Author: Dave Farquhar

Review: First Alert PIR725 motion sensing socket

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

I bought a First Alert PIR725 motion sensing socket, which has the distinction of working with CFLs, as well as incandescent bulbs. The premise is simple. Screw it into a bulb socket, screw the bulb into the socket, and it turns the light on when it sees you, then after it senses there’s no one in the room, it waits four minutes and turns the light off.

Read more

The web reacts to Jack Tramiel’s death

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , ,
The web reacts to Jack Tramiel’s death

Numerous tributes appeared today as word of Commodore founder Jack Tramiel’s death spread. Read more

RIP, Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
RIP, Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, the orchestrator of the first line of affordable personal computers, died this weekend at the age of 83.

I don’t know exactly what to think about it, and I’m probably not alone, though it didn’t take long for tributes to pour in. Read more

Remember Plextor? Now they’re making SSDs.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Those of you who’ve been around as long as I have–which is probably most of you–will remember Plextor as the maker of the very best SCSI CD-ROM drives back when there was a market for SCSI CD-ROM drives. I had one, and I haven’t used it in years, but I relied on it, especially when I was doing A/V work. And it never, ever let me down. Read more

Speeding up an Acer Aspire One 722

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

I gave my out-of-box impression of the Acer Aspire One 722 last week. It’s completely unacceptable out of the box, and adequate when you do some basic cleanup on it.

Now I’ve installed an Intel SSD in one and clean-installed Windows, and I’m much more impressed with it. Read more

Bernard the Legend

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , ,

It was Friday or Saturday night and I was back from college. I don’t remember what the occasion was anymore, but I’m pretty sure it must have been 1993. I got together with some friends back home in St. Louis to blow off steam.

I did this a fair number of times when I was in college. I don’t remember what movie we saw and I barely remember who I was with. There’s no reason for me to remember that night. Except for one thing.

His name was Bernard. I worked in food service for 2 1/2 years, and one of my managers told us to be legendary. That was our location’s catchphrase. But in all my years, I’ve never encountered anybody in a restaurant more legendary than Bernard. Read more

Acer Aspire One 722 review

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

I set up an Acer Aspire One 722 netbook this week. This is my Acer Aspire One 722 review. I imagine the return rates on these things is horrendous, because the out-of-box experience is pathetic.

This one won’t be going back though. Tune it up, and it’s an adequate performer. It’s still a netbook–all that talk of the AMD C-50 and C-60 chips delivering Celeron-like performance was just rumor–but it can match an Atom’s CPU performance and delivers better graphics performance than Intel. Read more

Take back some privacy

Dave Farquhar security , ,

The creepy Girls Near Me smartphone app is drawing some much-needed attention at data brokers, companies that aggregate information about you from public information and information you provide to marketers. I even found an article that talks about how to opt out from selected brokers.

I recommend you do. Open up a temporary Yahoo or Hotmail account, use it for your opt-outs, then close or abandon the account. Read more

Firefox disables out-of-date Java plugins

Dave Farquhar security , ,

Firefox is advising users to disable vulnerable Java versions on Windows. I actually saw this in action on a machine yesterday–a machine that has to run a slightly dated version of the JRE because a vendor hasn’t certified their product with the current version yet. Read more

Macintosh malware continues to evolve

Dave Farquhar Macintosh, security , , , , , , ,

Security experts have long warned that [Apple’s] delay in delivering Java patches on Mac OS could be used by malware writers to their advantage, and the new Flashback.K malware confirms that they were right. — PC World magazine

Last week I argued that a Macintosh-based botnet currently being distributed via Word document would likely change distribution methods, perhaps to a PDF document, in order to spread itself more effectively.

That, to my knowledge, hasn’t happened, but today I learned of the above example of Mac malware doing exactly that, jumping from Java vulnerability to Java vulnerability. Read more