Computing on Demand

Hard Drive Encryption

Joe DiFiglia — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:54:49 +0000

It seems that the world is going crazy; everyone wants everyone else’s information. Some companies are going to great lengths to protect their data. Laptops have gone missing or stolen with tons of important data on them, copy machines have latent images on the hard drives that can contain vital or important private information on them. So what can be done about all this? Some companies, including my own, have started encrypting hard drives. This is nothing new as types of encryption have been around for thousands of years (ever watch an Indiana Jones movie?), but it seems as soon as something makes the news, the purchasing departments or C level staff finally listens to IT. Full disk encryption does more than protect specific files on a hard drive; it encrypts every sector on the drive, including those occupied by swap space, temp files, and hibernation files. By encrypting every Read More...

Add an About the Author to Your WordPress Theme

Joe DiFiglia — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:03:38 +0000

There is a lot of functionality that a plugin can add to your WordPress configuration, but for some reason I can’t feel comfortable relying simply on plugins for everything. When something simple comes along that can be done without a plugin, I would much rather go that route. With that said, I had been looking for an easy way to add some information about the author to display on every article. It turns out that this is VERY easy to do and DOES NOT require any plugins to accomplish. This solution uses some WordPress hooks…To start, there are two files that you will need to edit, single.php and style.css. In your single.php simply find the area you would like to display your “About the author” information and paste the following.  <div id="author-info"> <div id="author-image"> <a href="<?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?>"><?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_meta('user_email'), '90', '' ); Read More...

Separate WordPress Posts with an Image

Joe DiFiglia — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:35:57 +0000

For a lot of us, transitioning from one post to another can be difficult to do. I try to do it with a Post Thumbnail, but it just seems like it is missing something. There is an easy way you can separate posts with a separator image and all you have to do is modify your theme’s style.css file.You must start by creating an image or finding an image for the separation. Feel free to take ours Edit your theme’s style.css file find .post { and change the contents. Before: .post { margin : 0px 0px 15px 0px; } After: .post { margin : 0px 0px 15px 0px; background : transparent url(images/postseparator-468.jpg) no-repeat bottom; } That’s all there is to it.

Spire Coolers PacificBreeze II – SP302AP-B

Joe DiFiglia — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:32:05 +0000

Until recently, I have never really been a huge fan of laptops. I am given one for my company, but until I decided to get married I had no reason to be in the living room. Now that my time can’t be dedicated to being in my office on my desktop PC, a laptop has become a necessity. Although they are named laptops, few of us actually put them on our laps. The reasons for this vary as much as the reasons for purchasing one in the first place. My reason is simple… THAT THING GETS HOT! Spire has suggested that getting a laptop cooling product to keep my precious little laptop cool. Enter the Spire PacificBreeze II – SP302AP-B. The idea behind the PacificBreeze II is simple, it provides cooling for your laptop beyond the shotty little 40mm fans used for heat dissipation on most of these laptops. The Read More...

Add a Custom Logo to the WordPress Login Screen

Joe DiFiglia — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:47:23 +0000

There are many things about WordPress that make life easy… and a few that are a real pain in the butt. One of the pains is the login form’s logo and url. If you are like me, you want to brand your sites and doing so gives the site that extra touch of personalization. Not to mention, if you are designing a site for a customer, you don’t want a big fat logo for WordPress linking to the WordPress.org site on the login form. By simply overwriting the logo-login image in your WordPress wp-admin/images/ folder you risk having the original WordPress image restored every time you update your installation. The bad news is that there is no way to do this from your WordPress dashboard, the good news is that you can do this easily by editing your theme’s functions.php file. 1. create an image with the dimensions 326 wide Read More...

Delaying your WordPress RSS Feed

Joe DiFiglia — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:46:17 +0000

I can’t tell you how many times I have written an article, hit publish, then realized that I made some mistakes. It doesn’t matter how much I proofread a post, it happens all the time. With that, our readers get these articles delivered to them through my feed. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could delay the feed a bit, just in case I have to make a change? Well, you can… and this is how. The code below will delay your feed for 30 minutes. You can change the time it takes by editing the integer and designating the time in minutes, hours, days, etc. 1. edit your theme’s functions.php file 2. paste the following code between the <?php and the ?> //-------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Start Delay Feed // -------------------------------------------------------------------------- function publish_later_on_feed($where) { global $wpdb; if (is_feed()) { // timestamp in WP-format $now = gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // value for wait; Read More...

The Dangers of Email

Joe DiFiglia — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:09:37 +0000

As our world becomes more digital and the number of “personal” interactions with other people declines, we rely more on email and texting than phone conversations. There are a few drawbacks to this and I can bet that you have found yourself on one end or the other. As our interactions move more to email, we have to realize that these interactions are done without understanding inflections in voice and tone. It is becoming more common to misunderstand emails based on this and our responses may be out of line, and possibly detrimental to our career or relationships. I can tell you from personal experience that misreading an email can have an impact on a relationship with a fellow employee or customer. What can be first read to be demeaning or insulting can later be read as a joke or common office humor. All too many times our realization comes Read More...

StarTech – Computer Service Tool Kit

Joe DiFiglia — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:45:48 +0000

Every enthusiast faces the time when they have to do something to their computer and realizes they can’t find the tool they need to do it. There have been plenty of times when I scratched a trace on my motherboard and couldn’t find my soldering gun or needed a Torx screwdriver and lost the heads. It would be nice if I could get most of the tools I need to do what I need to do and keep them safe. Keeping them stored in a nice zippered vinyl case instead of throwing them in a drawer to fumble through or forgetting them somewhere. Oh! Wait! There is… Enter the StarTech Computer Service Tool Kit. The StarTech Computer Service Took Kit is nothing revolutionary, extraordinary, or spectacular. It is simply a collection of tools that many of us use on a daily basis packaged nicely in a vinyl zippered carrying case. Read More...

Windows 7 Upgrade hangs at 62%

Joe DiFiglia — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:45:21 +0000

My Windows woes continue. This time around, I have been trying to upgrade my Laptop running Windows Vista to Windows 7 Professional. After initiating the upgrade process it would stall at 62% and give no indication as to what would cause the issue. Well, after a bunch of research and much less hair, I have an answer for you. The cause of the issue can be traced to the Iphlpsvc service not responding during the upgrade. To verify that this fix will work for you, check the Seupact.log file for the following: Warning [0x080b50] MIG AsyncCallback_ApplyStatus: Progress appears to be stuck. Current progress: 62 To open the setupact.log file during the upgrade process, press SHIFT+F10 to open a command prompt, type C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log, and then press ENTER. To open the setupact.log file after the computer rolls back to Windows Vista, click Start, type C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log in the Start Search box, and then Read More...

The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation

Joe DiFiglia — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:26:42 +0000

In my efforts to get my company’s demo rooms up and running with the solutions we offer to our customers, I have been faced with numerous Windows errors and issues. The one I have been faced with today was an error message stating “The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.” However, I am the administrator and I haven’t set any policies on this machine yet!There are two methods I have seen to try to resolve this problem. However, mine was solved by employing the second method listed. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Safer\CodeIdentifiers Note Before you modify this key, we recommend that you back up this key. To do this, right-click CodeIdentifiers, and then click Export. Save the file to a location where you can find it on the computer. Change Read More...