David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ve long recommended hard-coding your DNS settings as a performance and reliability enhancement–here’s my guide for that–but it turns out it can be a security enhancement too.
Botnets targetting routers aren’t new at all, but there’s a particularly nasty one named Moose running around right now. Among other things, it changes routers’ DNS settings to point to rogue DNS servers that allow the attackers to steal your social media credentials, furthering the bot. Read more
If your Nook Simple Touch won’t power on, or is displaying a question mark (?) on its battery indicator, I have a four things to try. But before you go to the trouble of disassembly, try charging the device with a different charger. Some chargers fit more tightly than others, and as devices like these age, they can get picky about their chargers.
If a charger change doesn’t give you an easy fix, the next step is to disassemble it, unplug the battery, wait a good 30 seconds, then plug it back in and reassemble.
You’ll need a very small slotted screwdriver or another sharp and semi-flat object, and a T5 Torx screwdriver.
After the story came out about factory resets not adequately clearing flash memory in phones and tablets, one of my college buddies asked me if a similar problem exists in SSDs.
Depending on the SSD, it definitely can.
If you have a router and want to run DD-WRT on it, but can’t find the router in the router database, you may have learned the hard way that the router database is a couple of years out of date.
But not all hope is lost. Here’s how to find a build, if one exists.
I’ve been hearing the same new idea at work for about 10 years. The idea is pretty straightforward: Since my home PC updates itself whenever it wants and I don’t have problems, why don’t we do the same thing at work so we won’t need expensive update deployment tools?
There are generally two problems with that.
At work part of my job is reporting security metrics along with my colleague, and sometimes we report things like the number of machines running a specific operating system. The problem we run into is that when it comes to operating system versions, OS X versions 10.1 and 10.10 are really not the same. We run into similar issues with versioning for other operating systems too, such as AIX.
To keep Excel from dropping those significant zeroes on your charts, highlight the column containing your version data and switch it from a numeric format to text format. Then switch to the tab that contains your chart, refresh the data, and your charts will show the zeroes properly.
I got lots of random errors installing Office 2013 when I went to do it, including error code 112-4 and error code 0-4, and some other install errors mostly ending in 4 that aren’t documented on Microsoft’s web site. Although previously undocumented, these errors are fixable. Read more
My front porch lights sustained damage in a storm, so that gave me an excuse to modernize to an Altair 837016 from Costco. Priced at about $38, it has two energy-saving features: It turns itself off if it’s light outside, and it uses LEDs that deliver 950 lumens while consuming 10.5 watts.
These worked for me for about 10 years, but today there’s another option I like better that works just as well.
One of my coworkers accidentally enabled scroll lock on a Lenovo Thinkpad L440 the other day, which is bad news when you do it accidentally and can’t find the missing Thinkpad scroll lock key. Read more
Google is moving its corporate applications to the Internet. A year ago I would have said that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Today I’m not so sure.
Sticking stuff in the cloud is the popular answer to everything these days, and I just see the cloud as the new mainframe. It’s not a solution so much as a different take on the same problem, and while I see a couple of potential disadvantages, believe it or not I see some real advantages to the approach as well.