NZ Tekonverse

New laptops being shipped today have a native resolution of 1366×768. Previously it was 1280×800. Before that it was 1024×768. Considering I can get 1280×1024 or 1440×900 on the desktop the trend to increase only the width of the screen while keeping the height roughly the same seems backward. Application and OS design favours horizontal…

This is my latest acquisition from Trademe, and a very good one at that – the T5720 is almost a current model (not quite) and this particular one was made only four years ago. Although this one, which cost me $83, has 256 MB of RAM, I have ordered some more for it in order…

Back about two years ago when we were fully in the swing of installing projectors in our classrooms, I had to come up with a scheme for getting wall plates in for the VGA cables that connect projectors and laptops. Up until now all that has been available or easy to find has been a…

This photo is of the inside of a well known and supposedly high quality (Australian) brand of plugbox which I would have unhesitatingly recommended to anyone until recently. Observe the earth contacts on the two left hand sockets, which have a much wider gap than the two on the right. The left hand pair are…

Offline Files is a technology that was first introduced in Windows XP. And it was pretty much of a dog back then. We did experiment with getting some laptop users to have it running, because we hoped it was going to make automated backups of their stuff. The problem with the earlier versions of Offline…

This has been a recurring situation ever since we started with Vista and Windows 7. Basically when the user logs in, if verbose login messages are disabled (a GPO setting), they just see “Please wait”. If verbose messages are enabled, they see a number of different messages about policy processing, but the one that is…

Here is some useful information on the security of computers which are connected to a network. This is phrased in a Q&A format to try to give a good understanding of how computer security works, and how this changes when connected to networks. It applies to most versions of Windows but some information may be…

This refers to the 32 bit system file distribution for Musac Classic Jan2010 Secondary package (2.0.2008.4). There are two different MSIs that could be extracted from the install package to be considered for unattended installation. Since Musac appears not to want to support any unattended / automated installation (it is specifically noted as such in…

With the problems still happening after all this time and the number of users affected it is looking very much like the Window 7/2008 compatible drivers won’t work with Windows Server 2003 print servers. Print queues on a 2003 print server are having serious problems but queues on a 2008 server are unaffected. Next step…

In a previous post I referred to the refocusing of the OLPC project. Part of the reorganisation was to split off the Sugar shell from the core OLPC project, at which time Sugar Labs became separate and has developed the shell in its own right for a number of platforms. Since there is so much…