox boxes, from what used to be Slim devices but nowadays is Logitech - at http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/ That presupposes that you can install the server software on your...

A HTPC is basically no different from any other PC, with the exception that it may have a great deal of hard drive space and be built to be especially quiet and unobtrusive in the home theater. Usually it has a user interface that can be navigated with a normal remote (and has to have support...

RAID is in fact a great solution for ensuring against the failure of any single drive, but it's only one step in a data protection scheme; like many things it's not sufficient in itself to ensure you're safe. Backups, preferably backups taken off site so if your house burns down you still have...

It's kind of hard to fail when buying a general purpose PC these days. Assuming one leaves out the desire to game on it and has the patience to wait for things like a hard drive churning instead of going with a solid state drive, basically anything with a dual-core or better CPU, 2 gigs or more...

The thing about being attacked and taken over, the way your computer appears to have been, is that once that happens you have virtually no way of knowing that you've managed to clean it. Spywaredetectors etc are no help at all against a proper root kit (I suppose, on Windows that should be...

The signal strength and wattage and stuff like that really doesn't alter that dramatically. That said, there are some that are longer ranged than others (can't really name any specific ones) - but, your best bet is really to change out the antenna on the wireless router itself. It's not very...

In a more corporate world this problem doesn't exist. At work, I use Outlook tethered to an Exchange server - but I can also read the mail in a web mail component and on my mobile devices via Exchange Activesync, so I have the mail on my pocket pc and Nokia phone both. Reading or replying on...

A no-expense and very smooth way is to get Synergy. Synergy Though you need two screens... However, you use only one keyboard and mouse. The computers talk on the network and you can just seamlessly move the mouse pointer from computer to computer and type on the one keyboard. Very...

Why not get a proper remote media player instead and hook that up to the room you are in? Something like a Squeezebox from Slimdevices - you run server software on the computer but you can pick and choose with a remote what you play back in the room where you have it. If you want to do...

Silent data corruption. Scares the **** out of me compared to a drive just dying. Fortunately on my home server now I run Solaris 10 and ZFS, and ZFS does checksumming of all data so it basically cannot happen. As for encoding, two choices IMHO - VBR using the latest Lame encoder and APX...

It is also an extremely bad idea to share the entire C drive. Especially if you do Everyone and have a wifi set up. It is simply so outragesouly bad that you shouldn't do it even if you live in the woods and have no neighbours with wifi gear... What you should do is share a sub-folder on...

You will hit lots of walls with a 98 system as time goes by. Driver support these days is pretty iffy and getting worse, for instance. Stop spending any money on the old system and save up for a new one. As has been mentioned, new systems aren't that pricey, especially if you look for deals...

I kind of like Keepass. It's even integrated in the very nice PortableApps system; http://portableapps.com/ - I run that on a Sandisk titanium USB key that's on my keychain and is holding up very nicely due no doubt in part to the tough exterior and retractable USB connector. That gives you...

Also kudos to Sun Microsystems. They were the ones who owned Staroffice and gave the code away so that OpenOffice could be born. They're releasing tons of their code as open source these days, including Java now, and what is IMHO the best server operating system on the planet, Solaris.. Two...

Buy the cheapest laptop hardware you can find that is sufficient. You can get by with 512MB of memory, but 1GB is great. Once you've done that, download Ubuntu Linux for free, burn it onto a CD, put CD in new laptop and boot it, then install and you should have Openoffice, Opera (or if you must...