tech

My home phone has been ported to VoIP. We beta-tested Voicepulse for about three months; everything went fine, so we put in to have the port done. Any calls to  our home number will now be digitized, packetized, fragmented, routed, and then reassembled automagically. Or so they say. Let me

Sorry about the absence. My hard drive failed and needed a complete reinstall. The important application data I had saved to CD, but I never made a system backup and, after the renovation, I had mislaid my system disks. However, the whole refit was pretty simple -- I had the

Over the past week my PC has been hit hard by spyware and the Sasser virus. Spyware is either cookies or executable code which "enhances" ones browsing experience. In my case, this included changing my toolbars, intercepting Google queries, and adding extra links to pages (e.g. "car" and "loan"

A quick note: I'm told that the new Time-Warner DVR is not capable of delivering HDTV output, for those few channels which have that today. Seems like quite an oversight. I'll have to decide which is more important, time-shifting Letterman, HDTV Leno, or several more set-top boxes to do both.

I've finally fixed the icons. If you're interested, some were found at Icon ArchiveIcons Tree looks good too. And Icon Town is over the top.

Just replace my old-fashioned digital cable box with a DVR - a tivo-like recordable cable box. Has all the old functions (video-on-demand, etc) plus the ability to record up to 30 hours of video on an internal hard-drive. So far, thumbs up. I got home with it, plugged it in,