“Cannot connect to the iTunes Store.
Can’t connect to the iTunes Store.
I’ve had this issue on my Windows iTunes for months. I was hoping that an upgrade to the newest iTunes would help, but it didn’t. I reinstalled iTunes, I cleared my DNS cache, and I did a bunch of other things.
Finally, I found this time. DELETE YOUR HOSTS FILE! Who knew. Anyway, that solved the issue and I’m a happy B right now.
Done. I have no idea what it fixed or added but I did it anyway. Yeah, I’m crazy like that.
* first off * I am working on a way to get my Nerd posts off the main page of my blog and make them visible only with a Category view. I’ll toy around with the PHP code later on. In the meantime, I’m just going to blog my geeky little heart out about very non interesting things right here on the main page. Suck it.
Our office printer, an HP 2430n, started curling pages recently. This went on for a month, and the only thing I could do was to replace to toner to see if it had any effect. It didn’t, of course. I called HP and the printer was out of warranty. They gave me a few tips, like to set the fuser temp to low (whch you can do from the printer’s control panel), but it didn’t really fix the problem, and with the temperature so low, the toner didn’t bond to the paper all too well and came off on my fingers when I rubbed the paper. The prognosis was that the printer needed a new fuser.
The cost of a new fuser was about $230, which wasn’t horrible. The labor to have our service comapny visit and do the work, though, was more than I wanted to spend for what seemed a simple job. So, I downloaded the service manual for the printer and figured I could do it myself. I ordered the fuser from CDW (they had it! It wasn’t the easiest thing to find at a normal office supply or computer place), and after a long backorder delay, it arrived yesterday.
Four screws, a couple plastic tabs, and three wires later and the thing was replace. Piece of cake! After powering the printer back up, I went into the control panel and reset the fuser temp. level to ‘normal’ and it’s printing properly again with no page curling.
The printer is only about two years old, and as an HP I was a little miffed that the fuser needed replacing so quickly, but at least we didn’t have to buy a whole new printer or spend $ on a repair guy to come out. Problem solved.
Here are pics of the fuser unit and the printer itself. Good times.
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Synergy is an Open Source utility that allows you to share your keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. It’s like a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) swtich, but without the V, and without the hardware. It’s free, and it works great! I liked having multiple monitors and multiple systems on my desk, but I always hated the multiple keyboards and mice. Now I have my desktop LCD monitor and my laptop sitting next to each other and both are controlled by my Microsoft Media Keyboard 3000 (I’m not a MS fan but this works really well and was only $30) and my Logitech V220 wireless mouse.
To get running, you’ll need to first download Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net) and install on each of the machines that you are going to use it on. Installation is easy. After that, just set up one machine as the ’server’ and the other as the ‘client’. My keyboard and mouse are plugged into my desktop PC, so that’s my ’server’ and then I set up the laptop to communicate with the server. It’s really pretty easy.
The initial setup took a few minutes to figure out, but the keyboard and mouse are plugged into the desktop, and Synergy is running on both machines. All I have to do is scroll off to the right of my desktop screen and I’m on the laptop. I was expecting some keyboard and mouse lag on the laptop due to Synergy running over the LAN, but it works GREAT. No lag or issues at all so far.
The software also works on Macs and Linux based machines, so you can control a PC and a Mac that you have sitting next to each other if you want to. Very useful.
Thanks to TechRepublic for posting a video blog entry about it! I never thought this type of thing existed but it’s exactly what I wanted.
My new work desk setup, complete with the two systems (well, technically 8 with the virtual machines running…):
I’ve used a few different IM programs over the years, starting with AOL IM and ICQ almost a decade ago. I now have accounts on multiple IM networks and got tired of running multiple IM programs. I’m on a PC, and I have tried Trillian, Gaim, and others. The one I’ve found to work the best and make my machine not die (*ahem* AIM and your memory hogging annoyingness..) is Pidgin. It’s little, it’s simple, and it works with all my accounts without a problem. It was brought to my attention this morning that a new version has been released, so I figured I’d post about briefly. Check it out!
