In the process of finding updated Win7 64-bit drivers for my Dell laptop to try and improve my suddenly degraded wireless speeds I found my new favorite diagnostic tool: inSSIDer. Updating drivers has solved this kind of problem for me before but I started to wonder about how crowded the 2.4 GHz spectrum was in my neighborhood. [...]
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More Dell Win7 64-Bit: Upgrade WiFi & Restore SD Reader
March 10th, 2011 
justinI’ve previously mentioned my trials with upgrading a couple year old Dell Vostro 1500 laptop to Windows 7 64-bit. The latest problems were spotty WiFi speeds with the default Win7 driver (or possibly a congested wireless channel) and no driver at all for the built-in SD card reader. Google turned up a Vista 64-bit driver for [...]
Restore Laptop Trackpad Scrolling Under Win 7 64-Bit
March 6th, 2011 justinI noticed after upgrading my Vostro 1500 to Windows 7 64-bit that I had lost vertical/horizontal scrolling on the trackpad, the generic driver Win 7 installed doesn’t appear to have those features. Of course searching Dell’s site was a waste of time as they only have 32-bit Vista drivers, why update their drivers when that [...]
Sync and Secure FileZilla With Dropbox
March 6th, 2011 justinSearching for more ideas of how to synchronize my computers with Dropbox and secure them with KeePass (like this) led me to a way to sync both the settings and FTP site list for FileZilla. FileZilla is of course the best FTP client available so if you aren’t currently using it, start. It does have one horrible problem though, it stores [...]
Reprogram Your Dell MediaDirect Home Button
March 5th, 2011 justinI recently breathed some life back into my old Dell Vostro 1500 laptop, going from 1GB to the max 4GB of RAM and upgrading from Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit. Even before the upgrade it bothered me that the lone “programmable” hard button wasn’t customizable at all, it only launched Dell’s MediaDirect software which [...]
Delete Duplicate Google Contacts From Your iPhone
March 3rd, 2011 justinSo at some point my iPhone reverted to storing contacts on the phone instead of on my Google account. You can see if some contacts are only on the iPhone by opening your contacts list, then clicking the Groups button in the top left. If you see any “stored on my phone” then they aren’t [...]
Full Text RSS Feed Builder Does What It Says (Usually)
March 2nd, 2011 justinOn my continuing Mission To Restore RSS Sanity where feeds have become variously; perfunctorily truncated, plastered with ads, embedded with comments and spammed with links, I have run into Full Text RSS Feed Builder. You plug in a website and it spits out your new full text RSS feed link. In my tests it made a decent Ars Techinca [...]
KeePass and Dropbox Are Their Own Love Child
March 2nd, 2011 justinKeePass KeePass and Dropbox are an amazing solution to password security, and I can’t believe I haven’t been using the combo until now. I’ve been using Dropbox for a few years to sync files across several of my computers, such as useful utilities CPU-Z and CoreTemp, or as a way to send files to friends [...]
Digsby Has Supplanted Pidgin and Google Talk
February 6th, 2011 justinI’ve been using Google Talk for many moons, mainly because it docked in the Google Desktop sidebar I have been drifting away from. Of course Google Talk hasn’t been updated in over 3 years. As a secondary IM client I had been using Pidgin to connect to the few AIM contacts I had left, but [...]
Improve Slashdot RSS: Redux
January 30th, 2011 justinWell after my first foray into Yahoo! Pipes programming I am definitely impressed. After some searching I came across a Yahoo Pipe that removed the comments, and ads for that matter, from the Slashdot RSS feed. As a bonus it added back the inline links to the feed so you don’t have to click through to [...]
