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Where Can I Find Canon Printer Drivers?
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in Printers
Printers are probably the most used piece of computer peripheral we have today. They come in all shapes and sizes, and are used for everything from photos to school reports. If you want a physical version of what you see on your screen, using a printer is the only option you have. Canon is one of the most popular companies that makes printers. Finding the correct Canon printer drivers for your PC can be a difficult task, if you’re unsure of where to look.
What makes a piece of hardware function well with your PC is the driver that is uses. With so many makes and models of printers on the market, your computer doesn’t know how to specifically use the device. There are generic versions of certain drivers but they are very limited in their capabilities. In order to get the most out of your printer you need to be using the correct, official and up to date driver that is designed specifically for your device.
Locating Canon printer drivers used to take a lot of effort on behalf of the user. If you know the model you’re trying to find the driver for, you can spend time with a search engine, go to the official site, or visit any number of driver sites that host these files for download. Unfortunately, tracking down the correct version you need for your PC takes time and can cause quite a headache.
What’s the alternative? Automatic driver software. These revolutionary programs take the tedious task of searching for all the drivers you need, and simplifies it down to a click of a button. With your printer connected, running a scan of your PC will identify exactly which printer you are using. After checking to see if the current driver is corrupt, or the wrong one, the program will check against a database to find the most up to date, and correct version of the one you need. It’ll even download and install it for you. It’s all very quick, simple and easy to use.
Finding the right Canon printer driver for your computer doesn’t need to be as difficult as it once was. There are many different types of automatic driver programs out there that will make every day PC maintenance a breeze.
Desktop Computers
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in Desktop Pcs
A desktop computer is a computer that is built so that it can be used in a home or office setting. It is distinguished from a laptop or a much larger mainframe computer. the typical desktop computer will consist of three devices – namely, an input device, a processing device and an output device.
The input device refers to your keyboard and mouse, the processing unit is the system unit (or central processing unit), and the output device refers to your monitor screen. the system unit, also known as the central processing unit or chassis, is a box-like case made from metal or plastic that protects the internal electronic components of the computer from damage. It also houses the brains of the desktop computer – the processing chip. Also, all the circuitry in the system unit usually is part of or is connected to a circuit board called the motherboard.
There are three basic characteristics you should look for in a good desktop computer – storage, speed, and reliability. Your desktop computer or personal computer (PC) should have a good data storage capacity, and the chip running the computer should be a good one that can do billions of calculations per second and give you the best results. with reliability, all your computer components should come with a guarantee that you will never have to use.
Today, various companies offer completely assembled PC models that offer the best in terms of good configurations, price, guarantee terms, and quality of product. One can also assemble a personal computer by putting together various computer components from various manufacturers. some of the best manufacturers around are Samsung, Dell, ViewSonic (for monitors) and Microsoft – the list goes on.
Personal computers today, are custom-made for various uses. One can get media center PCs that are solely built to watch movies, rip music, edit movies, and the like. Gaming enthusiasts can also get desktop computers that will enhance game play and provide high-quality graphics so that every game can play itself to its fullest worth.
One can custom-order PCs to suit one’s needs – whatever they may be. So, get yours today.
All Important Features Given by DVD Writers
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in cd Dvd Drives
DVD writers come out in newer and newer breakthroughs currently. With the DVD writers you can copy any data you need, even movies by employing Digital Versatile Disks (DVDs). As a result, whenever you want to see a movie or listen to your most wanted music you just need to put a DVD into a player that is able to read DVDs.
Actually, with the ongoing rise in fame of the DVD, watching movies at home become a highly general activity. All that you need is a great DVD parlor in the region from where you can rent DVDs and also watch your most wanted movies at home. then, you can also use the writers to copy your most favorite movies.
Make Own Copies
You are able to watch movies in a newer technique and that is to copy some movies from the real DVD to a blank DVD or even to your computer’s hard disk. you also need applying DVD writers for the reason. Simply, DVD writers are tools that aid you to copy the content from a source to a separate destination.
