Try Thinking For Yourselves

I used to use ZapTXT.com to keyword search new listings on Craigslist, but they went out of business. I looked online but couldn't find anything similar. Is there something? For example, I want to get an email when Dallas Craigslist gets a new posting that matches "Big Agnes tent," or an email when @delloutlet Twitters a message containing "15%" so I can catch 15% off coupons. I don't want to check the sites obsessively myself for everything I'm interested in.

I'm looking for a portable gadget (like a PDA or gaming device) that I can use to control a USB tethered digital camera using a free Linux application, so I can write a script to shoot complicated series of photographs. I'm looking for the cheapest gadget of any sort - used on ebay or wherever - that is small, battery powered, can serve as a USB host, and run Linux.

I don't care if it's an old PDA with 2 MB of memory and a 160x160 B&W screen. As long as it's cheap. There's no point in suggesting a new iPaq. And I need to be able to strap it to a digital camera and shoot hand-held, so no laptops or even netbooks. Also, don't suggest a device that's only capable of USB peripheral mode, it needs to serve as the USB host of the camera.

A PDA, gaming device, cell phone, MP3 player, or whatever is fine. It doesn't need to ship with Linux, as long as there's a Linux distro I can run on it without having to start modifying a bunch of things to make it work - it needs a proven Linux variety for it. Any ideas?

How do I log in to the admin page of my Speedstream 5100 dsl modem? The manual I found online says to go to

"http://speedstream"/

But browsers just return a "page not found" message. I've tried likely sounding IP addresses, and my PPPoe settings panel reports a router address of "151.164.182.21," but I can't get a login page trying any of those.

I'm trying to use Vonage with AT&T DSL, but I can't get a connection, and I assume it's because I can't set up PPPoe. My computer uses its own PPPoe settings, but I can't configure my Vonage box to use PPPoe, and I can't log in to my DSL modem to make it handle PPPoe either.

I have a Speed Graphic and used to shoot black and white and develop it myself in the darkroom. But I've since lost access to the darkroom. I also have an Aero Ektar 5x5 200mm f3.6 lens that I want to put on it and do color work. It's easy to buy 4x5 sheet film, but where does one get it developed?

The big local lab in Cleveland is Dodd Camera, but they don't handle it. I've been trying to Google up a lab that I can mail it to for developing, but I can't find one. Can anyone recommend some labs that develop 4x5 color sheet film? Someone must, people still use it.

I've looked everywhere I can Google up, but can't find one. I don't want the best sellers of the week, month, or year, or the best sellers from a single store like Amazon, but the all-time best sellers from the romance genera. I thought this would be easy to find, but I can't find it.

I was backpacking and came across a survey mark/benchmark, and I'd like to know how to read it to translate it into a (rough) GPS coordinate. I tried Googling, but couldn't find anything that would tell me how to read it.

It says:

_______________

T 49 N

1/4 3/10

R 10 W

Michigan Department of Conservation State Forest.

_______________

Any help with what all that means?

Thanks.

My girlfriend and I are trying to backpack about a 100 mile stretch of the North Country Trail one-direction. We've found a shuttle that will take us from Grand Marais to our starting point, but we've got about a 40 mile (by road) gap from where we want to leave the car to Grand Marais. We're trying to hire a local person to drive us this distance, but can't find anyone. We've tried contacting the North Country Trail association and placing a Craigslist Ad. What else can we do? We just need a ride from about 40 miles east of Grand Marais, Michigan to Grand Marais, Michigan on the morning of Monday, July 7th (or the evening of Sunday the 6th if we can't get one Monday). We're willing to pay. But we're no where near there and don't know how to find local people.

I was in the garage, hit the trigger on a high-amp saw, and instantly all the lights and outlets in the garage, plus several more in the house and basement near the garage, go out. Seems totally obvious this is a blown circuit. So I check the breakers and... all the breakers are fine. Double check, tripple check, have somebody else check- all circuits are fine. None tripped.

As far as I can find, there are no GFI outlets on this circuit (house is from 1959, none of this section has been rewired, plus I checked for GFI's anyway). Besides, it would be bizarre to have so many fixtures and outlets all wired through a single GFI outlet.

Did someone install a second circuit breaker panel somewhere I'm not finding? It seems impossible, because I'm sure I've blown a circuit using a saw in the garage before, and I reset it in the regular circuit breaker box. Besides, I'm sure there is no second breaker. Any ideas?

I'm building a corner shower seat for my handicapped father and I'm making it out of polycarbonate. I plan to attach the polycarbonate panels together with plastic epoxy and screws. When working with polycarbonate, will I get better holding power treating it like metal, and tapping (threading) holes for machine screws (I'm using 1/2" polycarbonate, so I'd probably use 1/4-20 machine screws), or would I get better holding power in polycarbonate just drilling tap holes and sinking sheet metal screws?

I bought a D-link DI-624M wireless 802.11 G MIMO Router used off eBay. It arrived in good shape and worked fine. I updated it to the latest firmware. But I had trouble using port forwarding on it, and posted a question here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Atm3F...

I followed the initial advice in the answer- reverting to a prior firmware version. It didn't change anything, so I tried going back to the newest firmware- and the transfer crashed, and then my router was bricked.

