Regular readers of this Journal may remember that my wife and I drive identical 2002 Saturn SLs that we purchased brand new when we lived in the Frostbite State.

Unfortunately, my car’s air conditioner hasn’t cooled for at least the nearly seven years that we’ve lived in the Sunshine State.

Do I miss having an air-conditioned car during [more...]

Instead of the Seagate Barracuda 500GB hard drive that I was looking at a couple of days ago, last night, I ordered a Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive that has twice as much storage, twice as many positive reviews, and also works well with Linux.

Newegg.com currently has the 1TB drive on sale for only $60, including free shipping — and they also have a temporary promotional code that gave me an additional [more...]

Last night, my replacement Western Digital 500GB hard drive arrived by 2-day UPS.

Within a few minutes, I hooked it up to my computer, booted from my PartedMagic USB flash drive, and used GParted to create my required Linux partitions on it.

Then I left it connected, shut down my computer, reconnected my older hard drive (the one that already has Linux installed on it), [more...]

A couple of weeks ago, an old friend and I began to discuss bootable Linux USB flash drives — as opposed to bootable Linux LiveCDs.

I was motivated by the fact that I’m down to my last few writable CDs.

Plus, I have a 256MB USB flash drive that is too small to use for much of anything else.

But, in the past, every time I’ve [more...]

The other day, I downloaded the current Debian Squeeze (Stable) 6.0.2.1 Xfce+LXDE installation CD and installed its default Xfce choice from scratch onto a brand new ext4 hard drive partition of my existing Debian Wheezy PC.

Afterward, I added a few additional packages from the Debian Squeze repositories, including the Synapic GUI package manager and DesktopNova, my favorite automatic desktop wallpaper changer.

Then, in DesktopNova’s settings, I [more...]

A couple of months ago, I ordered a new Western Digital 500GB SATA hard drive from Walmart.com.

I was planning to reinstall Debian Linux on it from scratch, using ext4 partitions, while still keeping my older SATA hard drive, so that I could boot it up and use it until my new Linux setup was completely configured and ready to hit the ground running.

Several days later, [more...]

Windows users are extremely familiar with certain computer terms.

Malware, spyware, rootkits, spyware, and viruses.

The ways that they spread, and the ways that they affect computers, are often very similar to the ways that biological “malware” spreads and affects human beings.

So one writer recommends that we [more...]

Keith’s girlfriend called me last night.

Her Windows laptop computer was having serious problems again.

It started when she received an email from a Web site that she visits.

And she clicked on a hyperlink that was in that email message.

A whole bunch of [more...]