DVD tracks are exceedingly narrow and habitually not more than 0.74 microns in width which for sure is a lot less than what is discovered in a general CD. What’s more, DVDs are more true and error corrections features are also very greater. then as the writers use laser technologies they are straightforwardly able to also read and write CDs, in addition to the DVD.
There are dissimilar kinds of writers being sold on the market at this time with the two major types. Both of them are internal and external writers. Each of them has their own set of independent features.
These days, when you buy the writers you will be pleasingly dumbfounded to figure out that manufacturers that are making such writers also will offer you with much software. The software aids to make your experience in employing DVD writers much better and more beneficial.
Security Firm Alert Logic Compliant with PCI Approved Scanning Vendor Guidelines
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in pci Network Cards
A screenshot of the control panel of Alert Logic Log Manager
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Security services provider Alert Logic (alertlogic.com) announced on Tuesday that it has expanded its PCI DSS compliance and has recertified as an Approved Scanning Vendor by the PCI Security Standards Council.
According to the press release, the new Approved Scanning Vendor Program Guidelines are stricter and include quarterly vulnerability scans to ensure credit card data is safe.
Alert Logic says this is the fifth consecutive year that it has attained the PCI ASV certification.
To enhance its security capabilities, Alert Logic has several technology partners and integrations to provide organizations with tools to achieve PCI compliance, according to the press release. these include web appication scanning to handle web-based infrastructure vulnerabilities, integration of Rapid7′s PCI scanner, integration for File Integrity Management capabilities and web application firewall solutions from AppliCure and Imperva.
“these new capabilities complement Alert Logic’s offerings in native intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment and log management,” Alert Logic senior vice president of product development and CTO Dave Colesante said in a statement. “Alert Logic’s service provider partners and enterprise customers depend on us to help them achieve and maintain PCI DSS compliance, so this recertification is important validation of our standards and processes.”
Web hosting providers are among Alert Logic’s partners. Most recently, web host SunGard began offering Alert Logic’s security solutions.
Alert Logic says its compliance reporting and monitoring solution help organizations address requirements of PCI DSS. for example, the Alert Logic Threat Manager provides periodic vulnerability assessment by scanning customer networks.
Alert Logic Log Manger gathers and archives log data for audit review.
ActiveWatch and LogReview are two other Alert Logic managed security services that help customers address security compliance.
How to use Conky for automatic system notification and administration
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in linux
Takeaway: Marco Fioretti shows you how to use the Conky system monitoring tool for automatic maintenance and event notification on remote computers.
Conky is a graphical system monitoring tool for Linux. it is normally used to show all kinds of data as text or diagrams in the root window of your screen, in a much bigger and more readable format than any panel may do. as the galleries on the official website or at Scrnshots.com prove, Conky provides lots of ways to customize your desktop and impress your friends. Exchanging, tweaking, and discussing Conky configuration files can be a lot of fun if you find the most common Linux environments a bit too dull.
In general, Conky may run on one computer but appear on the monitor of another one, via SSH or Gnu Screen. Conky may also load data from plain text files of any kind, from local logs to RSS feeds or Web pages downloaded with w3m or other command line tools.
In addition to all this, Conky can be used in another interesting way that, as far as I know, has had much less coverage so far (even if the Gnu Screen trick I just mentioned uses the same technique; I’ll explain in a moment). the reason is probably that Conky looks so good that most users stop there.
System administrators continuously need scripts that perform automatic maintenance and/or event notification on remote computers. In this context, a tool that is usually installed so that somebody can personally look at its output may seem useless. however, Conky has plenty of predefined variables for lots of stuff relevant for system administrators, from available disk space and CPU load to UPS autonomy and much more. Furthermore, Conky’s mission is to display all this stuff in one, unified way, in order to spare people from dealing with a plethora of other, more or less disconnected tools if they want to know what’s going on.
This is why, some time ago, I started to wonder if Conky might be used for automatic system administration. What if Conky could directly print all its variables to ONE file, in a format immediately usable by a shell interpreter? In that case, maintenance and notification scripts may be much quicker and easier to write, because they wouldn’t have to run several unrelated commands (assuming that they are available) and format their output before deciding what to do.
