David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I lost a college classmate this week.
We weren’t close, so I didn’t take it as hard as some of our newsroom-mates undoubtedly did. But at the very least, as a human being with a soul and with two kids, I feel bad for the wife and two kids he left behind. It shook me up enough that a couple of my coworkers asked me Wednesday morning what was going on. I told them.
“Don’t try to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense,” the smartest guy in the room said. Read more
I’ll get back to the Android questions momentarily, but here’s an interesting development: randomblame on XDA-Developers has managed to develop a working Jelly Bean 4.3 ROM called Jelly Time for the Sero 7 Pro, even without kernel source.
As one would expect, the workarounds are causing some issues, but even with the limitations he’s working with, the reports have been very good. I’ll be trying it out on my Sero 7 Pro as soon as I have a bit more time.
Leave it to a security vulnerability to interrupt a perfectly good discussion, but it doesn’t get much worse than this. If you have an older D-Link router, it’s possible to completely bypass the authentication on its administrative web interface.
A longtime reader who asked to be anonymous got his first tablet and smartphone a few weeks ago and was underwhelmed, to say the least. “What’s the point?” he asked me privately.
To be honest, I understand. I got my first tablet a couple of years ago–a Nook Color that I loaded Cyanogenmod on. And, to be honest, once the thrill of hacking an e-reader into a full-blown tablet with no restrictions on it wore off, I didn’t do a lot with it. When I thought of it, I would check the weather on it when I was getting ready in the morning, and maybe glance at my e-mail with it, but mostly it sat on my end table. I probably used it 15 minutes a week.
On my Nook Color running Cyanogenmod, inside Settings, Performance, there’s a mysterious setting called I/O Scheduler. Storage performance (I guess I can’t call it disk performance anymore) is critical to overall system performance, but it’s also easy to get wrong. I assumed the default setting, something called cfq, was optimal.
I was wrong. Let’s explain why.
Thanks to a new tool that Microsoft pushed out in 2013, it’s very easy to clean up after Windows Update and free up a bunch of disk space.
In 2013, Microsoft released a new Disk Cleanup tool. Click your start button and type “Disk Cleanup” to launch it. If you see a new option called “Clean Up System files,” you got the update. If you don’t see it, visit this page (Internet Explorer-only, unfortunately) to grab it. Read more
I bit the bullet last week, and added a second smartphone to what’s now our family plan. I didn’t buy a new phone though. Instead, I bought a used Samsung Galaxy S 4G off Amazon (the Canadian version, which was an accident) for $100. Since we now own both phones outright, that lets us run the phones month to month, with no contracts and no penalties. They bill us every month and we use it, but I can walk into any T-Mobile store and cancel one or both phones at any time.
Chances are there’s a reactivation fee if I do that and decide to reactivate later on, but that’s cheaper than getting out of a contract.
Now, as for the Galaxy S 4G… It’s a well-built phone from about 2010. It’s on the old side, but works pretty well. I loaded a custom ROM on it and I’m very happy with it now.
Continuing this discussion of Android, the next question that came up was what the deal is with Android memory usage. I wondered the same thing at first, so that seems like a good topic to explain.
Prior to 2005, operating systems tended to use a set amount of memory, then what was left over was for programs. So a freshly booted system would have 2/3 of its memory left free, if not more. If you read my book and my blog way back at the turn of the century, you might have a lot more.
Fire up an Android, though, and you might only have 1/4 of the memory left, or less. Much of this is by design. Read more
So, I read about the Chromecast, wondered how it could possibly work, and thought it might be too good to be true.
But, since it costs $35, I thought I’d take a chance on it. I’m glad I did. Think of it like this: You can use a smartphone or a tablet like a remote. Pull up what you want to watch on Youtube or Hulu Plus or Netflix, tap an icon, and boom, it moves over to your TV screen. You can rewind or fast-forward with the mobile device. Or look for more videos and queue them up.
And it’s not at all hard to set up, which was what I wondered about. Read more
My wife found an unflattering piece about landlords in the Huffington Post titled 9 things your landlord won’t tell you. This sorry excuse for an expose just makes accusations, without backing any of it up.
I’m a landlord. Here’s what I have to say about those nine things.