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Amazon bundles free/discounted e-books with print books

Dave Farquhar e-readers September 4, 2013May 24, 2015Barnes Noble

Amazon just fired off another salvo in the e-book war, one that’s going to be very difficult to return: Selected e-books are available for free or at a substantial discount if you bought the print book new from Amazon at any time, dating back to 1995.

Of course, being an e-commerce site, Amazon has the data to do that. Barnes & Noble doesn’t, necessarily. Their records of in-store purchases will be spotty, at the very least.

It’s a fair and reasonable deal for consumers, and I think it’s a good deal for authors and publishers too. Read more

Don’t be too surprised that financial writers don’t follow all of their own advice

Dave Farquhar Saving money September 3, 2013September 2, 2013lifehacker, technical writer

Horror of horrors–a financial writer confessed to Lifehacker that he or she doesn’t track every penny of every expense. The hypocrisy!

Not really. There are two things you need to understand: The end goal, and how to get there. The end goal of every financial writer is to get people living within their means. The majority of their advice are ways to get to that goal. If they’re already at that goal, then they’ve outgrown some of their own advice.

So if they don’t follow all of their own advice, that could be a positive sign.

The pizza procession

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized September 2, 2013August 29, 2013radio shack

There’s a plaza over by our house that’s home to, among other things, a pet store, a license office, a Chinese food joint, a mattress store, a haircut place, a Radio Shack, another cell phone store, and a pizza joint. My wife was there last week, getting ready to pull out of the parking lot, when a funeral procession approached. She stopped to stay out of the way.

The pizza delivery guy behind her didn’t.

A modest second-base proposal

Dave Farquhar Baseball September 1, 2013Billy Butler, Jarrod Dyson, Lorenzo Cain

So my Royals look to be playing meaningful baseball in September, for the first time in a decade. I’m excited. I’m disappointed they can’t find a second baseman who bits better than a pitcher, but I’m excited.

And with rosters expanding to 40 players, I have a proposal to fix that second-base issue.

The trouble with routers

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security August 30, 2013May 17, 20171980s, antivirus, asus, d-link, firewall, Justification, linksys, netgear, vulnerability, Windows XP

I see the advice going around, again, to disable the Windows firewall and rely on an external router, the justification being that it makes your computer “invisible.” It doesn’t. Only IPV6 can do that–and then, only if you don’t use it for anything.

The trouble with that advice is that there are botnets targeting routers. Routers are nothing special; they’re small computers running Linux on an ARM or MIPS CPU, typically outdated versions with old vulnerabilities that can be exploited by someone who knows what to look for. One example of this is the Aidra botnet. Typically Aidra is used to attack outside targets, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility for an infected router to turn on and attack the machines it’s supposed to protect. And if you’ve turned off your firewall, then you have no protection against that.
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How to make an LG LD301EL dehumidifier drain the water out of a hose instead of the bucket

Dave Farquhar Landlording August 29, 2013November 28, 2015Adobe Acrobat, computer security, hardware store, LG, malware

I recently came into possession of an LG LD301EL dehumidifier. It was supposed to be draining out of the hose, but it wasn’t. I figured out why.

If you have one of these or a similar dehumidifier, chances are you have the same problem. The instructions on the back of the dehumidifier aren’t as clear as they could be and the diagrams are tiny. The manual doesn’t quite seem to explain it either. If you don’t have the manual and don’t want to download one from a dodgy web site–and as a computer security professional I recommend that you don’t (more on that at the end)–here’s how to get it done.

LOAD “*”,8,1 – what it means

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 28, 2013September 27, 20181541, 1571, commodore, commodore 64, IEEE, nintendo, tape drive

The smartest guy in the room cited the Commodore command LOAD “*”,8,1 as something he used for years but never understood why it worked except it was the command he used to load games on his Commodore 64.

So I explained it. Now I can explain it to you too. Read more

Better than the shirt off my back

Dave Farquhar Parenting August 27, 2013January 22, 2015classmate, costco

My oldest just started kindergarten, and he needed some school supplies, of course. Among those supplies was a paint shirt, and the instructions said an old adult-sized shirt would be fine.

We sent him with something, but he wanted a different one his second week of school–something bigger than what we sent him initially, so that it would cover his legs too. “I want a plain shirt,” he told me. “One with no writing on it.”

Then he paused. “The shirt you have on looks good.” Read more

Calibre turns 1.0

Dave Farquhar e-readers August 26, 2013November 27, 2018calibre, microsoft word, public domain

Calibre, the free e-book management software, hit the magic version 1.0 this past week. That’s not to say the previous versions were unstable, because they weren’t. In the world of open-source software, frequently software doesn’t hit version 1.o until the authors decide that it’s reached a certain level of feature completeness.

In that sense, Calibre’s time has come.

Cringely takes on Ashton Kutcher’s movie about Steve Jobs

Dave Farquhar Macintosh, Retro Computing August 25, 2013July 17, 20171990s, apple, Apple Lisa, capitalization, IOS, os x, Steve Jobs, unix, windows nt

Mark Stephens, a.k.a. Robert X. Cringely, wrote last week about his disappointment in Ashton Kutcher’s movie Jobs, about the late Apple co-founder and CEO.

Here’s the most important part of his quasi-review:

[S]omething happened during Steve’s NeXT years (which occupy less than a 60 seconds of this 122 minute film) that turned Jobs from a brat into a leader, but they don’t bother to cover that. In his later years Steve still wasn’t an easy guy to know but he was an easier guy to know. His gut for product was still good but his positions were more considered and thought out. He inspired workers without trying so much to dominate or hypnotize them.

Indeed. Read more