Consumed Consumer . org

For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of running a TOR relay for my own privacy reasons and to give back to the community as well. Though my router and NAS (and possibly even my WD Live box) have enough chutzpah to run it, I prefer to use a very old computer instead for reasons of separation (security). For a while, I even considered buying a Raspberry Pi or some other similar cheap gizmo, then I remember I have a bunch of old computers I've never used..

After discussing options in choosing a cheap, low-end, learning VPS , we take a look here at how to set it up for secure use, for when you get a so much for so little, you want to make sure it’s only yours!

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

I recently had to play a bit with a new installation of Ubuntu and again, old unnerving ghosts came back to haunt me. Since these ghosts have a habit of tormenting indiscriminately, I am sharing my solutions with you.

After a few attempts which ended in failure, I managed to format my 2 x 2TB 4k Western Digital drives . Now that it’s done, it seems incredibly simple. It is also “sticky”, meaning it does not need to be performed on each reboot (DUH!).

We recently needed an older computer and discovered we had forgotten a login password. Our development server for designing and testing a website will most likely reside on an older laptop running in dual boot with Windows XP SP 3 and Backtrack Linux 5.

There seems to be a mistaken belief that in order to gain superuser access (or to do serious development or, to use a popular misnomer, “hacking”, one has to “jailbreak”, or as it is called everywhere other than iOS, “root”. Let us see how anyone can do most of it using an excellent and completely free hack (or app) called Termux.

There was a time when having a “media center” involved building an HTPC, which was a difficult project to undertake, wrought with frustrations and hardware/software incompatibilities. OTA HDTV came along and many felt left behind just when they had gotten things working. Some experimented with Popcorn while others played with NZBs/NNTP/Usenet downloads. After all these years, one media interface has emerged dominant: XBMC / Boxi / Kodi.

As we shift our home to using more and more Internet services such as VOIP , it becomes necessary to replace the existing router, which is usually not able to handle well multiple connection and QoS. We are looking at the current alternatives on the market.

Maybe you have run into your current webhost limitations or you discovered that running your own server is cheaper than whatever piecemeal services a dedicated provider might sell you. Or maybe you want to run a service that is either not offered or too expensive for your requirements. Or you consider a VPS an essential part of a mobile lifestyle. Either way, we shall quickly review how to accomplish that.

I recently installed 11.10 on an old Toshiba tablet - color me impressed. I was itching to try this new version especially since I just inadvertently blew up the linux 10.10 partition in my old dual boot Toshiba Tablet and rather than fix it I had decided to wait for the new release.

After installing Windows, I started playing with it extensively. These are the voyages of the Windows 10 Technical Evaluation, its continuing mission to explore strange new apps and computing paradigms, to seek out better GUIs, to boldly go where no stylus pen has gone before. In this article we will look at partitioning for dual boot with Linux and the very first impressions.

After successfully formatting my 2 new Western Digital 2TB discs properly, with the "advanced 4k option" , the time has come to move all the data from my existing 2TB array (1 TB + 1 TB in RAID 0) to one of the new drives. The quickest way to do this is to connect the drive via the NAS unit USB port.

After having a look at the more specific driver issues related to installing the latest version of Ubuntu linux on my Toshiba Tablets , it’s time to have a more general – and, hopefully, useful to more readers – look at what’s new and what needs to be changed in this new install. Obviously, I’m building upon my previous install notes ( 10.10 ).

When working on the CLI (command line interface) or, as it is widely known, "the prompt", most people prefer to set certain shortcuts as typing the same thing over and over is not something anyone enjoys. In Linux, such shortcuts are called aliases. This is a continuation from choosing and then setting up your first VPS .

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.

Over the years, I tried many hardware solutions to bring “convergence” to the PC desktop, but I found most implementations to be flawed one way or another. The new contender from Silicon Dust seems to be the perfect solution.

Have you noticed your Internet connection getting sluggish even while your Speed-tests show no slowdown? Are your VoIP conversations breaking up and becoming unintelligible especially when torrent downloading? If your answer is yes, you might benefit from the following tips.

Speedtest - how fast are you? : I clocked 2 short of 60 WPM, which is not bad on a laptop keyboard :)

Although I have purchased my WRT-610n router (pretty much the same as the newer E3000 ) many months ago, only recently was I forced to install the Linux firmware on it – mostly due to lack of time and procrastinating. This is primarily due to some issues with my Internet connectivity, which I am hoping could be solved with a better router.