I recently moved and tried using my cell phone exclusively. Didn’t work. I decided that I needed a house phone. However, I use a house phone so infrequently that it really isn’t worth $20 per month to the cable company. I decided that I could try Skype. I found this usb phone on Amazon for $6.40. A Skype subscription is $2.99/month plus $3.00 a month for a DID (phone number). That puts me at $6.00 per month using Skype vs. $20.00 using cable, which is a savings of $168.00 per year. (Probably more when you consider that Skype is not a common carrier and so they don’t charge FCC taxes, universal service fees, or 911 service fees)

So far it has worked great. The caveat is that it only works for Windows. However, I leave my Windows 7 VM constantly powered on in VMware Fusion so I connected the USB device to that VM. Once I installed the driver I noticed no audio quality issues. It sounds much better than my cell phone!

I am giving IOmeter a try on Linux. More specifically I am creating a minimal RedHat install that I want to install the IOmeter client on, then clone the install a few dozen times. When I tried to download the IOmeter linux client I realized that the minimal RedHat install does not include wget. Since I did not have a reliable internet connection on my MacBook I wasn’t able to connect to the RedHat repos. I was able to search and find the following process on how to configure a local repo to be able to install packages from the cdrom.

1. Create a file: /etc/yum.repos.d/cdrom.repo
   [cdrom]
   name=cdrom
   baseurl=file:///mnt/cdrom
   gpgcheck=0

    

2. Mount CDrom:
   mkdir /mnt/cdrom
   mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

    

3. Run: yum clean all

    

4. Install needed packages:
   yum install wget

    

I was helping a friend do P2V conversions of his older but still useful Dell 2950 servers, when I noticed the BIOS was version 2.2.6 and the latest BIOS available from Dell is 2.7.0. Unfortunately I had already finished the P2V migrations from Windows Server 2008 R2 and the servers were running ESXi 4.1. I was having limited success with booting a linux live CD and running the linux bin file when I stumbled upon this post. This man is a genius!

If you have two monitors and need to open side by side excel windows you might have been annoyed by Excel’s default setting of opening everything in the same window. Here’s how to fix that:

Open My Computer

Select Tools

Select Folder Options

Select the File Types tab

Choose XLSX (XLSX for 2007 and XLS for 2003)

Go to Advanced

Uncheck “browse in same window” in advanced window.

Then highlight Open

Click Edit

Make sure in the Action box it says &Open

Copy the following and paste into “application used to perform action”

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\EXCEL.EXE” “%1”

Check the box next to use DDE

Remove anything that is in DDE Message box and DDE Application Not Running box.

Make sure the application box says: EXCEL

And in the Topic box it says: System

Click OK and enjoy side by side Excel windows!