I have a problem with facebook, myspace, and other social networking websites out there.  The problem is when I upload my data to their webservers….I don’t own it anymore.  They do.  And they can do whatever they want with it once it is there.

With this in mind, I’d rather setup my own twitter using Status.net or my own digg using Pligg.  But I’d do it on MY OWN SERVER.  That way, any content I upload is MINE.  It doesn’t reside on some server in California or DC and get recycled to advertisements.

I like to control my own stuff.  I don’t like to be cut out of the loop.  If you’re like me, then you’ll want to host your own domain, website and webserver so that your friends/family/shrink can quickly and easily connect up to see new photos, find out the latest family developments, and understand why you wear tinfoil hats every Thursday after 4pm.

Normally, to host your own webpage you would need to spend around 7 bucks to purchase a domain.  Next you would need a hosting plan that usually runs around 3-15 dollars per month to serve up your web pages.

What most don’t realize is that you can skip these steps all together…you don’t need to get dedicated hosting (this blog is hosted on dedicated hosting…but started out in my apartment!) to serve pages up to your friends and family.  You absolutely do not need to get domain name services through a provider.  You can even host your own webserver using a dialup connection (that’s right…I said dialup) although. I don’t recommend it (but I’ve done it using 56.6kbps).

Why would you want to do this?  The answer might be to stay connected to friends and family…perhaps install a gallery so that your grandparents can see pics of your new dog/car/tinfoil hat.  Sure, you could waste my time with MyWaste..er..space and facebook and be barraged daily by advertisers and solicitors and be inundated with the minutiae of what all your friends had to eat for the day …or you could roll your own web host, install a gallery or website, and provide media to your friends and family without costing yourself a dime.  That’s right, NO COST (except time spent getting it running).  Just remember, your website might not survive a digging or slashdotting if you run it yourself.  Keep that in mind So without more chatter, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of things:

Meat and Potatoes

If you have Cable or DSL at home (not a business account) you have something called a dynamic connection.  Dynamic connection means that it can change every once in a while.  DSL and cable ISP’s purchase blocks of IP Addresses in the dynamic range so that they can keep consumers separate from businesses.  It’s also easier for them to manage dynamic pools of people than to have to remember static connections that don’t change for everyone.

Because of this problem…an ever changing connection for you at home…web servers and websites do not do very well.  The reason for this is because when you visit a website on a dynamic connection one day, it might be different the next day.  In order for visitors of a website to find you each and every single time, you need a “domain” or web name that points back to the address (IP Address) your internet service provider changes on a whim.  You’ll also need an update service to update your website each time your ISP decides to change things on you.

Believe it or not, there are free services out there to do that for you.  You just have to be willing to do a little extra work in the beginning to set things up.  You can also do this without spending 20-40 bucks a month on DNS service.

I’ll divide this up into 2 sections.  The first will deal with Linux hosting.  The second, Windows hosting.  This is only something that I’ve found easy to do and the price is just right (it’s free).  The only thing that I recommend is a dedicated internet connection (cable, DSL) but even this is not necessary as dialup can be used.  I recommend that you use the Linux way of doing things since it is more secure and doesn’t require a restart every time you patch it.

*note: I’m assuming that you aren’t behind a firewall/proxy of any kind and that your ISP doesn’t block port 80 traffic.  If your ISP blocks port 80, see the appendix at the end of this article.

LINUX

No matter what version of Linux you run, chances are that you’ll be able to install the apache webserver.  This is good news as over half the websites of the world are run by apache. I’m not going to address the specifics of how to set up your apache…only how to get it a fixed address without buying a domain.  So, you have your html or php pages located into your webservers public directory…good…whatever application you have is installed on your server.  Now, how to resolve your IP…lets say it is…25.24.4.166 (for our example) and you want it to have a host.name.com to bind to.  Easy to resolve.  Go to http://www.no-ip.com/index.php and sign up.  You can get a site from noip that is like yourname.theirdomain.com/.net/.info.  They have cool names like sytes.net and servebeer.org…even workisboring.com.  Other services like dyndns.org also exist and provide the free service as well.

You’ll be able to choose your own top level name…for instance, Ithink.dnsiskinky.com could be your new domain name.  Next download a client from the download tab: https://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php

The linux client is a tar.gz source and is simple to install. Follow the instructions when installing.  You may have to install compilation tools (devel packages like GCC) to install the client.  You now are the proud owner of yoursite.theirsite.com and your IP will ALWAYS update (as long as noip.com is up) each time you log on/sign on/beam up or whatever it is you do.

How does this help you?  Well, if you’re like me, you have a dynamic IP address.  If you connect to the internet via cable, dialup, or dsl…you also have a dynamic IP address.  Dynamic means that it will change from time to time without warning.  So by binding yoursite.theirsite.com to your IP address…you don’t ever have to worry about what IP address you have anymore.  Instead, you’ll always be able to connect using yoursite.theirsite.com.  You can host a webserver using Apache and a virtual host in this style as well (look for another how-to on this subject later) so that everyone can visit a shiny website at yoursite.theirsite.com.

