How to

Local SEO: How To

If you own a brick and mortar small business you may have heard of SEO (search engine optimization) or even the more specific form of SEO, “Local SEO”. Maybe you have been wondering what these two terms mean or if you should care at all. You should!

SEO is the process of influencing the factors […]

How to Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive

In order to create a bootable USB Flash Drive, you will need some knowledge of computers.  I will attempt to make these directions as simple as possible, but even I can be a bit obtuse at times.  (Who said that?)   Also note that there are other ways to do this, but I am going to share the way that I know works.  Here’s how to create a bootable USB flash drive.

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How to hack your Amazon Kindle to read all your ebooks and documents including .pdf, .doc, .xls, chm, .lit, etc..

What is a Kindle?
First off, the Kindle is Amazon’s entry into the ebook reader market.  It joins the Sony PRS-505 Reader which has been around for awhile but, it adds a lot of interesting features such as a free built-in wireless connection that allows you to tap into Amazon’s online bookstore from just about anywhere you can access Sprint’s EVDO cellular data network.

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How to setup Clonezilla on Linux (Ubuntu). Quick start guide.

Replace Symantec Ghost Enterprise with Clonezilla.
Since posting my article listing the open source alternatives to Symantec Ghost Enterprise, I have received a lot of questions related to installing and configuring Clonezilla, so I thought it would be a good idea to post a “quick start guide” for installing Clonezilla.

The following applies to setting up a network boot environtment using the PXE capabilities of your network card. If you simply want to image a single machine, then I suggest you use the Clonezilla Live CD. You simply boot your system from the CD, mount a network drive, and save your image to the network. It is the same as using a ghost boot disk in DOS but, without all the network card configuration.

If you are anything like me then you don’t like having to remember what you did with a boot disk and have to image a system a lot more often then a couple of times a year. In that case, follow along to setup a Clonezilla server your clients can use to boot from without the need for a boot disk.

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How to listen to Sirius online with your Nokia N800 N810 internet tablet.

I’ve had a subscription to sirius satellite radio for the last four months and I can’t say enough good things about it. The best thing about it, besides the lack of commercial interruptions and music selection, is that with the online streaming, you don’t really need to purchase a sirius radio as long as you have an internet connection where you want to listen. This is the case for me.

Over the the last few months I have been able to integrate sirius with MythTV, my Linux and Mac laptops, and now my Nokia N800 internet tablet.

Radio? We don’t need no stinking radio!

I would like to give credit for most of the grunt work to jtyrrell and m00s3computer of the internettablettalk.com forums. All I did was clean up their instructions and verify the procedure.

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OSX boot options.

Like Windows, OSX has a number of options you can invoke at startup. One example of this would be holding down “c” during the boot up sequence in order to boot from a CD. That is just one example. I thought I should list the rest for my “OSX noob” friends.

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How to listen to Sirius online radio with Linux or OSX.

I never thought I would actually pay for radio until a co-worker of mine signed up for Sirius satellite radio when Howard Stern made the switch to Sirius. Now, Howard Stern I could care less about but, this gave me my first extended exposer to the music channels. Every afternoon, for weeks, I would hear a great song off an album I had long forgotten, on the Alt Nation channel, wafting over the cube wall. I was just about sold.

The only problem remaining was reception. My co-worker sat next to a window and was having reception problems despite Sirius having a land based repeater in our market. I’m located closer to the center of the building so using a satellite radio probably wasn’t going to work. So I waited. Sirius offered online streaming but it was only a 32k stream. Not going to work for me.

Finally, Sirius started offering near CD quality streams but, only offered a Windows based player in a browser. I love my tunes but, not enough to switch back to Windows. So the hunt was on to find a way to stream Sirius online to Linux or OSX. If you want to try Sirus for three day for free sign up here.

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Lost your reason to live? How to retrieve a password in windows.

Recently, a friend of mine contacted me about a friend of hers, whose sister died tragically and the friend needed to access her sisters computer. Fortunately and Unfortunately, her sister kept her windows password in her head. Now her head is gone and we needed to get the password. (I’m think I’m going to hell for that one) I did some research and here are some ways to help you retrieve the password from your sisters head computer.

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How to install WordPress on OSX using MAMP to make life easier.

Disclaimer:
A lot of the people asking me how to install WordPress on OSX have new babies. I’d like to apologize up front to the rest of the internet for bringing more new baby sites to the internet and thus hindering the speed at which we all can download music. Sorry.
How to install WordPress on OSX using MAMP

Since starting this web site I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how easy it is to use WordPress. The answer is it couldn’t be easier but, I would recommend that you setup a development environment first so you can test everything. That led to a second set of questions from all my friends that use OSX. How do I setup a test environment on my Mac? I know that the Apache web server is included in OSX but I can’t figure out MySQL or PHP. It’s true that OSX comes with Apache, and you could use it, but there is a much simpler way. Use MAMP.

MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. You have probably heard of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) which is the standard web development platform on the internet. There is also WAMP; Windows, Apache, so on and so forth. One more acronym, WIMP; Windows, IIS (Internet Information Server. The default Windows web server), MySQL, and PHP. I’m so clever. You also might be thinking that I’m not very clever because I felt the need to explain what IIS was. In either case, I don’t care and you are probably correct.

All these acronyms provide all the necessary components to run WordPress locally on your given platform. In this case, the wonderful OSX.

Anyway, read on to learn how to install WordPress on OSX using MAMP.

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How to kill a windows task at the command line.

Someone here at the office just asked me how to kill a process in XP at the command line. Presumably they wanted to kill a process in a batch file. Seeing I had to look it up myself, I thought it might be useful to you too.

If you know the name of a process to kill, for example sol.exe (the solitaire game), use the following command from a command prompt to kill it:
taskkill /IM sol.exe
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