Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

Harmony 880 Remote – battery problems

I recently bought a Harmony 880 remote control. Harmony is a Canadian company recently bought by Logitech. I bought my remote from Dell for about CAD$190 delivered. It’s a great unit. There is one problem I had: battery charging. As long as the remote remained on the charging cradle, it would work. As soon as the remote was removed from the cradle, it stopped working. The problem was battery charging. The battery does

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Advocacy : give away your computer

Tonight I gave away a computer. It was the first computer onto which I installed FreeBSD. That computer was given to me by Jay. It was originally a 486 with 16MB of RAM. That computer started a whole lot of things back in 1998. I brought it from New Zealand back to Ottawa. When I gave it away, it was a Cyrix 686 with 64MB of RAM. I told the guy that the

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Dan does Utah!

I’m heading off to Utah at the end of the month. The primary goal is to do some mountain biking in Moab. I’ve been there before but it’s time to go back again. As part of my trip preparation, I contacted the Greater Utah BSD User Group (aka GUBUG. Wouldn’t you know it! They’re having an installfest on the very day I’m arriving in Salt Lake City. What a coincidence! I’ll be giving

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New box – addenda

That computer I mentioned recently, I added a SCSI card to it and enabled the second NIC. It’s now looking pretty sweet with 5.4 running on it. With the new additions, the dmesg now also contains: isp0: port 0xd800-0xd8ff mem 0xff6fe000-0xff6fefff irq 17 at device 8.0 on pci2 I plan to make this box into a Bacula testing platform for FreeBSD 6.*, add a backup DNS server for my LAN, and make it

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New box

I got a really sweet deal on a computer: Dell Optiplex GX-260 CPU 2.4 GHz HDD 20 GB RAM 512 MB CD ROM Re-Writable NIC 3COM internal speakers build-in sound card Windows XP MS-Office XP Yes, that INCLUDES the original CDs for that software, still shrink wrapped! That alone is worth the CAD$150 price. I’ve removed the HDD, put it aside, and replaced it with an 80GB drive. I’ve installed 5.4 on it

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Windows XP kept dialing out

I had a recurring problem with Windows XP. The VPN to the office kept dialing out… often when I was browsing to a web page. This became annoying. It came. It went. Last night, it was back. And increasing my frustration level. To solve the problem, I went into Control Panel | Network and Inernet Connections | Network Connections. While there, I renamed the VPN that kept dialing up. The next time it

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