Category Archives: Software

Quick and Dirty (Free)DOS Bootable USB Drive Under Linux

By jason | Published: October 23, 2009
I found myself needing to flash a BIOS today, which required a DOS or Windows 98 bootable floppy disk.  Forget that.  Let’s use a USB drive instead! Googling around returned methods that seemed way too involved for what I was trying to do.  Here’s the three commands I ended up using: wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz gunzip FDOEM.144.gz sudo dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/sdb Be [...]
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Linux ‘rename’ utility on OS X

By jason | Published: September 15, 2009
So you you want the powerful Perl-based rename utility that comes with many Linux and *BSD distributions, but sadly not on Apple’s mighty OS X? Well so did I. (Go away you fanboys of all types. I hear not your rants about which operating system is for the win) Thinking about it for a moment, I [...]
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The SoX of Silence

By jason | Published: August 25, 2009
SoX is, by their own definition, “the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation.” And no doubt it’s full of fun with slicing and dicing and playback and recording and filtering and effects capabilities. But SoX is a command line tool, which means obscure syntax and parameters in order to get things done. I’ve been trying off and on [...]
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Quietly Complaining

By jason | Published: August 23, 2009
I’m switching from DSL to cable internet.  It’s not so much that I prefer cable internet (in fact, I like the ease of the home DSL install) but our house is in the middle of town and conveniently too far from the central offices on either side of town.  It’s only like a 2 block [...]
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Windows Update Stalling/Stuck/Hang at “Searching for Updates”

By jason | Published: August 16, 2008
No time for introductions. I spent way too much time today trying for get Windows Update to work on a laptop.  When the “Searching for updates” screen would come on, sometimes the progress bar would be empty, other times it would run and run until it failed. I tried CCleaner and reinstalled the Windows Update Components.  Multiple [...]
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