David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Can you use a Dell charger on an HP laptop? Or vice versa? I don’t recommend it, but sometimes you can. In a pinch, that’s better than not being able to use your laptop at all. Here’s how to tell.
Interchanging chargers between Dell and HP laptops doesn’t always work, and in the worst case, can damage the computer. Be sure to check the voltage and polarity before you even try it.
Laser printer toner doesn’t dry out like inkjet ink does. But does toner go bad? Does laser printer toner expire? How long does toner last? In this blog post, I’ll explain why it can last a decade or more.
Laser printer toner doesn’t dry out, so the toner itself doesn’t go bad, and page count matters more than age when it comes to longevity. There are parts inside the toner cartridge that eventually go bad, but that generally takes 15-20 years.
It’s hard to know how to find my router IP address, since it’s arbitrary. Usually your router lives at one end or the other of your network, but there’s no reason why it has to. So if someone decided to get tricky, here’s how to find it.
There was a time when knowing your router IP was a matter of survival, but these days networking normally configures itself, using a technology called DHCP. That puts your router IP address out of sight and out of mind. But it turns out there are several ways to find the router IP, and some of them work no matter what kind of computer you have.
A vulnerability scanner like Nessus or Qualys will record the MAC address of every computer it finds. But Qualys doesn’t output the MAC address in a nice column format. It mixes a lot of other data into the cell. So I had to figure out how to extract a MAC address from Excel data to give an infrastructure team an inventory they wanted.
Effective Aug 1, I won’t be able to post updates from the blog to my Facebook profile automatically. So if you follow me on Facebook, you won’t see blog posts after Aug 1. I have set up a Facebook page where I will be able to continue to post updates. If you’re interested in following this blog on Facebook, follow this page instead of me. If you want to watch me rant with my journalism school classmates from the 1990s, follow me.
And now I have two days to get posting to that page working. Wish me luck.
I’ve had high speed Internet for about as long as anyone in my ZIP code–as soon as DSL was available, I signed up and paid through the nose for it. It took a while for fiber optics to become an option, but I switched once I did. I’ve been a Southwestern Bell/AT&T customer for a good 20 years. Over the years I weighed AT&T Internet vs Spectrum Internet. And for a while, I switched.
I switched to Spectrum in 2016, then back to AT&T in 2018. There are pros and cons to each of them, so I thought going through them might be helpful. Keep in mind Spectrum encompasses several legacy companies. Charter Communications started re-branding itself as Spectrum soon before it acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Of the three, only Bright House Networks had a good reputation, but Bright House had low name recognition. Hence the use of the new name.
Dan Bowman kindly pointed me to former Commodore engineer Bil Herd’s discussion of the ill-fated Commodore TED machines on Hackaday. Here in the States, few remember the TED specifically, but some people may remember that oddball Commodore Plus 4 that closeout companies sold for $79 in 1985 and 1986. The Commodore Plus 4 was one of those TED machines. So was the Commodore 16.
What went wrong with those machines? Commodore miscalculated what the home computer market was doing. The TED was a solution to too many problems, and ended up not solving any of them all that well. Arguably it’s more popular with vintage computer enthusiasts today than it was in the 1980s. Read more
AT&T provides a residential gateway when you subscribe to U-Verse or AT&T Fiber. It’s pretty easy to use, but lacks a lot of features we expect in routers these days. So you may be wondering: Can I use my own router with AT&T U-Verse? Yes. Yes you can. Here’s how to use your own router with AT&T U-Verse or AT&T Fiber.
AT&T’s default wi-fi passwords aren’t the worst I’ve seen, but they aren’t super-secure either. So here’s how to change an AT&T U-Verse wifi password. The same trick works with AT&T Fiber, since it uses the same residential gateways.
Is there a virus on my phone? Or your phone? I can’t know for certain, but probably not. Here’s what to do if your phone says it has a virus and wants you to visit a web page or pay someone money.
I’ll tell you what you really need to do, and I’ll even show you a neat trick so you’ll see fewer of these messages. And none of this will cost you anything, either.