Matt Wilkinson

PBS recently aired an episode of Frontline/World that centered on the dumping of e-waste in the African nation of Ghana as well as in China. Some journalism students from the University of British Columbia in Canada traveled there to document the tragic environmental impact of e-waste dumping, as well as some scary discoveries about data [...]

One of my job responsibilities is to generate, update, and distribute standard images for my organization’s PCs. Currently, this is done via Ghost images. One of the more tedious parts of this process is burning and duplicating several dozen DVDs, then FedExing them to various locations. The files are much, much too big to push [...]

Hello again, Gnomies. Sorry that I dropped off the posting radar again — seems to be a bad habit of mine. My wife and I adopted a puppy, and our lives have changed forever. Curtis is a Miniature Pinscher-Fox Terrier mix, and boy, is he full of energy. If you care to check out the [...]

I am pretty much in a full-time telecommuting work environment for my employer. It’s actually been a great experience for me, and I feel I am producing quality work output for my employer. All-in-all, I believe it to be a great arrangement for both myself and my employer. But all is not well in Telecommute-opolis.
Our [...]

I’d never thought I’d go and do something like this, but I “Bricked” my AT&T BlackBerry 8310 (Curve) the other day. It all started with the best of intentions, upgrading the BB device software. I’d read the other day on the Boy Genius Report, one of my favorite tech blogs (it concentrates very heavily on [...]

My wife and I continue to get settled into our new home. My home office has been pretty much fully operational for a while, but we’ve only recently gotten my wife’s home office space setup. My home office is upstairs, and I have all my equipment concentrated in that space. Her home office is in [...]

Hello Gnomies! I’m finally coming up for air after an eventful and chaotic November and December. As my last post indicated, we finally sold our home in Chicago after a full year on the market. We moved from Chicago to our new home (pictured here) in Bixby, OK (near Tulsa) over Thanksgiving week. Once the [...]

It may be a while before my next post. We finally have a buyer for our home in Chicago, so we are gearing up for moving to our new home in Tulsa, OK. We’ve been on the market for nearly a year and ended up taking an offer much lower than we would have liked, [...]

Hey Gnomies, I’ve come up for air again. Been a while since my last post, I’ve been dealing with a lot, trying to sell my home in Chicago in a “down” real estate market has been an all consuming chore. And we’re still not quite there yet, although some recent activity has given us fresh [...]

Last weekend, I finally caught up with a client that needed some help with connecting to his wireless router at home from a couple different Windows laptops. I had the client connect one of the laptops to his router via wired Ethernet so I could use LogMeIn to remote into the machine.
After a few moments, [...]

Last month, an eWeek writer did a analysis on Average Selling Prices for Windows PCs vs. Macs. The conclusion should not shock anybody: Macs are more expensive, twice as expensive to be exact. So that begs two questions: (1) Why are they continuing to sell so well (overall market share aside) and (2) why do [...]

It feels good to post again… I haven’t posted anything in quite a while, but not because I didn’t have anything to write about. On the contrary, I almost have too much to write about. I’ve just been swamped, trying to tend to every little PC issue with what seems like an endless stream of [...]

I decided to test out Thunderbird today, and I have to say I am very impressed so far. I set it up with my Google Apps/Gmail account via IMAP, and it is lightning fast compared to Outlook 2007. And Thunderbird’s interface is very clean and easy to navigate. Will these impressions be enough to make [...]

One of my customers has been experiencing off-again/on-again problems with their e-mail host. Her current e-mail host has a very miserly storage quota on their POP mail accounts, which results in her maxing out and having issues receiving mail. The good news is, there are lots of options… including Google.
I did a little research on [...]

A couple of months back, a customer asked me for help with his desktop. I’d replaced the hard drive and re-loaded it for him over a year before, but he said it suddenly starting to freeze up randomly. He dropped off the machine, and I took a quick look.
I plugged the machine into my KVM, [...]

Like taxes and death, the hype surrounding Apple’s launch of the iPhone 3G is unavoidable. I’m not an Apple hater, nor am I an Apple fanboy, so I guess I fall somewhere in between… but I still had to shrug my shoulders when it came to those people who sat/stood/crawled in the various lines at [...]

One of my customers runs a very successful dog training business in Chicago. A year ago, I’d helped her move her Web site to a new host, although we kept her domain name/DNS hosted with her original service. To facilitate this, we purchased that domain hosting company’s DNS management service, which was priced at $5.00 [...]

Last Sunday, I invested a couple more hours into troubleshooting some nasty issues with Windows Update causing my machine to lose Internet connectivity. The first installment of the saga is here, and the second installment is here.
The outcome was actually pretty decent, although far from perfect. I now have a means by which I can [...]

Last Wednesday (6/11/2008), I wrote a post about my Windows Vista PC having some major issues after auto-installing a batch of updates from Microsoft’s Windows Update service. Essentially, after these updates installed and my PC restarted itself, it lost its Internet connectivity (while maintaining LAN connectivity overall, which is peculiar in and of itself).
Shortly afterwards, [...]

Maybe this will turn out to just be a unique situation — that I’m the only one encountering this phenomenon. But it’s a very frightening scenario: that a number of Windows Updates made to my Vista PC overnight last night (Tues, June 10) neutered the PC’s ability to connect to the Internet. I’ll be watching [...]