Originally published at www.linux.com on December 09, 2008 at 09:00 AM; reprinted with the author’s permission. Corporations and home users alike need firewall protection. Many choices abound, including some expensive, commercial options that only run on specialized hardware. Others, like SmoothWall Express, are freely downloadable, built on the same...

Once again, I have pestered the editors at the ordinarily refined Linux.com into publishing an article.  I had a harder time getting this one right.  I was stuck in a fiction writing mode–half of the sentences I wrote were in passive voice.  Very frustrating–probably more so for the editors. http://www.linux.com/feature/154568 In any case, go...

I’m very happy with MythTV up to this point. It is no where near as fragile as I feared it might be–in fact, it seems to be quite robust. A recent power outage knocked its pins out from under it, but by the time I checked, the machine was already back up and running. Part of that is the BIOS setting “Last State on Power Restore,” but if the...

It has certainly been a busy month.  We just moved to a new house–which wreaked havoc with my technology.  What kicked it all off was that we couldn’t get a line-of-sight with DirecTV.  So, that made me switch to Cable TV.  And if I’m going to switch to cable, I can save money and get higher speeds on cable Internet (fortunately, I...

OpenDNS Guys and Gals, you may have never heard about OpenDNS–and that is unfortunate. This FREE (yes, that is as in “pizza”) service is the most basic and simple step you can take to secure your home and/or business network. It is actually so free and easy that you may not even need me to tell you how. There are great technical instructions...