When running local services off your home computer, your IP address becomes an issue. This is due to the fact it can be hard to memorize and it may change- without letting you know. However, there is a work around for this! Setting up “Dynamic DNS” will allow you to access your computer through a domain name, even when your IP changes.

To do this you will need:

• A computer running Linux (We used Ubuntu)
• No-ip.com account (Free!)

On No-Ip.com

1. Sign into your account on no-ip.com
2. Click Add which is located under Hosts / Redirects.
3. Next to hostname put whatever you want, this will be your domain name.
4. Click Create Host , located at the bottom of the page.

On Your Linux Computer

1. Open up a terminal
2. Switch to root user

sudo su

3. Install the package no-ip

apt-get install no-ip

4. Configure no-ip

no-ip -C

• Select your internet interface
• Enter the login information
• If you only have one host it will use that, if not it will now ask which one you which to use
• Now it will ask for the update time (in minutes), i just used 30.
• Now it will ask if you want to run something at a successful update, I selected no.

Within the next 30 minutes your domain name should now point to your IP! Test it by sending a ping to it, or navigating to it in a web browser.

As many of you may have experienced our search feature was nowhere near as good as it should be.  We however made a switch and now let google handle the search.  This isn’t the “prettiest” solution, however the power of the search is much better.  We are confident now that you can easily pull up our older tutorials, so what are you waiting for? Give it a shot!  It will also search the forums.

For all those who use chrome because it has a quick, but miss all those nifty firefox plugins you should check out the Firefox Beta 3.1.  It seems to be about 1.5x faster at processing javascript with its default javascript engine, which you should be able to use without any issues.  However there is an even faster engine available to 3.1 that may have a few bugs but in all fairness chrome has a lot of bugs aswell.  Also firefox 3.1 has a nifty feature to switch between tabs, by using Ctrl Tab.  It functions similiar to alt+tab but for tabbed windows instead of open programs.

To enable the new JS engine:

1. Open firefox beta
2. Where you would type the URL(websites) type about:config and hit enter
3. Search for ‘javascript.options.jit.content‘, you can also search for javascript.options.jit.chrome aswell but this may cause your browser to crash more frequently.  The content works on javascript that runs on pages .chrome works on javascript that is apart of the browser itself
4. Double click on the result it gives you and that will change its value from False to True
5. You are now using the blazingly fast javascript engine, you can turn it off by repeating steps 1-4

Get firefox beta here.

Full list of changes here

Passwords. Their used by everyone on a daily basis to protect personal information, accounts- just about everything. With Password Chart, you no longer have to think of a good password. Simply create your own password algorithm, and your desired password. It will then generate for you a password based on the information you provided. Simple, easy, and secure!

This is incredibly handy for people who have to remember multiple passwords to important accounts. In addition, if you ever forget your generated password, all you need to do is type in your algorithm, password to convert, and there you have your secure password!

Try it out- its free! PasswordChart.com.

Do you dual boot and wish to grab files on your linux partition while you are on windows? Well the Disk Internals have a program to do just that and best of all it’s 100% free. Just install this program and when you open it, it will detect any ext2/ext3 partitions on your hard disk and give you full access to them!

Making the move from Windows to Linux can be a tough one, especially if you have a hard time moving your data. Here is a way to access your NTFS Windows partition from a standard distro of linux, such as ubuntu.

1. Open a terminal and su to root

sudo su

2. Find the NTFS Partition

fdisk -l

3. Create a place to mount your NTFS Partition

mkdir /mnt/windows

4. Mount the NTFS Partition, in my example the NTFS partition is on /dev/hda1.

mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222

5. Test that you can read it

ls /mnt/windows