Archive for February, 2011
Synergy – Control multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse.
Feb 27th
There is an awesome writeup on Synergy by Adam Pash over at LifeHacker today. I have been using it for sometime now and you should check out the post and applications.
If you have two or more computers at one desk, you don’t want two or more sets of keyboards and mice cluttering up your workspace, too. You can buy a hardware gadget that lets you share a single keyboard and mouse with several computers (which involves a mess of tangled wires), or you could use a free software solution called Synergy. The Synergy application runs on all the computers you’re using—the one that has the keyboard and mouse connected and the one(s) that do not—and lets you control all of them from that keyboard and mouse. That means you can move your mouse off one computer’s screen and it will appear on the other, where you can type and work as well. Synergy also lets you share Clipboard contents between computers. If you copy information to the Clipboard on one computer and move your mouse to the other, you can paste it there, even though they’re two different systems.
Read the whole post at Lifehacker here or grab the app here.
Do you know the sound of a failing hard drive? Data Cent Does and they recorded them!
Feb 7th
Check this out and then click through to hear the failing drive sound tracks by hard drive manufacturer and issue. Remember that all drives will eventually fail. It is definitely beneficial to know what a dying hard drive sounds like. I have been around dying drives for years and can typically tell you what is wrong with a drive by listening to it. So now is your chance to learn to listen to a hard drive like a pro. And this was a great idea in posting this on your website DataCent! I can only imagine the traffic it has brought you…
These are some typical sounds we hear in our data recovery lab. If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files – backup immediately…
To listen to the sound simply click on the play button. Click on the drive manufacturer next to the sound button to learn more about common problems these drives experience.
Click here to jump to Data Cent’s website (looks like they do data recovery) and listen to/download sounds of failing drives. There just might be an awesome practical joke in this for me…
Traffic surge takes AskTheAdmin offline. We use a caching plugin to bring it back…
Feb 7th
A little traffic surge of about 20,000 hits took our favorite tech support WordPress site – AskTheAdmin.com. It was my fault for not updating our caching plugin and it was not running properly. So after recieving several emails and phone calls I called our hosting company. As I was waiting on hold I got an email detailing the issue. They disabled the front end of WordPress but the backend was still up.
I was able to get into the wp-admin interface and uninstall the old caching plugin and install W3 Total cache the traffic was not as heavy when Gator reinstated the site but the 7,500 hits did not bring the server down. Learn a lesson from us no caching eats up server resources – enable a caching plugin like W3 today so it is running when you need it.
Thanks everyone for sticking with us!