Eventually, this task turned out to be much simpler than I had feared, thanks to a few Conky global settings and command line options.
A Conky configuration file consists of two parts: the first one sets general parameters, for example, which fonts should be used or where the text should be placed on the root window. the second part, that starts with the line containing the “TEXT” keyword, describes to Conky what output it should generate.
Telling Conky to print everything on the standard output is easy. First of all, run this command at the prompt:
conky -C > command_line_conky.rc
This will save Conky’s default configuration in the command_line_conky.rc plain text file. Next, open that file with any text editor and set these two options as follow:
out_to_console yes out_to_x no
They will force Conky to print its output to its STDOUT, but not on the X Windows screen. Once those options are set, you can save Conky’s output to a file and use it in a shell script in this way:
conky -c command_line_conky.rc -i 1 | sed -e ‘s/[ t]*//g’ > /tmp/conky_data.sh source /tmp/conky_data.sh
The first switch tells Conky to load the custom configuration file. the second makes it run only once and then quit. the sed command removes all whitespaces (more on this in a moment). as a practical example, let’s assume that the output section of command_line_conky.rc looks like this:
TEXT UPTIME=’$uptime’ MEM=$mem MEM_MAX=$memmax MEMPERC=$memperc CPU=$cpu ROOT_SPACE=${fs_used /} TOP_NAME=${top name 1} TOP_PID=${top pid 1} TOP_CPU=${top cpu 1} TOP_MEM=${top mem 1}
The official Conky page describes syntax and meaning of all the variables I’ve used pretty well, so I’ll directly show you the output of the commands above and only explain part of it:
#> cat /tmp/conky_data.sh UPTIME=’1d3h14m’ MEM=1.33GiB MEM_MAX=7.69GiB MEMPERC=17 CPU=14 ROOT_SPACE=6.34GiB TOP_NAME=knotify4 TOP_PID=29173 TOP_CPU=0.00 TOP_MEM=0.35
Thanks to Conky, we have here, for example, three MEM* variables that contain the amount of used and available memory and its percentage value. the last four lines of command_line_conky.rc, instead, return name, Process ID, CPU and memory usage of the process that is using more CPU. see what I meant? this is valid Shell code, and all it took to generate it was one Conky call! Once it has loaded this file with the source command, your script will be able to make any test you want and act accordingly.
It may, for example, kill the process whose PID is 29173 if its CPU usage ($TOP_CPU) is over some predefined value, or it may send you an email if the $MEMPERC is more than 90%, or if the root partition is almost full. There are lots of possibilities, because Conky can print in the same way lots of data. the only thing you need to be careful about is white spaces. Without the sed command, Conky would output lines like these:
TOP_CPU= 0.00 TOP_MEM= 0.35
that are not valid shell variables assignments because of the white spaces. Removing them with sed as I’ve done above is a quick but dirty solution. Sed “cleans” all lines, including those, like “UPTIME=’$uptime’”, that don’t really need it. should this be unacceptable, you should remove the sed command and modify command_line_conky.rc as follows:
- put single quotes around the variables that need to keep their spaces
- add to the definition of those that can’t have spaces shell code that will remove them when conky_data.sh is loaded. something like this may do the trick:
TOP_CPU=`echo ‘${top cpu 1}’ | tr -d ‘[:space:]‘`
With or without these extra steps, the result is always the same: Conky can provide administration scripts with lots of data to work on, in a simple way that is also quite portable, because the Conky configuration file has the same format on every system on which this utility can be compiled.
How to erase file information on unused disk space
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in data Erasing
We all know that it is important to securely delete all files on a hard drive before giving it to someone else. this holds especially true if you plan on selling the hard drive on Internet sites such as eBay. I know that some users buy used hard drives on eBay purely for the thrill of trying to find data that was deleted on that drive. this could get you in a world of trouble if you think of the private information that you save on your computer.
I was thinking of something different though. what if I want to keep my hard drives for now but make sure that deleted data can’t be recovered by any means ? I tried and ran some file recovery programs such as Recuva and it showed thousands of files that were still referenced on my system although they have been deleted before. I think that this is a privacy problem and decided to look for a way to delete all file information on the unused part of my hard drives.
