Author: Dave Farquhar

Social networks can be good or bad for your career

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , ,

HR departments and recruiters are watching you on Linkedin and other social networks. That’s an opportunity and a warning. Read more

How to clean your LCD monitor or TV cheaply and safely

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I found a nice trick this week. If those microfiber cloths that came with your LCD monitors and TV(s) have all wandered off, you can use a dry eraser instead to clean your LCD. They’re bigger, so they’re easier to keep track of, and easier to use too. Just wipe the screen with the eraser like you would if you were erasing a whiteboard.

If you have fingerprints or other gunk on the screen that a microfiber cloth or dry eraser can’t remove, dilute some white vinegar 1:1 with distilled water and apply it to a soft cloth to clean the screen.

Back online

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

The site was down last week due to a series of power failures that extended longer than the capacity of my uninterpretable power supplies. As it turned out, I wasn’t home to fix it. But now I’m back, and so is the site. All of the machines recovered gracefully.

My apologies for the downtime. If there’s an upside, it’s that I now have about a week’s backlog of content.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

What to do when your COBRA paperwork doesn’t show up

Dave Farquhar Health , ,

I’m writing this to hopefully save someone from having as bad of a day as I’ve just had. You see, I started a new job on July 3. My new health insurance starts August 1. My former employer terminated my coverage on July 2. COBRA is intended to fill gaps like that, but all I have is a promise that my COBRA paperwork will show up someday. My former employer didn’t send the COBRA paperwork, just a promise that it was coming. Famous last words, you know.

That promise doesn’t help when my wife needs insulin today. And when my current employer doesn’t know what to do, my old employer won’t answer the phone, and my old insurance company doesn’t know what to do either, that’s enough to ruin your day.

What I didn’t know was that COBRA doesn’t work that way.

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The Nexus 7 looks promising, if slightly flawed

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I haven’t mentioned Google’s upcoming Nexus 7 tablet yet. If you haven’t heard about it somehow, it’s a 7-inch, quad-core tablet with 1 GB of RAM, priced at $199, and running Android 4.1. So think of it like a souped-up Kindle Fire. Read more

Want to be a landlord? Read this

Dave Farquhar Landlording

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a good, short piece on landlording. It’s pretty good, but misses a couple of things.

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New digs

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

Tuesday was my first day on the new job. Who starts a new job the day before a holiday? Me. Hey, I tried to start one the day after Christmas one year. This is completely in character.

The new job uses the pieces of the CISSP I wasn’t using. It’s a stretch. Stretching is good. My new boss handed me a schedule for the next six weeks, with objectives for each week. It’s good to go in knowing what’s expected. He also said I’ll be doing a little Unix work. I was glad to hear that.

A data classification study question

Dave Farquhar security , ,

I was in a meeting last week where two CISSPs were battling wits, and one challenged the other with a question. I elbowed my boss and said that’s a great CISSP or CISM study question. He agreed. So I’ll repeat it here, with explanation.

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No matter what brand you buy, you’ll have carburetor trouble

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

I bought a lawnmower this weekend for the other house. Of course they tried to get me to buy the $40 extended warranty to cover a $162 lawnmower. “You’ll have carburetor trouble no matter what brand you buy,” she said.

The bold print on the warranty paperwork said it excluded carburetor cleaning, so I don’t know what the point of that was. “I’ll pass,” I said. Read more

Ping sweep from Windows

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking, Windows
Ping sweep from Windows

Here’s the best Windows command-line one-liner I’ve seen in a very long time: a ping sweep from Windows. Ping sweeps, also known as ping scans, are something every sysadmin and security analyst is likely to need at one point or another. You don’t need a special tool either. It can be as simple as a one-line batch file. Ping sweep scripts for Unix are common, but you won’t always have a Unix box available. You can almost always find a Windows box anywhere you go. That makes a Windows ping sweep useful.

If you’re not familiar with a ping sweep, read on. If you need to quickly scan your network to see if anyone’s added any new systems without telling you–something that only ever happens to me, right?–this tool will help you detect that, then head off those questions about why you haven’t patched and installed antivirus on that new server yet. Sometimes I run this on my home network too, to help me jog my memory.

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