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Showing posts from March, 2008

how i saved my windows xp installation with knoppix

so its true. the difference between a ' digital native ' and a 'digital immigrant' is the amount of information that they contribute to the world. I absolutely hate having to wade through google searches to find an answer to my problems, so I try to post here about some of my tech adventures (even though it might be nerdy ) hoping that one day a spider would come and crawl/index it and provide answers to people for the same questions I couldn't find answers to! So I tried to upgrade the ATI Radeon drivers on my Windows machine for my old video card (thinking it would improve performance! hah! no.) but I could not get Direct3d to work for my ol' Radeon 9500. After the 26 or so re-boots fiddling with the hardware, the hardware connections and the hardware drivers, something finally happened to my Windows XP OS partition. It got fried. I tried to boot up, but after the BIOS loaded I would get the error: Windows XP could not start because the following file i

The Internets Is Scary Sometimes

Sometimes, you think that you are covered on the internets (all of them!), but then I get an email like this to my primary account: As a courtesy, we are notifying you that XXXXXX users have found the following accounts for you:    Flickr tmarthal on Flickr    Digg tmarthal on Digg    MySpace birddog on MySpace    Picasa marthaler on Picasa If you would like to make these accounts private, please change the privacy settings on the original network and XXXXXX will update its search results to reflect your changes. To find your friends on XXXXXX, signup now. I removed the company that sent the email, not sure that I want to encourage this type of email and account harvesting. The point is, that someone, somewhere has correlated my different accounts on my various networks to my single email signon. Someone, somewhere knows my that the articles dugg on digg are associated with the pictures that I post on flikr ! So, when I don't post anything, they can check my pict