My home computers are in need of some TLC. There are no major problems, just little things. Here is a wrap up of some of the issues and solutions, some of which the readers of this blog might find worthwhile:

About two weeks ago, I downloaded Juicen, a program that handles your “podcast” (I hate that term) subscriptions. I expected it to fail miserably, as do most RSS readers, but have been pleased with its performance. Now if I can only find worthwhile pods to cast (actually, NPR has a ton of good ones). FYI, I am running this on my primary desktop machine, which runs XP Pro and handles nearly all of my DL/UL tasks).

Today I decided I was going to deal with my inability to open links in new tabs in Firefox using the wheel button. Every Windows machine I have used except my primary one allows you to use the scroll wheel button to open a link in a new tab. In about five minutes I had the problem solved. Turns out Microsoft Intellipedia’s system-wide settings override Firefox’s mouse settings. The best solution I found is to Control Panel->Mouse and then set the wheel button to AutoScroll. Problem solved.

I have a number of large files that Windows won’t let me delete, and when I try to delete them, I am greeted by a “File In Use” error. I am running out of storage space, so this problem is becoming pressing. The “File In Use” issue is a known one and I found a very basic but possibly helpful solution here. The page gives you the basic advice of how to ensure you are not actually using the given file but also points you to a program that handles deleting, copying, and moving of files before Windows gets going. They say this should work. I am a bit hesitant but will eventually give it a try.

As previously mentioned, I’m almost out of storage space (I have a lot). And I really do need to set up a RAID 5 server. I have an old machine that has a nice tower for this type of set up and it should work well. I just need to scrap the money and time together to buy a controller card (any suggestions?) and hard drives. Ugh. I wish there was some little kid around who wanted to set this up for me. In that case, I’d just have him or her build me an entirely new machine just for this purpose. Once it will set up, I will be so happy. I even built a shelf in a closet that should be a nice spot for it.

I have noise on my line-in, making recording difficult. It has not stopped me before, but when I rearranged my apartment setup (furniture moving that involved some rewiring), I was hoping to eliminate the noise or spend time identifying the problem. Neither has happened, but it is on my agenda. But what isn’t.

I have an old laptop that I wanted to install Ubuntu on. It won’t get past the initial install screen, though. Ugh. Not an important project, but one that would be nice for music-in-the-bedroom action.