I've tried following the directions here:

http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/?page_id=31

I can connect to the router's flash recovery page that lets me try to upload new firmware, but whichever firmware file I choose, I either get "wrong image file selected" error, it it just sits and nothing happens, even if I wait for days. Anyone have any ideas for anything else to try before I pitch it?

I bought a used D-link DI-624M router. It works fine except for when it comes to port forwarding. As I understand it, they refer to port forwarding as "Virtual Server." While this service works, there is no way to enter a port range. As one example, Bittorrent can use from 6881-6999. Am I expected to manually enter 118 separate entries in order to achieve this?

I read the manual and help file and clicked through every configuration screen to no avail. Searching the web, I found directions for doing this, complete with pictures, but their pictures show a different setup screen from what I get.

I already tried updating the router to the latest firmware off D-link's website, v2.5

Here's a link to the picture from someone else's directions, showing fields to enter a port range:

http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwar...

and here's a screenshot I took of my screen, that won't let me enter a port range:

http://familyreserve.com/temp/dlink.png

I'm moving an electrical junction box that was installed by an electrician. Generally I assume an electrician does things right, but I'm suspicious about something he did in this box I'm moving.

The box has modern 3-conductor (NMB 12-2 Romex, which is 2-wire plus a third wire bare dedicated ground) run to it from the circuit breaker. The box junctions this with an old circuit that is two conductor with no ground.

The way the electrician did this was to tie the white (neutral) wire in the old 2-conductor cable to both the white (neutral) and bare (ground) wires in the new 3-conductor. Obviously, black (hot) was tied to black.

Now, I would have thought to dead-end the third wire (bare ground) to the (metal) box, and to just connect black to black and white to white. I thought you weren't supposed to connect dedicated third-wire ground with the neutral return wire, even though they're both grounded eventually. What should be done in this situation?

A few years ago, US manufacturers standardized the color of the Romex sheathing on household electric cable. Now AWG 14 is white, 12 is yellow, and 10 is orange.

We have a summer cottage that doesn't have hollow walls, so all the electric wiring is exposed. We need to replace some of the old, crumbling wiring - which is all black - but on the very dark wood walls, it would look terrible to have any of the new colors, particularly yellow or orange. Is there anywhere left to buy a simple household electrical cable, like a sheathed solid-core NM 12-2, with either brown or black sheathing?

I have exposed chrome plumbing to my shower head. I need more matching pipes to use structurally- some pipe, two flanges, and a 90 degree elbow- all of which will be exposed in the bathroom and must be chrome or stainless for appearances. It is for structure only- it does NOT have to carry water, be rated for safety, or even be hollow, for that matter. It doesn't have to have any significant strength either, anything metal will be strong enough. I have looked everywhere- scoured the internet, from plumbing warehouses to industrial supply companies, and asked at hardware stores, and no one has any or has any ideas who would. Yet I've seen it installed before, so it exists. Some came in the overhead shower kit that's installed in my bathroom. Someone must sell it. Any help, please?

I have a home network. The router has port forwarding, which you set by setting which IP address the ports are forwarded to. But as the computers come and go and are restarted, the router keeps assigning them different addresses, leading to the ports forwarding to different machines all the time, which I'm constantly manually correcting. I've tried setting up the computers with manual IP settings, or using DHCP with a manual IP address, but neither one will work- they only work when configured to use DHCP, and then the addresses keep changing. An old router I had let you reserve an IP address and always assign it to the same MAC address, so the same machine always had a static local IP, but my Linksys Wireless router doesn't appear to offer that. Any idea?

The commercials can be seen at

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/

And no, it's not Photoshop or GIMP, unless it's customized beyond recognition.

Last year, when I got up to around 8 miles, I suddenly developed knee problems (probably runner's knee - chondromalacia) that got so bad I stopped running for the season (even after a two-week break, the pain would come back within a mile).

I've looked into shoes, my form, pronation, knee exercises, stretching- but one frequent factor contributing to runner's knee is how fast one increases their mileage. However, I can't find any sort of remotely authoritative sounding recommendations on how quickly I should increase (preferably something backed by some research, but otherwise at least backed by a doctor or someone with sports-medicine credentials). I've heard stuff between adding several miles a week and "not more than a 10% increase per week," never with any references.

I'm not looking for "this worked OK for me," I'm looking for at least slightly authoritative recommendations, if available.

I just got VOIP telephone service. The download stream is always fine, but if I have any program that uploads (torrent, gnutella, DC, FTP) open and running, it starts to introduce errors in the upstream conversation (the other person hears annoying clicks and I cut out). I'm sure this is because I only get about 100 kilobits upstream, but 4 megabits down.

Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this? I was hoping my router (a Linksys) would have a place to configure giving bandwidth priority to a particular device (we'd ALWAYS want the phone to get complete priority over any other device), but I couldn't find anything. Did I just miss it? Is there another solution? If another router with wireless does this, I could sell the older Linksys and get another. Any suggestions?

I have a bunch of pictures tagged with keywords (currently in iPhoto). I want to have a website where someone can search for a keyword, or choose a keyword from a list, and have a web photo gallery generated of all matching pictures. I have hosting with mySQL and PHP. I am familiar with computers, but I can NOT program this myself, I'm looking for some "easy" way to do it. A blog site or free homepage or such would be fine if they include this functionality, or a pre-made website platform I can install on my host with this functionality. It does not have to be highly customizable or elegant.