David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ve talked before about how to disable animation in Cyanogenmod 10.x, but I’ve done a few other things to conserve some scarce system resources on my gigahertz-ish, half-gig Nook Color. If you’re running Cyanogenmod on a phone that’s a couple of years old, these tricks can help you too. Here are some tricks to speed up Android. Read more
So I have Cyanogenmod 10.3 running on a Nook Color that I use as a secondary tablet. It’s outmoded, but still useful enough that I want to keep it around. But a week or two ago, it suddenly started to lag really badly. So I looked into it a little bit.
Some other Android tablets have some trouble with TRIM. Android generally handles it decently on its own, but it doesn’t always seem to. I found an app–for rooted tablets only–called Lagfix that lets you force TRIM yourself. Read more
When it comes to Ctrl-Alt-Del history, there’s a lot of selective memory going on.
Bill Gates said in September 2013 that he regrets the use of Ctrl-Alt-Del as a logon sequence, while David Bradley, the IBM PC engineer who built that feature into the first IBM PC, says he doesn’t know why Microsoft chose to use that sequence for logon anyway.
Both of them, for whatever reason, are forgetting a few things.
“Mario from Microsoft” called me last night. I’ve never heard a Mario with that kind of accent, and, I thought he worked for Nintendo. I’ll bet he gets that a lot.
“Microsoft has no reason to be calling me,” I said to “Mario.”
“Oh, we’re a Microsoft certified partner,” he said.
“That’s nice,” I said. “I’m certified too. What’s going on?”
“You are having computer issues,” he said. Read more
If you’re looking for ways to waste money, here’s 28 ways to do it. If you’re afraid you might be wasting money, the same link is 28 common ways that people do it.
I’ve covered most of this ground before, but it’s never a bad idea to have a reminder. I resemble that being disorganized remark.
I can’t imagine needing to take a screen capture of a web site terribly often, but I have had to do it a few times in the past year. I used Snagit to do it, and it didn’t always do the best job–sometimes the program would crash, or the CPU would race and I would have to resort to ctrl-alt-del to get things back to normal–and not get my screen capture.
IE Capt is a small, standalone utility to do just that. Feed it the URL you want to capture, and it uses Internet Explorer’s Trident engine to render the page and outputs it to an image file for you. If you’re comfortable with the command line, it’s a faster, easier way to get your screen capture. And it’s free, which doesn’t hurt either.
Ives-branded track clips for Lionel O27 track are relatively common, and although they are often mistaken for pre-1933 items, they were actually manufactured for several decades after the Ives brand name disappeared from the marketplace, and by Lionel, not its erstwhile rival Ives.
Lionel stamped the Ives name on track clips to protect the trademark. If you don’t use a trademark for several years, someone else can apply for it and start using it. Lionel didn’t want that.
I saw an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX at an estate sale this past weekend. It took me back to my first non-food service, non-retail job, doing desktop support at Mizzou.
Well, as a precursor to doing desktop support, they tried me out just building and tearing down machines. I worked out of Room 11, which was at the time a dingy, dark, musty place. But they pay was good and it meant I got to spend my time between classes taking computers apart all day, and that was nice.
My first assignment was to build IBM PC 330 and PC 350 computers to sit on professors’ desks. These were 50 MHz 486DX2s. They were a bit outmoded by then, but they were a lot better than what they were replacing, which was, in most cases, a PS/2 Model 55SX, which was a 386SX running at either 16 or 25 MHz. My second assignment was to disassemble those Model 55SXs, revert them back to their factory configuration, and sort out all of the add-ins so we could use them to upgrade other machines, and then, sell whatever was left as surplus. Read more
Matt, one of the higher ups in my department, departed from the company on Friday. Rich, a coworker I’ve now worked with in two different shops in two different states, got Matt’s office. Rich grew fond of wandering in to Matt’s office at random times during the week with a tape measure, just to make Matt wonder.
But Matt got the last laugh.
So, do you need an outbound firewall? Two people say no.
I agree but I disagree. I like the idea behind an outbound firewall, but in practice, I find they don’t work. The human element makes them fail. Whenever a computer asks for permission to do something, people generally fall into two camps: People who say yes all the time, and people who say no all the time. With the people who say yes all the time, the malware gets to do whatever it wanted anyway, so the firewall fails to do its job. With the people who say no all the time (Why does Internet Explorer want to connect to the Internet?), nothing works.
Ultimately, the argument against them is that if you don’t trust a piece of software to connect to the Internet, you shouldn’t have that software on your computer at all. I agree completely with that argument. Only install trusted software that you get from trusted sources, learn how to check the MD5 or SHA1 signatures to ensure the software is what it says it is, and then and only then install it.
A firewall is one of the most basic of security tools. You need one to protect yourself against basic threats. Not having one is negligent. But trying to turn that firewall into something other than a basic tool–something it’s not–generally isn’t going to get you very far. A firewall with training wheels on it isn’t a substitute for security awareness.
And here’s the thing. The Windows built-in firewall does block certain outbound connections, mostly on antiquated ports that are generally used for malware more frequently than for legitimate purposes anymore. It just doesn’t jump up and down and tell you that it’s doing it. It just quietly does its job, which is exactly what you want your firewall to do.