Now you can give your friends/family/dog walker/mailman the address to your new webserver…maybe it’s Ithink.dnsiskinky.com like we used in the example above.  Now when they visit that address in their web browser, your application or web page displays for them.  You also get bragging rights at being the most technical friend/relative/dog walker client/household that everyone knows.  Now let’s cover Windows.

WINDOWS

First you need a free and clear webserver since one is not included by default with windows. You can download Apache for this as well OR try the Abyss Webserver.

Interestingly enough, Abyss is also free!  I ran it while my linux machine was being worked on (bad hard disk…it was a Quantum 200MB drive from 1913…had to upgrade) and it worked just great off of Windows XP.  Download that puppy and install it.  Make sure you read all of the documentation and familiarize yourself with how Abyss does business.

The next step…getting a hostname… is even easier than the linux method because you don’t have to manually install the noip client…they have a windows installer.  Go to http://www.no-ip.com/index.php and sign up.  Choose the domain name you would like (see above examples in Linux section).  Next, download the noip client from the download tab: https://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php but this time choose the windows client.  From there, you’ll be able to install this with a simple double click.  Fill in all of your information (pretty self explanatory) and make sure that it will run with each time you sign on.  You’re set! Your IP will now resolve to the yourchoice.theirhostname.com

CONCLUSION

You don’t have to spend a dime to keep a domain bound to your IP.  This is perfect for the home user who just wants a gallery or homepage.  It’s even good for someone who has a weblog or enthusiast site.  It’s good for someone who wants to be able to find their files and music…setup Jinzora and stream all your music library to yourself anywhere you are!  Setup Amahi and have access to all the goodness it brings.

Please remember, this wouldn’t be good for a business to have.  You will probably violate your ISP’s terms and conditions for using their connection if you tried to run a business this way.

It’s always good form to put a link of the stuff you are using on your website to direct traffic back to your software provider.  When I used noip, I included a noip link on my main page and also an abyss webserver icon as well.  It’s just good form and some companies/software providers necessitate the use of their logo or a link on sites that use their software/code.  Just be a nice person and give a linkback to them.  Good luck! Have fun!

Also, please note that having hosted my own webserver for quite some time (circa 2001) I’ve found Linux and Apache as a combination to be more secure, faster, and more stable than any webserver I’ve hosted on the Windows Platform. I included information on Windows mainly to introduce you to the concept of free and open source software. If you thought getting a webserver for free was great, think about getting a whole operating system! Give it a try, you don’t even have to install it (use a Live CD).

APPENDIX

If your ISP blocks port 80 traffic, your webserver won’t work.  Before deciding that your ISP is blocking however, make sure your firewall has the appropriate rules to allow incoming traffic.  You can do a quick add to IPTABLES in the following manner:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

If you’ve opened up the appropriate ports and things still don’t work, it will be safe to say that you’ve determined the ISP is blocking port 80.  How you can get around this conundrum is to switch the listening port on the webserver to a different one and redirect traffic there.

1. See how to do this for IIS Webservers
2. See how to do this for Apache Webservers (normally in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf but your distro may vary.)
3. See how to do this for Abyss Webservers

If you still have problems, drop me a line in the comments section.  I may not be able to answer all questions but I can most likely get you to a person/place/thing that can.  Have fun and thanks for reading!

Host Your Own Domain, Website and Webserver originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on February 13, 2010.

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CAN you run Adobe Photoshop on Linux?

Many Web designers, graphic artists and bloggers might consider the answer to this question crucial when considering a shift from Windows.

After all, while there are many excellent open-source alternatives to common office and multimedia applications, the defacto graphics program on Linux, the unfortunately-named Gimp, hobbles a generation or two behind the market-leading Photoshop, which is available only for Windows and Mac OS X.

Years of speculation and wishful thinking have not yielded a Linux version from Adobe, nor does one look likely to come anytime soon.

As they are often wont to do, users have taken matters into their own hands, using free and open-source software called Wine to run Windows programs – including Photoshop – in Linux.

A group of hackers began the Wine project in 1993 as a way to run Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Over the years, Wine has been expanded to include programs running under later versions of Windows, including 95, 98, 2000 and XP.

Wine, short for “Wine Is Not an Emulator,” is software that translates Windows commands into their equivalent in Linux or Unix.

While the project is more than a decade old, Wine is still under testing, with the latest beta version being 0.9.18.

“Wine is still under development, and it is not yet suitable for general use,” the official Web site (http://www.winehq.com) says. “Nevertheless, many people find it useful in running a growing number of Windows programs.”

