At 3.31 PST on Friday 13th, or on Valentines day depending whre you live, Unix computer clocks reached the time of 1234567890–1.2 billion seconds elapsed from January 1, 1970, the official beginning of the Unix epoch.

The clock is used not just by Unix, but also by Linux, Java, JavaScript, Mac OS X, and various other technologies.

That’s my bit of trivia for this week

I had some issues with my work laptop the other day and all my settings for my applications had been lost. Damn I thought, I’ve lost all my bookmarks and firefox settings. However I had backed up my profile a few days before but wasn’t sure how to move it to my new computer seamlessly.

After a bit of googling and trial & error, I found the following way to work the best:

1. Exit Firefox
2. Start -> Run -> type ‘%APPDATA%’
3. Select Mozilla -> Firefox -> Profiles
4. Copy profile folder (XXXXXXX.default) and paste it to desired location (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles)
5. Start -> Run -> type ‘firefox.exe -ProfileManager’
6. Click ‘Create Profile’
7. Click ‘Choose Folder’
8. Select the newly copied folder (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXX.default)
9. Now select the newly created profile and click ‘Start Firefox’ — check that all your cookies etc are there
10. Surf the net!

How long has my PC been running for? Often you want to find out as you need to know if your PC or server has rebooted.

There are a quite a few software tools out there on the net that can do that for you, but you don’t need them. I’ll show you a couple of ways (and I’m sure there is more).

* Open up a command prompt (Start>Run type in cmd and press enter)
* Type the following command: Systeminfo | Find “Up Time” (! Case sensitive)

This will take a few seconds and you will see messages that Windows is loading certain information. Eventually you’ll get an output similar to this:

System Up Time: 1 Days, 0 Hours, 57 Minutes, 18 Seconds

The other way is even simpler.

* Again, open up a command prompt
* Type in net statistics workstation
* you get a few lines of info but the one you are looking for will look something like this:

Statistics since 2/3/2009 7:23 AM