James'Techblog

Task scheduling is an important and useful option built into both Windows and Linux. For a while there, if you wanted to schedule tasks in Unix, it wasn’t as easy as Windows, technically, it still isn’t, however, it has grown leaps and bounds over what it used to be. With Linux(built from similar code as Unix), you have a multitude of options, Cron and Anacron are just two such options. Today, we’ll focus mainly on these two, the similarities and differences. What makes each of them great, what might make one better than the other depending upon the individual circumstance. Task Scheduling in Windows was a difficult thing for me to learn as well, but it was pretty straight forward once I figured it out. In Linux, you have to either use the built-in Systemd or Cron/Anacron. Systemd is a really good thing to use if you are trying to be more precise with regards to timing, however, that is for a later article. Both Cron and Ananacron use the system time, but what makes these two

As with the previous part of this topic, it’s good to do a routine clearing out of dust inside your pc. As to how often, it depends. If you ask two different people, you will get two different opinions. For some, this also depends on where you live. People living in Arizona typically have more dust in and around their homes, more cleaning is necessary and even then it still seeps into your machine. Dust and cigarette smoke are silent killers to computer hardware. Any smoke can be bad for a computer, it leaves a residue. Dust can also build up quick where there is a lot of smoke. It almost seems like the two go hand-in-hand. But What can you do to remove such crap from your fans and heat sinks? Most computer owners use cans of compressed air religiously. These cans can be bought at your local Walmart or Office Depot. Many people used to take their machines to a neighborhood computer repair shop for the same maintenance rather than doing it themselves. As with all hardware, it

Spring is almost upon us again. With spring comes the usual yearly cleaning that just gets so deep that it doesn’t happen any other time of year. The same thing should go for your computer. Over the year we’ve tested new software, saved copious amounts of web cache, stored various amounts of pictures and other files to the hard disk, on our Linux machines, we probably only booted our computers once anyway and so there are countless numbers of kernels and other system packages that maybe haven’t been applied. There is also the developer’s computer that may have all these extra files laying around from where he tried to solve a specific problem in a program and had to try various scenarios to get around it… No? Must be me then. All these things may or may not be needed now and so it’s a good idea to clear those out of the way to make room for new ones. In this, I stress the idea of making occasional home directory backups as well as a few of the commands that I use to clean my