Intrigued by the possibilities, I did some research and found a 2003 article in eWeek about how Walt Disney’s animation unit and two other competing studios jointly funded a project with CodeWeavers, the leading corporate backer of Wine, to develop a solution that would allow them to run Photoshop on Linux.

The project cost Disney less than $15,000, but saved it more than $50,000 a year in Windows licenses, eWeek reported. At the same time, CodeWeavers was able to incorporate the technology into Wine and its commercial version, CrossOver Office.

A quick check with the Wine Web site showed that Photoshop was indeed among the 4,398 Windows applications that would run under Wine.

Setting up Wine and using it isn’t rocket science, but it’s probably complicated enough to intimidate the typical Windows user.

I downloaded Wine (using the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu Linux) then configured it by using the winecfg utility (type “winecfg” in the Terminal command line). Doing this the first time creates a fake “Drive C” in the hidden .wine directory of your home folder. This is where Wine installs all Windows programs.

To install a Windows program, pop in the install CD and type this into the command line:

wine /media/cdrom0/setup.exe

The Windows installer will come up and install the program.
Theoretically, to run the program, you’d type the following:

wine “C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop 7.0Photoshop.exe”

Sadly, this did not work. Further research showed I needed to tell Wine which dynamic link library or DLL file to use. This line from an Ubuntu forum does the job:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=wintab32=n wine “C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop 7.0Photoshop.exe”

To save myself some typing, I created a script that executes the command when I click on an icon.

So how does running Photoshop in Linux measure up?

In general, I was pleasantly surprised by the program’s responsiveness. There was none of the sluggishness that I expected and most of the features I use heavily work.

There are some major caveats, however.

1) Right-click menus do not work. In fact, they can lock up the program. This is a pain, because I’m used to right-clicking on items in the Layers palette to manipulate them. Fortunately, there is a work-around for this, using the menu bar at the top of the window.

2) Resizing the Layers palette will also crash the program.

3) Alt-clicking on an area does not work for the Clone tool. Instead, you must hold down the Shift key while doing the Alt-click.

4) The Tools and other palettes will remain on screen even when you minimize Photoshop.

These are pretty serious problems because you could lose a lot of work. On the other hand, if you’re careful to avoid these pitfalls and save your work periodically, you ought to be able to run Photoshop productively under Linux.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
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Some of the best ways to optimize Windows is to just flat out turn off some the useless or unneeded services that run by default on every Windows base install. One such service is the Indexing service included in every install of Windows. it is probably one of the most useless services found running in the background of Windows and that is saying quite a lot if you ask me.

What is does is it indexes files as they are saved to your hard drive so when you search your drives the search can be completed faster. I find that very few people actually use this feature and to top it off I have tried multiple searches with and without this enabled and the difference is none or so small you will never see it if you do use that function. This service will however slow your machine down as every single file will be indexed as you save it to the hard drive. Stopping this service is a very highly encouraged optimization.

On how to stop this service you will need to click the start menu button found in the lower left part of your screen. Once you do that then click computer. You should enter Windows Explorer and be able to see your hard drive(s), any floppy and/or CD/DVD ROM drive(s) among others. Right click your hard drive ( you may have more than one and this needs to be done to each ) and click the properties option at the bottom of the pop up. On this pop up you will see a check box that has “Index this drive for faster searching”. Uncheck this box and click apply. This can take a while, but is worth it. While you are on this page you can run disk cleanup to help with stuffed hard drives. This to can take a long time, but will help in long run.

Also while you have this pop up box open you may want to click the tab that says Tools at the top of it. On this new tab you have options to check your disks for errors, which can be helpful at times, and also to defragment your hard drive(s). Defragmenting your hard drive(s) is a common, very basic optimization that many people either forget about or never knew about. All Windows filesystems save files on the disk in clusters that are in sequential order. This is fine as long as you never delete a file, but that isn’t realistic. Easy way to explain this is to take four files, lets give them names of A, B, and C for simplicity sake. File A takes up 3 spaces on the disk, B is next to it at 2 spaces and C occupies 5 spaces. If you delete file B and then save a new file such as D that would take up 3 spaces, Windows will delete B and fill in its spot with the first 2 parts of D and place the third part after file C. This forces the computer to read the first 2 parts of D and then move over C to read the next part decreasing read times and hurting overall performance of any program using file D. This is called fragmentation and can become a huge problem over the course of years or even months. This is why defragmenting your hard drive(s) is so important to system performance. This process will move all pieces of a file and place them next one another so they can be read much more efficiently.

Troubleshooting Windows can be as easy as using the built in help and support feature in Windows or by using google to search the error message you got so you can find what others have done to correct the issue you are facing. Windows also has a recovery console if you have the original install disk, you just put it in and turn on the computer. Unless your BIOS has been altered it should either boot from the disk or ask you if want to. Each issue has its own way of being solved so a broad troubleshooting guide can not fit in this article.

