David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
There’ve been some stories floating around about how to make your IT department spy on you. The advice is good. The question you may be asking is how much does your IT department really know? Or, more directly, is my IT department spying on me?
I can’t answer the second question with certainty. But the first question is a lot. I’ll tell you a story.
I am a garage sale pro. Over the course of a decade, I attended thousands of garage sales, saved thousands of dollars buying things for my own use, and made tens of thousands of dollars reselling my loot (yes, I had a business license and declared it on my taxes). Here are my favorite garage sale tips and tricks for buyers.
Steve Jobs was aware of the Amiga. He didn’t think much of it. Even still, Steve Jobs and the Amiga did have some connections.
Jobs’ opinion of the Commodore PET made bigger headlines after he died, but Jobs had an opinion about the Amiga, too. Both pre- and post-Commodore Amiga.
Sometimes a Windows computer is so broken that you have to run system restore from the command prompt. If you’re reading this, I don’t have to elaborate. This works in Windows 7, Windows 10, and any other recent version.
And when a system is that broken, you can expect to run into a couple of snags. Maybe you can’t even get a command prompt. Or maybe you got a command prompt but the executable file is buried. Here’s how to solve those two problems. Read more
The dark tan 1541 is the most common C-64 peripheral in existence. Its counterpart for the VIC-20, which looks exactly like it at first glance, is pretty rare. The 1540 vs 1541 is a fairly common topic among Commodore enthusiasts.
Cordless phone interference has always been a problem–phones interfering with other things, and other things interfering with them.
That was the draw of 900 MHz phones. There wasn’t anything else running on that frequency at the time, so there was little to no interference. But 900 MHz didn’t sound hi-tech in the age of gigahertz computers. So in the early 2000s, 900 MHz gave way to 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz phones. That brought back the problem, because there’s so much other stuff operating at those frequencies these days, like wireless computer networks. But there is a solution that doesn’t involve digging up a 20-year-old 900 MHz phone and trying to find a battery that works in it.
What’s the best color to paint a rental property? You have some leeway, of course, but the color you paint it really does make a difference. Both the interior and exterior matter, but it’s more common that the interior needs a paint job.
For months, I had a goal to remove the dates from WordPress URLs (or permalinks) on my site. It seems like everyone is doing this, but nobody explains how to do it simply or easily. So I’m going to share my method. Removing the dates from WordPress URLs is a surprisingly effective way to get more traffic.
When opening locally stored PDFs in Chrome, sometimes Chrome says the file may have been moved or deleted. More specifically, the error message says “Your file was not found. It may have been moved or deleted. ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND.” But nobody moved or deleted the file, because I just clicked on it. In fact, I could still see it sitting right there in Windows Explorer.
Oddly enough, I had other files, even files of the same type, in the very same folder that opened fine. No errors. Here’s how I found the problem, fixed it, and avoided it in the future.