I decided to use Recuva first and see how many file information it would find. After that I would run a program named Eraser which I will use to clean the unused disk space of any deleted file information and finally run Recuva again to see if this reduced the amount of files that could be undeleted from my system.
Testing my Hard Drive with Recuva:
Recuva found 33720 files on my hard drive f: that could be undeleted. this is a large amount of files.
Running Eraser:
After right-clicking the central pane I was able to create a new task. The first option was unused space on drive which is the default option in the menu. I selected the f: hard drive from the list. Eraser was showing my newly selected task in the central pane and I had to right-click that task once again and select Run from the context menu. It took two and a half hours to overwrite all the data on my 100 gigabyte hard drive.
Testing the result with Recuva:
Recuva found one file on drive f: everything else was not found anymore which leads to the conclusion that this is an excellent way to erase file information that exists on the unused space on your hard drives. this is probably not enough to erase it for the big boys if you know what I mean but every amateur should have problems getting information about those files.
How do computer mice work?
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in wireless Mice
Please tell me in simple detail how modern computer mice work.An algorithm called optical flow.At the bottom of a mouse, there's a bright LED, and a low resolution greyscale camera.The LED illuminates the surface of the mouse pad, and the camera takes low-resolution “photographs” of the surface about 600 times a second. Because the surface of a mouse pad is grainy, the snapshots have a dot pattern. The chip in the mouse compares two consecutive snapshots of the surface, and determines what happened to the dot pattern. If the dots shifted up by 2 units, the mouse must have moved down 2 units. If the dots shifted right and up, the mouse must have moved left and down.The chip translates this data into two dimensional vectors and sends them to the computer.
How to build your own Google Chromebook
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in mother Bios Chips
With the recent release of Google’s Chromebooks, you might find yourself asking if you really want to spend your hard-earned cash on one. Don’t worry – we’ll show you how you can test out all aspects of a Chromebook without having to sink any of your cash into the hardware.
The good news is that the Chrome OS project is an open source one, so anyone with an interest and some spare time can go online, grab the source code and compile their own version of the operating system.
The even better news is that someone has already done that for you. A helpful chap called Hexxeh has been churning out automated nightly builds of the Chrome OS for quite some time, and making them available to download from here.
This makes it easy to try out Chrome OS in various forms, from running it on a virtual machine to booting it on real hardware. The latter part ranges from booting a USB drive to ultimately installing it on a suitable netbook, even in a dual-boot system.
Working hard?
Several big-name manufacturers are planning on releasing Chromebooks, but when you can buy an existing more powerful netbook for less and simply install Chrome OS on to it yourself, buying a specific Chromebook makes no sense – at least to us.
From our experience, most recent x86 netbooks and laptops should run the Chrome OS to some extent without any major difficulty. The exact level of success varies a little, from an installation with complete functionality to one that lacks wireless or audio features, or refuses to wake from sleep modes.
Any Intel Atom system should be a pretty safe bet, and Intel Centrino laptops also seem to provide good compatibility. as a guide, the Samsung, HP and Acer range of netbooks all appear to work, while a long list of laptops is also available here.
We tried Chrome OS on a cheap Advent 4211 Atom netbook and a Lenovo X200 Intel Centrino 2 laptop without any significant complications.
Writer man
For installation, you’ll need a blank USB drive at least 2GB in size. this will hold the Chrome OS drive image that you should have downloaded from hexxeh.net. Windows users should grab a copy of Image Writer from here; this is a basic image writer that can write the unpacked Chrome OS file to the USB stick.
Linux users can apt-get usb-imagewriter, which is in the Ubuntu repository. Mac users can also join in the fun, but they’ll have to use the Unix command ‘DD’.
To get this working on a Mac, unpack the disk image to your desktop, insert your USB drive and use the Disk Utility to check the disk ID number – usually ‘Disk1′.
Open a terminal and type sudo diskutil umountdisk diskX. Type cd desktop, then to write the image type sudo dd if=ChromeOS.img of=/dev/X bs=4m, replacing the ‘X‘ with the drive ID number.
