Month: October 2011

Looking back at Achtung Baby, 20 years on

Dave Farquhar Music

I’m of the age that’s supposed to like Nirvana more than U2. Or at least, when U2’s Achtung Baby came out, I was. (I suspect a lot of people my age would rather listen to U2 than Nirvana now, while my teenaged nephew would have the opposite opinion.)

I bought both Nevermind and Achtung Baby, at the same time in fact. I’ve written before about what Nevermind meant to me and the people around me. Being arguably my favorite record of all time, I think Achtung Baby, which is being re-released this week, deserves the same treatment.
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Serious hints for your employee self-evaluation

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Since posting my tongue-in-cheek hints for completing your employee self-evaluation, it’s received a ton of hits, presumably from people who want serious advice on filling out employee self evaluations. Just to clarify, I do not recommend calling yourself “awesome sauce” on your evaluation.

The main thing is to be understated if anything, fair to yourself, and back up what you say.

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Making newer versions of Firefox work like a fresh install

Dave Farquhar Software ,

About a year ago, I told you about how to vacuum Firefox’s SQLite database to make it run better.

The trick still works, but they moved stuff around on us in Firefox 7.

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HP decides to keep its PC business

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

HP came to its senses this week and decided that ex-CEO Leo Apotheker’s decision to pull out of the PC market he didn’t understand was a bad decision. They’re staying in.

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The mainstream places a bet on SSDs

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I just saw that LSI Corporation bought Sandforce, maker of high-performance SSD controllers, earlier this week for $400 million.

LSI makes a lot of things. I’ve owned a couple of SCSI controllers over the years with their chips on them. I’ve administered servers with their RAID controllers in them. They also make system-on-a-chip solutions.

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Do you need faster Internet, or just TCP Optimizer?

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

A longtime reader wrote in this week recommending TCP Optimizer. I’ve used this program off and on for years, but don’t seem to have ever mentioned it on the blog.

I talked about similar programs in my book, but TCP Optimizer works with all modern (and many ancient) versions of Windows, and it can make a tremendous difference. It’s a small, self-contained program that doesn’t require any installation, the way programs ought to be.

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The $199 tablet market gets more crowded

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Want a $199 tablet? Want something more open than a Kindle Fire? Want it a couple of weeks sooner? Don’t mind a slower CPU to have device portability on your books and more open access to the operating system?

Kobo is betting with its Kobo Vox tablet that the answer to at least one of those questions, for some people, is yes.

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Disable pointless tab-opening animation to speed up Firefox

Dave Farquhar Software

Rather than just opening, Firefox tries to be cute by opening the tab halfway, then sliding open the rest of the way. If you have a fast enough system, maybe you don’t notice. But if you’re like me and like things to be as fast as possible, you can disable this behavior.

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Disable USB mass storage to solve the USB drive-in-the-parking-lot problem

Dave Farquhar security , ,

Last Updated on October 11, 2019 by Dave Farquhar

If you’re not concerned yet about the danger of people finding random USB devices in parking lots and plugging them into work PCs, eventually you will be. The answer to the problem is to disable USB mass storage on business PCs. Of course, then there’s the question of how you connect hard drives for legitimate company use.
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Google guts.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Dan Bowman tossed a very interesting rant my direction. Basically, it’s an inside view on what Google is doing wrong and other companies do right.

I admire Google for allowing what could be embarrassing to remain out on the light.

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