Author: Dave Farquhar

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 , ,

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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Pipe output to the clipboard in Windows

Dave Farquhar War Stories, Windows , , , , , , , , ,

Besides all the changes to the GUI that happened post-Windows XP, they also made one useful change to the command prompt. When you run a command, it’s now possible to pipe output to the clipboard.

If you’re like me and write a lot of documentation, or you just take a lot of notes while doing computer maintenance, it’s a big boon.

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Appremover can remove stubborn antivirus software

Dave Farquhar security , ,

Antivirus software can be among the hardest software to uninstall, because its hooks dig so deeply into the operating system. I’ve seen it fail to uninstall for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it requires a password, which was entered by someone other than you and never written down. Or sometimes something gets corrupted, and the program’s uninstaller fails. If you need to remove stubborn antivirus software, there’s a solution.

Enter Appremover.

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Quieting a system with more modernized case fans

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Needing a secondary case fan for my current PC build, I picked up an Antec Tri-Cool Double Ball Bearing fan, the 92 mm size. Even on its highest speed, I found it to be quieter than the fans in the PCs on my desk at work. On its lowest setting, you pretty much can’t hear it at all. At its full retail price of $25, I wouldn’t bother with it, but when it’s on sale for less than $10, that’s not bad.

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A source of great inspiration evaporates

Dave Farquhar security , ,

Google announced this week that it’s defaulting to https (secure) searches, and not passing search queries on to the sites its user clicks anymore. It’s the end of an era, I guess, and I’ll miss it.

Yeah, I looked at the search queries that come into this site. I’ve been doing it for years.

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Awesome Ads broke my blog

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

So I thought I’d experiment with a plugin to help me better manage the ad blocks on my blog. The WordPress plugin Awesome Ads looked promising, so I tried it. Not only did it not work, it also threw my admin page into an endless loop of errors. This function not found in this php file. That function not found in another php file. Line 175 seemed like a problem.

Here’s how I fixed it. I won’t say it’s the right way, but it worked.

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Installing internal media readers in old Compaqs

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I had a Compaq Presario S5140WM case that I wanted to reuse for a new system build. There’s nothing really wrong with the case, but in the 8 years since the S5140WM was a mainstream PC, we’ve started putting things like card readers and audio jacks on the front of the PC. This machine only had USB in front.

Rather than replace the case, I installed an internal card reader that includes audio jacks, an eSATA port, a Firewire port, and three more USB ports, bringing it right up to 2011 standards. It fit in a 5.25″ bay, which is fine. The system has two bays, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever want to put another 5.25″ device in the second one.

But installation wasn’t as straightforward as it could be. Wouldn’t you know it?
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