David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Last week, I presented a shortcut for wiring a house with Ethernet using cheap keystone couplers. I’m happy to say I’ve done it twice now, and it all works, but I wanted to follow up and share a little more experience now that I’ve wired about a dozen ports this way.
The biggest problem with making custom (or reproduction) decals for use with trains of the miniature variety is getting the colors on the computer-generated decal to match the paint on the model. Eyeballing the color won’t work; you need a computer’s help to do it.
Enter a free Android app called Color Eye. Launch Color Eye, point your phone or tablet’s camera at the paint you need to match, and your phone will give you the closest color matches that it knows about, including a Pantone color and a CYMK value.
My mother in law didn’t have wifi set up, but she picked up a smart TV this year, so she asked me if I could help her with it. So I picked up a D-Link DIR-615 on sale, brought it with me and set up wi-fi securely (hints: set the SSID to whatever time it happens to be, disable WPS, disable WEP and WPA, and use WPA2 with a long password with some numbers and symbols in it) and once it seemed to be working right, I put her TV and laptop on it. Then, as other relatives trickled in, they asked me for the wireless key. Soon the air was full of Androids and Apples chattering away on wireless.
It’s not news to my regular readers that SSD pricing continues to drop, but Computerworld noticed that this week.
Everyday pricing is well around 90 cents per gigabyte now, and with some shopping around, it’s possible to do better than that.
I picked up a couple of the new Philips 10.5-watt 800-lumen LED bulbs this weekend. All around, they’re the best sub-$20 LED bulb I’ve seen yet.
For some reason, Microsoft decided several years ago that they needed to market a vector drawing program. It flopped. There may have been several reasons for it, but I’m sure one of the reasons was marketing.
At any rate, they decided to discontinue the product and offer it for free download. Read more
Since all the cool kids (or at least some of them) are writing about the end of the world, I thought I’d write about where I first heard about this.
I’m such a notorious cheapskate, the Mayans had a folk song about me. I was at a library sale, scooping up cheap books, in the summer of 2007. You meet some interesting people at these places, and one of the more colorful is a guy named Jim. Read more
Scheduling scans with Avast is easy, as it turns out, if non-obvious. Launch Avast, then, non-intuitively, click Scan Now. Click Settings, then, buried on the left is an option called Scheduling.
I recommend doing a quick scan at least once a day and a full scan at least once a week. If you’re using Avast as a secondary scanner, be sure to have your primary scanner scheduled to perform scans too. Read more
My 15-inch Dell LCD died this weekend. Its date of manufacture was October 2001, so I can’t complain. I bought it used a number of years ago and paid a pittance for it. It had been acting up for more than a year, and at least it had the decency to wait until a potential replacement was on sale before dying completely.
Best Buy had its house-brand 20″ LED monitor on sale for $90, and I had a gift card with a few dollars on it, so I braved Best Buy again, and found a good low-end monitor for the money. Read more
If you’re wondering why political-style anti-Google ads are suddenly running everywhere, it’s no coincidence. Microsoft has hired one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s advertising masterminds to try his hand at campaigning against Google.
While it seems to be having some effect on public opinion, its effect on market share and Microsoft’s bottom line will take more time to gauge. But I think in the long term, talking to customers and figuring out why they are walking out of Microsoft stores empty-handed will prove more effective. Read more