somewhat recently, adobe has pulled all support for 64 bit flash player on linux. debian has also remove the support from it’s non-free archives so the flashplugin-nonfree package no longer works properly. i find that gnash and swfdec are pretty lacking and are not compatible with all websites which is a major problem for me. after searching online, i found a 64 bit copy of libflashplayer.so and wanted to install it the debian way using update-alternatives. here are the steps to install it properly: ...

so you already have some songs in your itunes library and you want to make custom ringtones from them but don’t want to pay for them from the itunes store or the ringtone doesn’t have the part of the song you want. if you are looking to do just that, then you’re in luck and all you need to create your own ringtones is itunes itself. the steps are fairly simple. they may work similarly on osx, but i have only tested this on windows. ...

update 10/21/2011 - it appears that this bug has come up again with a number of people who have updated to iOS 5. luckily, the solution is the same as before. i have updated the instructions to help with any changes that iOS 5 added. before you start - this will only work if your photos actually exist on your device but do not show up in in the camera roll. you can verify that photos exist on your device by looking graph at the bottom of iTunes and by checking your device for the actual picture files. if you post comments about having problems but don’t mention that you haven’t verified that your photos are still available on your device, i’m sorry but i won’t be able to help you. ...

so what happens when your ipod dies? what if you get a new one and simply have no use for your old one? if you don’t have a use for your ipod or it is broken and you have determined that it’s a model with a hard drive and it is still in working condition, you can simply turn it into an external hard drive. i had a 5th gen video ipod that had a circuit board go bad and it already had a battery that wouldn’t hold a charge. instead of buying parts to repair it, it just went ahead and bought a new one. ...

i’ve seen tons of posts around the internet regarding backing up itunes. most of them seem to focus on backing up your itunes library. while this is great, it doesn’t cover everything you probably want to back up when doing something like a complete reinstall of windows. if you only back up your library, you will lose your settings as well as your playlists. if you are like me, you have your music stored on a central server somewhere so backing up your music on your local computer is pointless anyway. ...

this really isn’t much of a howto or anything, but it really amazes me what sorts of stuff i will find when cleaning out my computer closet. i decided to reorganize things so it didn’t look like a total jumbled mess since i have a few extra computer cases and boxes of random parts. while moving the cases around, i found nearly two whole computers. they aren’t anything to get excited about (amd duron 1600 and an intel celeron d 2.66) but i totally forgot that i had them! usually i pull all extra parts before tossing things in the closet but it would appear that these were forgotten at some point. i have no clue what i might do with them as i need a bit of ddr to make them actually useful and i don’t really have much of a need for more computers. i guess it is time to think of a new project to make use of an old computer besides a firewall or nas… ...

when i am at work, i use a ssh tunnel when i need to bypass the proxy server. this works great except for when i visit certain sites with a large number of big images. one site would be boston.com - the big picture. it has a large number of high quality images and the ssh tunnel just doesn’t seem to be able to handle the traffic. when the number of http requests overloads the ssh tunnel and then i get the message ’network error: software caused connection abort’ as seen below. ...

with this post, i am going to be keeping things pretty simple. i was recently asked why i didn’t have a favicon setup for my blog and website, i figured now is just as good of a time as any to create one. i just wanted something extremely simple. figured just my initials would work for the time being. now that i figured what i actually wanted, i then had to create it. so i loaded up photoshop and made my 16×16 favicon and went to save it and realized that photoshop (at least the version i have, 7.0) does not have .ico file support. a quick google search led me to the web site of Telegraphics. on the site, they have a plugin that works with photoshop to add .ico support. installation was more than simple (just check out the included readme if you really can’t figure it out). all i had to do was use the ‘save as’ function to save it as an .ico file. then i just uploaded my new ‘favicon.ico’ to the root directory of my blog and voila, i now have a favicon. ...

i have owned an acer travelmate 2420 for about 5-6 years or so and i have noticed, especially more recently, that my cpu temperatures were pretty high. the cpu would idle around 60-65°C. a couple years ago, i started taking the laptop apart to see if there was access to the processor to reapply the thermal paste. turned out that it wasn’t so easy to get to so i simply gave up since i couldn’t find a service manual for it anywhere online. since the temps seemed to keep getting worse, i decided to try to look again. ...

as many people are aware, many ISPs block traffic on port 25 in order to attempt to prevent spammers from using bot infected hosts on their networks. this can be a problem for people who want to run a mail server from their home connection. yes, i realize that running an email server violates the TOS of most providers but that is a discussion for another day. i personally use my email server as a learning experience but i also use it for my primary personal email. ...