Category Archives: Computers

On public apologies

A few days ago, I flew off the handle and attacked someone on the jewish-boston mailing list for a comment which was meant in jest and which I incorrectly took seriously. I was helped to see the error of my ways by some very polite people, and this morning I sent this apology to the… Read More »

HP printers: Oh, how the mighty have fallen

My loyal readers may recall my previous complaint about HP’s bungled attempt to support the Mac with its C5280 all-in-one printer. Unfortunately, my difficulties with this printer didn’t end there. Below is the letter I recently sent to HP’s CEO about the ongoing saga of my attempt to completely the presumably simple task of purchasing… Read More »

Turning off startup animation and sound on an HTC Windows Mobile phone (AT&T 8525)

After AT&T acquired Cingular, they released a software upgrade for the 8525, one of their Windows Mobile devices. In the upgrade, they added an extraordinarily annoying boot-time animation to the phone. When you power on, you see an animated picture of the Cingular “flying bars” and then the AT&T logo. It wouldn’t bo so bad… Read More »

Setting up a chroot environment for an ssh user

Recently, I needed to set up a chroot environment for an ssh user on one of my Linux machines. That is, when this user logged into the machine, I needed it to be trapped inside a chroot “jail”, i.e., a sub-hierarchy within the filesystem, such that it would only have access to the files within… Read More »