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I recently had an ISP service interruption at home, leaving me without a working Internet connection for a few hours. I used my iPhone to tether into my 3G connection, did a few speed tests, and wondered how it compared to my regular (cable modem) internet connection. Here are the test results.

Prompted by the latest Kali update (the rolling Sana), I looked through all my USB stick and decided to update them all. One such stick has Tails, the privacy and anonymity minded OS on a stick with Tor and i2P, used by privacy advocates all over the world (including Edward Snowden).

Now that the latest LTS is out, I thought the time is ripe to upgrade.

I have bunch of old, dusty laptops running around, and, obviously, I've been working to install linux onto them. Whenever I turn them on, I have to solve the same problems, so rather than repeatedly looking for the solutions I cannot memorize, I'd rather add them here.

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.

Continuing my SSD saga with windows installation. For what is worth, I have original Windows licenses with COA for all the new computers and laptops I purchased plus I even purchased and additional Windows license from DigitalRiver, as a student, for about $39. Unfortunately, that license was supposed to be for Windows Professional, as I ordered and was instead for Windows Home, which although at the same price point, lacked important functionality. I tried to contact the reseller to get the problem rectified but that was not possible (no response). Needless to say, I’m not as happy as one could be.

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.

One of the most annoying "features" in Windows is the "Compressed Folders" feature, where Zip files are displayed as folders. While this may be nice for some, most users accumulate a large number of zip files in a folder, making it unviewable in Windows Explorer. We look at how to get rid of it.

One of the most annoying "features" of windows is undoubtedly the zip folder feature - for those of us who prefer to use a full featured archiver program.

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.

If you have ever participated in an auction, you may have sometimes lost what seemed like a very good deal at the very last minute. We will describe here how and why that might happen and how you could as well win an auction at the last minute.

I will be writing this guide as I perform every step. Hopefully it will be helpful to you as well. An UPDATED VERSION was published 1 year later.

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 our salute dedicated to Microsoft Windows 7 milestone, it is only natural to repeat our welcome to Windows 8 RTM and answer the burning question “where can I get the ISO?” .

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!

In the previous article on the joys and pitfalls of freeing your Apple portable devices from Steve Jobs technoid BDSM prison, we briefly discussed the advantages and disadvantages of jailbreak. In this article we get a bit more hands-on and look at the actual methods of achieving this. Although just released, iPad has already been jailbroken (see video below) and an announcement will be made about iPhone OS 4.0 soon.

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.

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.

I am quite happy with Windows 7 Home Premium. However, I sometimes have to leave the computer on and unattended and would not want it to restart, especially if it's rendering a movie.

I have Windows 10 Enterprise Tech Preview on a "slow release" schedule. However, after each upgrade, I am forced to go through the same activation error: 0x8007007B. Here's how it went last time I fixed it.