There are many programs out there that offer a variety of services. Many are free and a few of those actually do what they say they will. Some of the best for some samples of each type are as follows:

SpyWare removal:

SpyBot search and destroy- includes passive protection built into browsers

Ad-Aware-can be used in tandem with Spybot to catch more spy/malware

Virus protectors and scanners:

Avira-usually rated as a close second on free virus protectors and the one I use most often.

AVG-is usually in 3rd place, but has made a strive forward and is closing the gap.

Avast-has been the best free virus protector for a while and is rated better than most and equal to the best paid virus protectors out there.

Office applications:

Openoffice- can save files in Microsoft Office format if that is your thing so less worries on that side, but Sun Microsystems, which produces this free open source software, has been recently bought out by Oracle. This may endanger this project, I advise getting this software while it is still widely available.

Messengers:

Of course the usual of msn, yahoo, etc. etc.

Pidgin-Can be used to connect to all the most popular messenger system around from one program.

Lastly to be discussed here is the operating systems besides Windows. Most Windows converts have went to Apple’s Operating System which is based off of the same unix kernal that bsd and linux are. I have seen many say Mac has more in common with the BSD OSs than with the linux ones as of late. If you haven’t tried these operating system I can offer you some guidance here. Make sure you read some literature on each before you attempt to use these as this will save you a lot of headaches, also look at each ones forums and read what problems new users of each one are having as an idea of what you may be facing. Apple has been closing the gap on being able to run the same programs offered to Windows users and much of their software database is actually superior to Windows. I can’t speak much on BSD as I have not had a lot of time to spend with it, but I can make a few suggestions on the linux side.

Linux has many different distros available, most even have a live CD you can download and burn for free with software like cdburnerxp and boot from. that way you can try out the software before you install to your hard drive. Ubuntu and Fedora are 2 that jump to the front of my mind when I think of linux. Ubuntu has made strides to be more convert friendly than Fedora, but that isn’t to say Fedora is hard to learn. Both distros have matured alot in last few years and are happy to live next to windows in a dual-boot environment of you so choose. Ubuntu is the more user friendly of the 2 while Fedora is more bleeding edge. I recommend trying both as live cds and making your mind up from there. If they are almost what you are looking for then take a look at www.distrowatch.com for links to other just as capable OSs.

http://www.rechelp.com

This is my website I have setup to help others help themselves when it comes enjoying your computers more fully, visit and leave feedback as this will help the site provide more of the content you want to see.

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For the past decade or more we have all become rather accustomed to the idea of operating systems that install directly to our hard drives, and of course it’s what we are all comfortable with. Google has chosen to challenge that with it’s new Chrome Operating system which is based upon it’s Chrome Browser. That is to say it IS the chrome browser. Is that a bad thing? Well that’s ultimately up for the end user to decide but we will do our best to fill you in.

First of all, the applications that are offered with the Chrome OS are completely web based. That’s right, there will be no installations to the hard drive, you will only be able to use the applications that are offered online. This can really be a pain, especially if there is something you need that just has not been created yet.

Of course at that point you will probably have a whole shelf of PC applications that you could be using, but of course the Chrome Netbook simply doesn’t have an optical drive or even a hard drive. So what’s the idea here? What even makes Google Chrome so desirable?

Well there is the fact that it will have that ‘instant on’ feature. People want their computers to ‘just work’, which means the Chrome netbooks will be great for those who need to check their e-mail on the go. It also begs the question though of whether or not the web browser will be a local application. What happens if the Google servers suddenly decide to go under the weather? You have all this data that you’ve saved online but you can’t access it! You have the latest in mobile computing, but it’s as good as a brick without the ability to do word processing or e-mail. You can’t even install a game to pass the time.

Having an operating system that is completely dependent on the internet is a bad idea at this point. This is for the reasons that were mentioned above, as well as a few others. Some of those other reasons include the fact that it is dependent on the internet! Really, what happens when someone suddenly cannot afford the internet, or maybe their internet goes out. They have a very expensive, and very attractive looking paperweight. This is not the computing of the future, this is lunacy.

Yes, there will come a point when computers can be web based. That will be the day when internet is given free to everyone and outages aren’t quite as common. That day is not here yet, and Google will find that it will be very difficult to force that day upon us.

For those who can afford the machine and can keep a constant internet connection wherever they go, the Google Chrome OS will be a great secondary device. But for right now that’s all it will be. A secondary device.

Kevin Hutto is an entrepreneur and internet business owner from Atlanta. He spent time in the investment banking world at Bear Stearns from 1992-1997. He has owned several online businesses and been doing search marketing services. You can also checkout his latest website on wheeled duffel bag which reviews and lists JanSport Wheeled Duffel from the finest manufacturers.

Author: Kevin Hutto
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