With the image written to your USB stick, plug it into your chosen netbook and boot it up. You may need to adjust the BIOS boot settings depending on your device. Many provide a boot device menu, while for others you will need to adjust the priority of the boot devices to elevate the USB drive above any internal options.
Hopefully with that done within seconds you should have Chrome OS up and running. If Chrome OS fails to start after this, there is a slim chance that the nightly build is a broken one, so it’s worth trying another night’s build.
Network down
One element you’ll need is a network connection of some sort. There’s a good chance that any wired Ethernet port will be functional, with a slightly lower chance of any built-in wireless network working. The Chrome OS is designed to be constantly online, so logging into it is effectively logging into your Google account – which you can’t do if you’re not online.
With an attached Google account, you can to get your pseudo-Chromebook fired up, and start to evaluate how much of the hardware is working and whether or not the OS is something you want to keep. at this point, there are just a couple of simple steps you can take to permanently install the Chrome OS on the internal hard drive of your laptop or netbook.
Be aware this is a dumb installation, so it’ll simply write over the top of any drive without attempting to create partitions. so obviously only do this if you’re happy to lose your existing OS and data.
In Chrome OS, press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[T] to open the diagnostic terminal. Type Shell, then to start the installation type /Usr/sbin/chromeos-install. You’ll be prompted to enter a login and password, both of which are ‘facepunch‘, and you’ll be presented with warnings describing what you’re doing.
OS duel
The final option (and the most complex, because we’re talking about getting Windows to work with a non-Microsoft product) is to dual-boot Chrome OS alongside Windows. While this is relatively straightforward in principal, in practice it’s time-consuming and awkward. this is largely because it involves having to move and create various new partitions for Chrome OS to live on, configure a fresh boot loader and copy the drive images over – all of which must be done manually.
That’s all quite a tall order, and to try to keep things as simple as possible we suggest you get a live CD version of a Linux distribution. We’re going to go with the reliable Ubuntu.
The CD and USB versions will both work, but whichever you choose, you’ll need to set it up and boot the soon-to-be Chromebook with it. among the gaggle of partitions that may already exist on your drive, you’ll need two more. You’ll have to shrink, delete and generally shuffle the existing partitions around to create the two new ones, which should be 1GB in size each. One should be ext2 and the other ext3.
These will store the main Chrome OS work partition and the standard swap partition. in Ubuntu we’re using GParted, but if you’re more comfortable doing this in Windows then we’d recommend EASEUS Partition Master from easeus.com. Alternatively, you can try the Disk Management snap-in that’s built into Windows Vista/7.
Do remember that MBR disks can only have four primary partitions, so it’s better to create an extended partition with two logical ones inside for the Chrome OS to live on.
Making it stick
If you haven’t done so already, plug in the Chrome OS USB drive. We’re assuming you’re still using GParted from the Ubuntu Live CD or USB. If necessary, refresh the devices and select the Chrome OS device so you can view its partitions. You should see quite a gaggle of them but you’re only interested in two: C-State and C_Root.
As we’ve already said, the first should be ext3 and the other ext2, both around 1GB in size. Using GParted it’s easy enough to copy and paste these partitions over to the waiting blank ones on the internal drive. Don’t forget to click the ‘Apply’ button to make sure that your changes stick.
Finally, for the boot loader we’ve found that by far the most straightforward solution for installing GRUB is to simply install a base Ubuntu installation without a swap partition – primarily because it automatically detects the Chrome OS, along with everything else, and adds boot options for all of this within GRUB. doing this saves you the headache of resettling with a manual GRUB configuration.
If you do opt for this when the machine is restarted you’ll see ‘Unknown Linux distro’ in the list of operating system choices. this is your Chrome OS. Select it to start up your newly installed Google operating system.
You may find Chrome OS wants to run a repair operation on its first boot, this didn’t always happen for us but if it does it only has to be run the once and will leave you with a fully-functioning Chrome OS Chromebook.
