David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Most of us have an old router like a Linksys WRT54G laying around, or if we don’t, it’s very easy to find one–the nearest garage sale or thrift store is a good bet–but sometimes all we need is a switch, to hook up a couple more computers or other devices to a wired connection. Using a router as a switch wastes some of its capabilities, but it’s easy to do. Here’s how to use a router as a switch.
Friday I saw a story from a financial publication suggesting that DDR3 DRAM prices will be increasing soon due to increasing demand for PCs, thanks to Windows 10’s release and the back-to-school season.
That got me thinking, and while memory prices aren’t at an all-time low right now, they are pretty cheap. A Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB kit runs about $105 right now. About two years ago, I paid $99 for the same kit. According to the pricing history available to me, the cheapest it’s ever been was $70, and the highest it’s been is $160.
Years ago, I brought a Lionel 2026 locomotive in for repair that had belonged to my dad. It ran poorly, and either dad or his kid brother had taken it apart at some point and lost some of the parts, including the front truck.
And then, when I got the locomotive back and I put it on the track for a test run, it derailed constantly. The front truck just wouldn’t stay on the track, no matter what I did.
If you’re thinking about canceling your cable TV subscription to save money, you might be worried about buying an antenna, only to find your TV isn’t capable of receiving over-the-air broadcasts.
If you live near a major metro area though, you can test it with a one-cent paper clip.
I’ve read a few things here and there about Waze, a crowdsourced GPS that runs on smartphones, including those that run Android, Apple, and Windows. Its premise is simple: Based on how traffic is moving, it figures out the fastest way to get where you want to go. It adds intelligence to the GPS.
The trade-off, of course, is that it’s tracking you too. The data is anonymized, they promise, but it’s up to you to decide whether it’s a showstopper.
I wasn’t surprised people were trying to hack my blog. What surprised me were how many people were trying to hack my blog–there was a time when I probably had more hacking-related traffic than I had reader-related traffic.
If you have a WordPress blog, you’re probably in a similar situation.
Last week, a former classmate shared a Dave Ramsey article about early savings. Ramsey stated a teenager could save a couple thousand a year, stop saving in their 20s, and still retire a multimillionaire. I agree with the sentiment completely, but I’m concerned that Ramsey overstates how rich that person can expect to become.
Ramsey’s favored investment vehicle is a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500.
The problem with the article is that he assumed an annual return on investment of 12 percent, which is well above every reasonable historical estimate I’ve ever heard of S&P 500 rates of return. Forbes agrees. Ramsey is basing his number on a subset of history, not all available history.
It was June 2, 2015, the 80th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s final Major League Baseball game. That day, I bought a lottery ticket. I spied a 1935 Goudey Babe Ruth card on Ebay, which casually mentioned it was an “RP,” which is usually shorthand for “reprint.”
Chances were, the seller was telling the truth, and hoping some bidders would fail to notice the code word. But the card looked just convincing enough that I decided to place a bid, just in case the seller was wrong. I won. The total price including shipping was $11. No one else had taken the bait.
I got this question anonymously, but it’s a fair question: Does AT&T U-Verse drop connections like DSL?
In my experience, over the 3½ years I’ve had it, sometimes. But not nearly as often.
In many security job interviews, the interviewer will ask about cross-site scripting, also known as XSS. Most descriptions of it are overly complex, however. The best description of it that I’ve ever heard is just five words long: Code execution in the browser. That’s cross site scripting explained as succinctly as possible.
That succinctly sums up the problem: You don’t want someone to be able to inject their code into your site.