I am a big fan of both your blog and problogger, and both of you seem to be fans of the Chitika ad network, in addition to various other ways that you make money. Darren says that it's a big revenue stream for him, and you've written that minor tweaks in how you have things set up on your blog have resulted in some major bucks coming your way too. I'm in! But, how do...

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I got a great gift from my folks, an Apple iTunes gift card. Nice. And I have an iPod. What I don't have is any clue how to redeem an iTunes gift card. Help!...

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I am a law student and have completely switched over to a laptop for all of my notes. My laptop is bluetooth and I use a bluetooth mouse. My question is do you know of any bluetooth pen devices? Sometimes it would be helpful to draw things by hand, and the regular mouse doesn't cut it. I want a pen-like device that can act as mouse. Hopefully it would be small, portable, and bluetooth....

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I have been an avid reader for some time but I have a question. The kids all have computers now (we all have macs) and I was wondering if there was a way to check up on them every once in a while. We all have macs running OS X. and I have read the oriely 'control' your mac from afar. but I was wondering if there was a cool way to login screenshot and...

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I've been starting to delve into peer to peer (p2p) networking and am trying to figure out what the difference is between Limewire, Kazaa, BitTorrent and similar. Can you explain how they work?...

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I've been doing some research on long-term stock pricing trends and need to find data on publicly traded companies. Any clues on where I can find this sort of information back for the last decade or so?...

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What is the reason people buy stocks from a company. I know the obvious reason is to make money, but there is more. So just "why do people buy stocks"? thank you....

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In the past 3 days I've received dozens of returned e-mails that appear to be sent by my domain name but that are not valid email addresses. For example I received a returned e-mail today that was "sent" from nvsnx@mydomainname.com but there is no user "nvsnx". Where did this come from, how do I stop it, and what risk am I at from this happening?...

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I have 2 Ubuntu Dapper machines at home. One is going to a college dorm with may daughter in a couple weeks. I can get her desktop on my computer through VNC here at home. It's using port 5900. Is there a way to know whether I'll be able to reach her machine through this port when she's at college? I have no idea how they manage their network - nor do I care...

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I've been running the Python-based "mailman" mailing list management program for quite a while with good results, but all of a sudden when I try to start it up I get the error "Site list is missing: mailman" and it won't start. What the heck? How do I fix this?...

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I have a couple of clients who are on the same Verio/NTT Virtual Private Server (VPS) system, and I want to have some simple script to check their disk usage. It's not a simple "du" sort of task, however, because of the peculiarities of the VPS environment. Any ideas?...

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Help! For some reason when I try to use "ssh" to connect to my server from my Mac, it fails and is saying that I might be a victim of a "DNS Spoof"? What's going on, and how do I fix the problem?...

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Dave, we have a server security problem in Mac OSX, it is being remotely accessed by a former sys admin who has been stealing our business and the webfiles that go with them. Could you work with me to help lock down this machine? He set the machine up, it is one of several we run. As a result, he knows the root level password. I am finding when we try to change the MySQL...

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I am trying to write a shell script for automated ssh. vairable user and passwd have initialized correctly, but when I use the following it still prompting me for the password. ssh -l $user cisdevapp1 $passwd uptime exit I have also tried the following ssh -l $user cisdevapp1 $passwd uptime exit EOF and no luck. Please help?...

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Dave, I've been using ssh like a good Internet citizen to connect to my remote server, but for security reasons the ISP has disabled root login from ssh on every server. Problem is, I really need to be able to log in as root occasionally. How do I re-enable it?...

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Dave, can I use America Online (AOL) as my Internet Service Provider, but actually use a different web browser -- Firefox -- rather than the browser that's included with the AOL software suite? Also, how about email programs?...

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Dave, I was talking with my ISP and he suggested that I use an "ssh tunnnel" when I use my email program, Microsoft Entourage, on any public wireless networks to avoid exposing my account and password to anyone who might be sniffing the wi-fi network. Problem is, I have no idea what they're talking about, but I'm definitely paranoid about security and the idea of point-to-point encryption sounds wonderful. Can you tell me how...

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Hi Dave! I'm running a 500 MHz Titanium Powerbook with 512MB of memory, Mac OSX 10.3.7. I recently had to do a clean install on my powerbook and my shell is defaulting to the tcsh instead of the bash. First question... Why did it do that? Second question... How do I fix it?...

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In case you don't get this magazine -- and you should if you're responsible for administering even a single Unix or Linux system -- I'm republishing the article here for your reading pleasure.

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Take a deep breath and let’s go back in time a few years, back to Windows 95. Think about people saying “Leenucks? What’s that?” and just maybe imagine being in a public place without 10% of the people chatting away on cellphones. Remember an upstart company called Netscape and a browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic. And let’s go back just a little bit further…

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A reader writes: I had taken an intro course to UNIX a few years ago, but have found your book Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours MUCH more comprehensive and user-aware! I have hit a stumbling block in Chapter 16 (page 337) where you illustrate the use of cat, however. You show: $ cat average.awk NF > 2 { count += 1 totalsize += $5 } There is more that follows on this page and...

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