qpg

qpg

adventures in life, music & technology

Posts filed under Operating System

Silent Order: Ninite Silent Updates

I’ve been wanting to put together a script to automate software updates with NinitePro for a while now, and finally deployed my first version. Right now it simply checks to see if NinitePro is in the specified location and silently updates all the apps it can or reports back that the application is not found…. (read more)

Headhunter: Use Snipping Tool For Screen Grabs (Not Microsoft Word)

If you work in an office, chances are you will need computer support at some time. In the course of working with support, you may need to submit a picture of something on your computer screen. If you don’t know of another way, it may be really tempting to paste a screenshot into Microsoft Word… (read more)

Little Fluffy Clouds: Deploy a Bitnami ownCloud Stack on Linode

I recently gave a presentation at the Boise Cloud Computing Meetup on deploying a Bitnami ownCloud Stack on Linode. The presentation includes material from Bitnami, used with permission. It also incorporates an official ownCloud Community Edition promotional presentation created by community member John Smith. Linode was kind enough to donate some promotional merchandise to those… (read more)

Amnesia: Dissociate File Types in Windows 7

I ran into an unexpected situation yesterday where a user had inadvertently associated his Windows desktop shortcut files with an application. This led to the application trying unsuccessfully to open the shortcut file instead of launching the target file as well as changing all the icons to a document icon for the associated application. Thankfully,… (read more)

Searchin: Remove Unwanted Search Box Changes From Firefox 34

Firefox 34 introduced a new search user interface. One of the features added in this version is the ability to use an alternate search engine on an individual search by clicking a tile in a window that pops up under the search box when it is being typed in. As long time user of DuckDuckGo,… (read more)

Control I’m Here: GFI TakeControl For Linux

NEP Control Remix

It’s no secret that I prefer to work in Linux. It’s where I am most comfortable. My staple tools are readily available and my habits are instinctual on that system. I use Max RemoteManagement on a regular basis and that platform uses its own version of TeamViewer known as TakeControl. If you are a Linux… (read more)

No Escape: Escaping Characters in Windows PowerShell

cabaret voltaire

Welcome to Windows Wednesday. I’ll make no claims of regularity for this feature. I found myself needing to escape an apostrophe (a.k.a. single quote ‘) in a path while using the Exchange Management Shell. Escaping characters on Linux with a backslash \ is second nature to me, but the need had never arisen in Windows…. (read more)

Postfix authenticated relay broken after upgrade (Solved)

If you recently upgraded your Postfix mail server and found your outbound mail being refused as if it wasn’t even trying to authenticate, that actually may be the exact problem. Postfix 2.10 introduced the new setting of smtpd_relay_restrictions which can result in authenticated relay being disabled until you add a value to the new setting…. (read more)

Asus X75A WiFi Hardware Disabled (Solved)

While setting up Ubuntu 13.04 on an Asus X75A, I encountered a most frustrating error message on the wireless networking: “Wi-fi disabled by hardware switch”. Having just used the interface in Windows, I knew it shouldn’t be disabled, but I tried the key combination to toggle it to no avail anyway. The card was Atheros… (read more)