Step-by-step: Boot to Chrome OS
Get Google’s operating system on your device quickly and easily
1. Find nightly builds
Go to chromeos.hexxeh.net and take a look at the list of nightly builds that are automatically compiled ready to run for VMWare, VirtualBox or primed for a USB installation. The latest will usually work fine but if you have problems you can usually get around them by choosing a slightly older version instead.
2. get Image Writer
Once you’ve snatched the USB version, you’ll also need Image Writer from here, which is a little utility that will write the image to the USB flash drive. Chrome OS takes up less than 2GB of space, so you could even opt to install this on an SD card, as long as your netbook or laptop supports the boot options.
3. give it the boot
Most up to date laptops and netbooks have very flexible boot option hiding away within the BIOS, so it doesn’t matter you’ve used a standard USB drive or an SD card. Once you’ve powered up your Chromebook-to-be, press the key for the BIOS or the Boot menu (often [Delete], [F2] or [F12]) and then choose the inserted media.
4. get connected
Although you don’t always need an internet connection to use a Chromebook, you do need one for the first boot, because it runs you through a setup procedure that requires either a wired Ethernet or wireless network connection in order to create a link between your Chromebook and your Google account.
5. Shiny chrome
The basic vanilla builds that are created by Hexxeh come with no additional bells or whistles, so your first impression of Chrome OS will be very dull. The OS runs all of the Chrome browser extensions, so head to chrome.google.com/webstore and grab any extensions you’re likely to need, like Google Cloud Print.
6. Together forever
If you decide to keep Chrome OS on your device permanently, there’s an installer built into the OS itself. Press [Ctrl]+ [Alt]+[T], type Shell, then type /Usr/sbin/chromeos-install. You’ll be prompted for the admin password, which is ‘facepunch’. Be warned, this wipes the internal drive, but you could opt for a dual-boot version.
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First published in PC Plus Issue 311
Liked this? Then check out Samsung Chromebook vs Acer Chromebook
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why won't my computer open up the D: drive that is my memory card reader?
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in dvd Rrw Drives
I have a sandisk video HD card 4 GB and everytime I put in it in the computer built in card reader I can't open it even when I go to explore it will just freeze up but the card reader works when I put in the memory card for my picture camera in the same card reader. Its only this card that it won't read, it said something about it being unable to read it because its secure?? Help I want to save my movies to my computer.Possibly, the reader in the computer can't handle cards over 2GB.One alternative is to find the cable that hooks the camera up to the computer and transfer the data that way.Another is to try out a different card reader that is supposed to work with 4GB and larger cards.
Why is My Computer CD Drive Not Detected?
645 days
by TwiddleGeek
in dvd Rrw Drives
If your computer CS drive is not being detected, you must have not installed the CD/DVD ROM drivers or they are corrupted. You need to follow some easy steps to know whether the CD drivers are not installed or are corrupted.
Right click on my Computer and go to Properties. Click the Hardware tab and the select the Device Manager option. in the list, click on plus sign which is beside the DVD/CD-ROM drives. if you get a CD drive after you click the plus sign and you notice a red colored cross beside it, it is an indication that the operating system did not recognize the drive. So, right click on the drive name and select enable. this will solve your problem. if it does not show the drive, it indicates that the system has not recognized the driver or the drivers are not correct. in which case, go to the BIOS of the system. start the computer and press F8 or F1 continuously when the system is booting. You will now get into the BIOS setup and see the proper options to know whether the CD/DVD ROM is on the list of the drivers.
Even after doing this you are unable to detect the CD driver, you have to check the hardware in the computer. Open the CPU’s cabinet. Two cables will be connected to the CD/DVD ROM. one is for transferring the data and it is from motherboard, and another cable is for supplying power and it is from SMPS. Remove and connect them and see whether the CD drive is detected.
If you get the message saying that the CD drive has disappeared, then here is the solution.
Right click my Computer and then click on Properties. go to the Hardware tab and then to the Device Manager. Click on plus sign which is beside DVD/CD ROM. Uninstall the CD drive. Click on Action and select the Scan for Hardware Changes option. Windows will find the drivers that are missing and install them.