Author: Dave Farquhar

A firewall to defeat Android location tracking

Dave Farquhar security , ,

That didn’t take long. If you want more control over Android location tracking, Whispermonitor is for you.

Basically, any time an application tries to hit the Internet, it tells you where it’s going and on what port, and you can allow it once, always, or until reboot. Or deny it entirely.

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Quoting famous people accurately

Dave Farquhar net.culture , ,

If you’re going to quote people on the Internet, you might as well quote them accurately. Here are some tips for quoting famous people accurately, based on my own detective work on one of my favorite quotes.

“The problem with quotes on the Internet is that you never can know if they are genuine.” –Abraham Lincoln

The death of bin Laden prompted a couple of quotes attributed to Mark Twain and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be repeated endlessly on social networking sites. It turned out both quotes were false. Inaccurate quotes also tend to pop up in election years.

Here are some good tips to avoid spreading fake quotes the next time something really newsworthy happens. One nifty trick: A Google search, filtered by date, to see if the quote existed anywhere before the event.

“Abraham Lincoln” may be right, that you can never know for certain, but you can get a really good idea with a little bit of digging.
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Why would anyone want my e-mail account?

Dave Farquhar security

One of my train acquaintances’ e-mail addresses got hacked last week. And yesterday The Consumerist warned not to play games on social networking sites telling people what your royal name would be by substituting things like the names of places you’ve lived for your real name. That led to people asking why anyone would want an Ordinary Joe’s e-mail account.

Ordinary Joe’s e-mail account is priceless, that’s why.
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Random thoughts from the day after bin Laden died

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , ,

It was 9:15. I was tired. I’d been reading, then I went to my computer to check baseball scores. I saw that the president had called a press conference for 9:30 CST, with no indication what it was about. 9:30 PM on a Sunday night isn’t when you usually call press conferences, and there’s usually some indication what the subject will be. I was curious enough to click around to see what was going on, but when I didn’t find anything right away, I went to bed.

This morning I woke up, went straight to the Kansas City Star’s baseball page to get an account of last night’s Royals-Twins game, and out of the corner of my eye, spotted the last headline I ever expected to read: “The Raid that Killed bin Laden.” What? Beneath it was a similar headline. I clicked, read the first two sentences to make sure I was reading the right thing, then raced into the bedroom, where my wife was getting our two sons dressed.

“They got bin Laden,” I said. And she did the same double-take that I did, and made me say it again.

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How I fixed a lamp

Dave Farquhar DIY ,

Soon after my wife and I got married, she used some of our wedding gift money to buy some lamps. We like them quite a bit. But one of them developed a big problem with flickering. I fixed it, temporarily, by bending the tab underneath the light bulb, but last week it deteriorated rapidly, ultimately reaching the point where any time we turned the lamp on, it blew the breaker immediately. Here’s how I fixed a lamp–for good.

After trying a few things, the solution ended up being replacing the lamp socket. A lamp socket is a $3.50 part similar to this one. I purchased mine locally, of course.

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Making the ribbon even worse

Dave Farquhar Software

How can you make the dreaded Office 2007/2010 ribbon worse?

Add Clippy to it.

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When Windows gets a file association with .exe files, get a hammer. This one.

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

I spent a maddening couple of days with a Windows computer that somehow had gotten a bogus file association with .exe files, which roughly translates to, “Windows quit running any programs.” Microsoft has a fix for that. Except neither solution worked. Nor did connecting via remote registry, or even renaming their automated fixer-upper to have a .com extension (presumably because it turned around and tried to download and run a .exe). It’s too bad that didn’t work, as I was pretty proud of myself for remembering that little trick.

So where’s my hammer?

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So why are Apple and Google (and Microsoft) tracking us?

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , ,
So why are Apple and Google (and Microsoft) tracking us?

So what are Google and Apple doing with this location data? And Microsoft, now that it’s clear they’re gathering it too (but they claim they aren’t storing it anywhere on the phone).

They aren’t saying a lot, but they’ve said enough to take a pretty good guess. And no, I don’t think the intent is to be evil.
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Disabling Android location tracking

Dave Farquhar security ,

It appears that you don’t have to defeat Android location traffic; disabling Android location tracking is entirely possible. Go to Settings, then Location and Security, and uncheck the options Use wireless networks and Use GPS satellites.

There are upsides and downsides.

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Ye Olde Nintendo 64

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , ,

I fixed up a Nintendo 64 this past weekend. People of a certain age affectionately refer to it just as “the 64,” though to me, “the 64” refers to a computer with 64K of memory introduced in 1982. I have an inherent bias against almost anything that reminds me of 1997, but in spite of my biases, I found a number of things to like about the system after spending a few hours with it.

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