Dropbox lets you put your important files in a folder on your computer and those files will be automatically backed up and synced with all other computers you share the dropbox folder with. The free account permits up to 2 gb of storage, paid accounts allow higher storage levels.

The free account works great for important files, like your Keepass wallet and things like tax returns or other important documents. The service works seamlessly in the background and supports Windows, Mac and Linux! Recommended.

Well, the old HP Pavillion laptop wouldn’t boot last week. Panic time! It kept trying to do a network boot, which failed, and just looped and looped in network boot mode.

No clue about what happened, but I suspect it may be related to hibernating while a windows update was pending a reboot.  My very first thought was that the hard drive died, but running SpinWrite against it revealed no issues or problems other than reporting that it was an empty drive.

My first step in exploring what that empty drive meant was to boot up Ubuntu from CD and seeing what it thought about the drive. The partition editor reported it empty, so time for some googling on the subject of corrupt partition tables.

Google revealed SystemRescueCD with an indispensable tool on it,  TestDisk.  Following the Step by Step instructions outlined on the Wiki found the missing partitions and quickly and easily rebuilt the partition table. Ten minutes after booting up the SystemRescueCD  it was booting to windows and back in business.

Can’t say enough about these tools, truly indispensable and my hat’s off to the authors!

Symptom: Attempts to access www.google.com using Lynx result in the error, “Google Error Bad Request” or “400 Bad Request”.

Cause: Some Linux distributions ship with a large /etc/mailcap or ~/.mailcap file that Lynx is using to send a huge Accept: header and google doesn’t like it.

Fix: In /etc/lynx.cfg, edit

"GLOBAL_MAILCAP:/etc/mailcap" to "GLOBAL_MAILCAP:/dev/null"
or
"PERSONAL_MAILCAP:~/.mailcap" to "PERSONAL_MAILCAP:/dev/null"

as appropriate (depending on which mailcap file is causing the grief).