David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) came out this weekend, and I want to mess with it. Here’s how I wrote the installation media to a USB thumb drive for it using a Windows box. Because sometimes that’s all you have available to work with. If you prefer another Linux distribution, like Ubuntu or CentOS or Fedora, the same trick will work for them too.
MSN asks if investors are ruining the housing market. I say no–around me, if it weren’t for the investors, there would be no housing market to speak of.
Let me tell you a story.
I saw a question on a vintage computing forum this week: How did the IBM PC become the de facto standard for PCs, and the only desktop computer architecture from the 1980s to survive until today?
It’s a very good question, and I think there were several reasons for it. I also think without all of the reasons, the IBM PC wouldn’t have necessarily won. In some regards, of course, it was a hollow victory. IBM has been out of the PC business for a decade now. Its partners Intel and Microsoft, however, reaped the benefits time and again.
PC Magazine is advocating a bring your own laptop, with your own software approach to business. It likens it to mechanics who bring their own tools.
The trouble is that while mechanical tools in a toolbox operate autonomously and don’t interfere with one another, software residing on a computer does. Read more
Unfortunately, energy saving products are political. Pitch energy efficiency as a cost savings, and liberals and conservatives alike are willing to buy. Pitch it as environmental-saving, and moderates get turned off while conservatives get even more so.
The lesson to marketers: Sell energy-efficient products as technology that promotes energy independence and cost savings. Everyone likes technology, everyone likes energy independence, and everyone likes cost savings.
And the savings is significant. Although I don’t have LED lights and an occupancy switch in every room yet, that’s my eventual goal. Even as electric rates go up, my electric bills tend to hold steady or barely go up, mostly because none of my rooms consume more than 60 watts of electricity to light them, and the highest-traffic rooms turn the lights off automatically after everyone leaves. My total usage goes down some years.
And for what it’s worth, I always preferred LED lights with occupancy switches. The LEDs don’t seem to care how often you switch them off and on; but CFL bulbs do. When using an occupancy switch with CFL bulbs, be sure to put them on their very longest time setting. Anymore, I always go with LED bulbs.
I have a fair number of documents I created myself–that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone–but I don’t think I’m the only one who does. And from time to time, I’d like to reference them, and I may not have my computer with me.
Carrying around a cheap Nook or Kindle isn’t much of a problem, though. If only I could get my Word documents to display on it… It turns out that’s not hard to do. Here’s how to load your own content onto a Nook, Kindle, or any other similar device. Read more
So last week, I wrote about the difficulty of landing a security job and promised to explore it further.
And I think the first key, and what should be the most crucial key, is being conversant in security. Having a certification is one thing, but at the end of the day, the biggest thing it means is that you passed a test. It’s possible to pass a certification test and not be able to talk intelligently about security. So in the process of interviewing, you can expect to have to answer a pile of questions, and if you don’t answer those questions well, you won’t be offered a job. Read more
Caller: “I calling from technical support. We found issue with your PC.”
Me: “What company are you with?”
Caller: “CSA is the name of my company.”
Me: “What’s our business relationship?”
Caller: “We found issue with your PC. Our technicians found your PC is running slow.”
Me: “Do you realize I wrote the book about PC performance? No, really, I wrote a book about it. I guarantee my computer is faster than yours. I also possess multiple security certifications.”
Caller: “Go on.”
Me: “You need to find someone else to social engineer.”
The caller stammered a little bit, tried to assure me it wasn’t a scam and wasn’t going to cost me money, then hung up.
Read more
Here’s a jewel from earlier this month from PC World: 12 easy, crucial PC tasks you should be doing and aren’t. They’re mostly related to performance and security. No wonder I like the article.
A couple of the items won’t give the kinds of gains they used to–in this era when everyone thinks they need a 3 TB drive and they’re using less than 1 TB of it, cleaning up unused data isn’t going to do all that much to improve performance. But there’s some benefit to removing unused programs, especially unused programs that run at startup.
Most critically, the article tells how to automate a lot of these tasks. Automating it so that it just happens without you having to think about it is even better than doing it. If you’re not doing these 12 things because the computer is already doing them automatically for you, then that’s OK.
Livingsocial got breached. You need to change your password, if you have a Livingsocial account.
There are two questions worth asking: How do you protect yourself, and how does this happen?