Uncategorized Archives

How to be an Apple Genius

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized August 30, 2012apple, BSD, compaq, intel, macintosh, motorola, unix

Gizmodo got its grubby little hands on a training manual allegedly used in Apple Stores. It looks credible, and answers some questions.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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If you needed another reminder to secure your wi-fi…

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized August 13, 2012August 12, 2012infoworld, wi-fi

And if you needed another reminder of why you should secure your wi-fi:

“There’s a very common belief that if someone pirates your Wi-Fi connection or uses your computer without your permission, you are responsible for illegal downloads of copyrighted material. That’s not true, says Stoltz; the law is quite clear. However, the lawyers who bring those cases use that misperception to convince innocent people that they had better pay up. Since $3,500 is just a fraction of the money it would take to fight a case in court, most people simply settle.” —Infoworld

Dave Farquhar

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Testing my new Facebook plugin

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized August 12, 2012August 12, 2012AOL, spam, yahoo

The plugin I was using, FT Facepress II, decided to quit working, so now I’m trying to get the official Facebook WordPress plugin working.

If it does all it says it does, Facebook comments about blog posts will also show up here (and not just on Facebook), which would be nice.

Update: It appears to have worked, but it also appears to have replaced the comments engine. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. That option is easy enough to disable; I’ll give it a trial period and see. The new engine can authenticate against Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail, so it does give some options for those who don’t have Facebook accounts.

The upside is that this may significantly reduce the spam comments. I have a good anti-spam engine, but the comments still clutter up my database.

Dave Farquhar

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The best free e-book site I’ve found yet

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized August 4, 2012classmate, Project Gutenberg, public domain

I’ve been grabbing Project Gutenberg texts as I think of them, and prettying them up with an epub editor, but I learned today that I’ve been largely wasting my time. Manybooks.net is a site that has most of the Gutenberg collection available and has already cleaned up the formatting and added covers to make these old public domain books look better and more recognizable on an e-reader’s virtual “shelf.”

That’s not the only thing the site has going for it.

Dave Farquhar

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It’s going to take me some time to catch up

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized July 30, 2012

I had an unexpected death in the family late last week, so I’ve been traveling and not doing any writing the last few days. I had a few things in the pipeline; chances are I’ll just call that stuff good enough and run it until I find my groove again. And if I miss a day or two this week, that’s why.

Dave Farquhar

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Yes, an e-reader does change how you read

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized July 29, 2012Nook Simple Touch

I’ve read that e-readers change the way you read, but of course up until this week I’ve never experienced it firsthand. I can say that in my limited experience with a Nook Simple Touch, I’ve already noticed it.

Dave Farquhar

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There’s plenty of credit for the Internet to go around

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized July 25, 2012April 27, 20261980s, 1990s, 3com, AT&T, IBM, IRC, Missouri, networking equipment, university of missouri, unix

There’s a crazy rumor going around saying that the government didn’t do much of anything to create the Internet, and that private industry did it all.

I remember the Internet before the private sector got involved in it. I was there.
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Dave Farquhar

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Nobody respects craftsmanship anymore

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized July 24, 2012home depot, New York, new york times, sears, Stain

The New York Times laments the decline of craftsmanship and its side effects in the United States.

A generation ago, it wasn’t terribly uncommon for men to make their own kitchen cabinets. And those cabinets, if built correctly, would last several lifetimes. The cabinets my great-great grandfather built before the turn of the previous century survived just fine into my lifetime. A year ago, a prospective tenant took me to task for having such handbuilt cabinets in a rental house, and pointed to a couple of other rental houses–with particle-board Home Depot junk in them–as having “better updates.”

Dave Farquhar

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Let’s talk GPSs

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized July 18, 2012

I’ve used Magellan GPSs for about five years. I find them pretty easy and intuitive to use and like them. I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of what you’re used to, though. Magellans have their quirks–they’re more prone to sending you on u-turns than other brands–but mine doesn’t recalculate unless you change directions, its routes are fairly intelligent, its time predictions are pretty close, and I like that it dings at you just before you’re supposed to turn. My only gripes with it are that it doesn’t display the speed limit and the newest maps available for my model date to something like 2009.
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Dave Farquhar

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