Graftark Tech enthusiast and all around nerd/geek.

Trying out Windows Live Writer

I happened to get a link to this Windows Live Writer beta, which is supposed to be a decent tool for creating blog content off-line. To say the least I was intrigued by the thought of having a stand alone application that I could use to write entries to my spartan blog. So here goes my test of the software.

Obviously, since you're reading this, the initial setup went well. The program asked me what kind of blog that Live Writer will be used with, since I use WordPress,  I told it "other" or whatever option it was that let me choose another blog type than the ones listed.  The next screen asked me for the web address and my username and password. Live Writer connected right up. I even got to choose whether or not I wanted to import the styles being used on the site so that I would be able to see how the post will look prior to it being uploaded.

It has already proved that it was worth the download already. We'll see how it performs later on down the road.

Mobile Blogging

I've had this pocket pc phone for quite some time and until now I never really had the impulse to blog from the phone. I decided to have a look into doing it but alas I have found nothing really that stands out as a decent windows mobile app to do this. Right now I have my pocketIE pointed at the blog and am writing this from there. I also want to be able to add photos from the phone so, I'm going to give that a shot.

Fixed the ol’ Compy

Well last time I posted my trusty PC was acting up like a toddler on a sugar high. I finally, got the damn thing working again. On top of that I got a little tip for the folks at home... well folks running Windows XP

If you ever need to reformat your drive to fix an issue and you need to recover the documents you had in My Documents in a password protected account. What you want to do if possible is get another hard drive, either one that you may have laying around or borrow one. Connect up the original HDD as a secondary or 'slave' drive. Install Windows on the new drive, so that you're not losing your data to the format that happens. You may also be able to create a new partition in the empty space.

Once you have the new install of Windows running, you want to hit the F8 key when Windows is loading... this will let you start the OS in safe mode. Once in safe mode you can log in as Administrator, do that. With admin privileges you can now go ahead and find the folder in question and right click it. In there you can get into the properties. There is are security settings in the properties and there you want to go ahead and take ownership of the directory and the files in there.

Microsoft actually explains it better and it's damn helpful. Wish I had found out about that earlier.

Great! I totally screwed my PC.

Being the dumbass that I am, I went and killed my MBR (Master Boot Record) by trying to fix an install of Linux (Fedora Core 6) on my PC. I wanted to run a dual boot system, which is what happened.

I had it all set up GRUB worked fine except for the fact that when I selected the Windows installation it tried to boot the wrong partition. Easily remedied by editing the commandin GRUB. The issue I was having was that when FC6 loads up I see a few lines of the startup and then the screen would go dead. No more signal. I decided that it might be the ATI graphics card that was the culprit so I removed it from the system and hooked up an old monitor to the VGA port. Same thing happened, so I decided to try reinstalling FC6... this is where things take a turn for the worse.

Upon reboot, the GRUB loader doesn't do its normal thing instead it just gives me a GRUB command line. Oh yeah, I am nowhere near a very competent Linux guy. So I try figuring out the GRUB loader... I get it to load Linux, same loss of video signal occurs. Reboot try to figure out how to load Windows from GRUB to no avail. Crap... I then proceed to boot from the recovery cd to get myself to a DOS prompt. From there I did fixmbr in hopes of at least getting Windows to load correctly. Reboot, swear a lot as the boot record I fixed is now booting from the recovery partition.

Oh yeah fun times ahead... running chkdsk now because there ws another issue I had pop up that suggested I do so. Not good... PC still not fixed and I have to go to work soon.