Supercow.net

Statfink released a new update recently including a new mobile phone interface.  If you play in a yahoo fantasy football league it is definetly worth checking out.  The new mobile interface is really slick.  It’s designed for the iphone but should work well with most mobile phones.  You can take it for a test run on your mobile by connecting to my server at supercow.net/statfink and selecting the iphone interface.

I was having overheating issues on my Shuttle SN85G4 XPC.  It’s an older box but it’s been running great so I decided it was worth keeping alive.  After checking the fan it seemed to be fine but the motherboard quit supplying power to the fan!  I decided the best thing to do would be to replace the fan and get a separate speed controller for the fan.  I found the Zalman ZM-OP1 after doing a little researching and it worked out perfectly.  It’s originally intended for one of their video card coolers and as a bonus contains an extra splitter that can select between Silent mode: 20 dB/1400 RPM and Normal: 32 dB/2800 RPM.

New Fan!

The box – time to tear it apart, remove the case (three screws on the back)

The Broken Fan, remove the fan (four screws on the back)

The problem – Remove the 4 screws and replace it with the new unit

Install the fan back inside the box – I used the new Zalman Cover

Hook up the speed control if your using it – I used the silent setting (white plug) – otherwise just plug it into the motherboard

It Works!!

I recently had to recreate a Vista profile again and with this process being a little more complicated in Vista than it was back in XP I thought I’d pass along the info.

If you try to do it the same way you have in the past with XP.  By deleting the profile folder as the administrator and the relogging in as the user you’ll find you get stuck in a “temporary” profile.  Which gets regenerated everytime you login.  Most likely NOT what you were looking for.  But fortunently you haven’t gotten too far off the path.

Recreating A Vista Profile

1. Login as administrator delete the username folder in C:\Users\

2. open the registry and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Locate the S-1-5-xx key which had the old profile name and delete it.

3. Reboot the system

4. Let the user login

I’m amazed at just how soon we forget. I remember not two years ago everyone complaining about the security flaws and instability of XP. Just 7 short years ago people were just getting into hating XP. Do you remember the lines? All the security is going to mess it up, it takes way to much resources, the interface is ugly! Today It seems to be much more popular to sing it’s praises and fight the discontinuation date by buying pc’s as quickly as you can while you can “still” get xp before the june 30th date.

Being in the techinical services field I generally have to be an early adopter when it comes to anything the average small business is going to get into so I’ve been running vista since release candidates. I’ve been very impressed the whole way. I now use it daily on my Asus Laptop (2ghz turion, 1 gb memory, nvidia graphics) and my desktop (p4 2.6, 1gb memory, ATI Radeon 8000 pro). I haven’t had one complaint and have had nothing but stable performance since day one. So why do the masses hate it?

1. People in general hate change. The number one complaint I hear is I can’t find what I’m looking for. This took me all of two days MAX to overcome. Come on people this OS is going to be everywhere for the next 5 years. Just learn it!
2. Many manufacturers rushed inadequate machines to market just to get those early sales when people were excited about a new OS. The machines best buy were selling just barely met the minimum specs. Just take a look at Xp’s minimum specs. Compare them to your system specs… yeah.
3. Vista is the natural progression of things. The OS itself is much more secure than xp ever will be unless you have about 3-4 third party programs protecting you. It’s much more user friendly and no the pop ups aren’t nearly as bad as apple wants you to think. As a tech person I’m glad they are there so my less tech savvy customers and friends are less likely to break things on accident.

So all I’m saying is Vista isn’t the evil looming giant some seem to think and in just a few short years any problems you might have had will be a distant memory and the masses will again be upset about the newest Microsoft offering… it’s the circle of life!

I checked my google analytics page the other day and to my surprise I had no traffic for the past couple weeks! After thinking about this little problem for a minute I realized the time traffic had dropped off was when I installed the new wordpress updates there by replacing the index.php I had edited to include the analytics code….

For those looking to install analytics please install it at the end of your footer.php for your theme or you’ll probably end up reinstalling it again a few months down the road!

I’ve been looking for a good way to forward from my highpcs.com address to include the www for a while and finally took the time to set down and do it tonight. This little bit of code can be very helpful for canonization of a domain. All you have to do is put in your .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

While that seems simple it makes things easier for the search engine that crawls your site. For instance supercow.net is different to www.supercow.net to google. Duplicate sites and content make it difficult for google to properly rank and return results for your site. I’ve also used this to forward accounts on my server to their domain so there isn’t another “way” to access their site. For example:

domain.com/~user – in this case the domain is the server hosting the sites domain and the user is the public_html account that the files are stored in.

Using the .htaccess lines above you can forward the site right on to the proper domain without any problems. For more information or other ways of accomplishing the same task click here.

Bahahaahaha!!! I’m sending this to trever now…

Me and my friend Trever have this on going debate whether or not techno is actually good. I of course take the side that it is just about 15 seconds worth of work repeated for 5 minutes to an "artistic" fade out. When your listening to music and are reminded of windows 98 because is sounds like the pc locked up and is looping five seconds of the mp3 the way 98 and winamp used too then you know your listening to techno .

Want to climb a wall or leap buildings? Me too. I think I’ll get there in just a couple more weeks of these workouts .

Vista x86 / 32-bit Update (~435 Megs)

Service pack one is finally out! While this might seems like a unimportant event for the average person tons of businesses, schools, and individuals wait for the initial service pack of a windows OS to adopt it as their default platform. So this means update your systems and expect to see vista even more than you currently do.

Even wonder how the web works? Well here’s a video to show you just how everything gets put together!