David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Anandtech reviewed Crucial’s new value drive.
Spoiler: Unless you get the drive on sale, pay the few dollars more that it costs to get a Crucial M4, or Samsung 830, or whatever Intel drive is available (I’ve given up on trying to keep track of Intel’s drives; they release drives more often than Oracle releases security patches.)
Linus Torvalds is sick of the gimmicks, and he’s really sick of laptops sporting cheap 720p displays. He wants high-resolution (2560×1600, or even 2048×1536) displays to become standard.
Having seen an Ipad with a 2048×1536 display in person recently, I agree. Read more
Note: I wrote this in mid-2010 and, for whatever reason, never posted it. I found it this week. Although the information in it is no longer fresh and new, it’s still useful, so for that reason, I’m posting it now.
Dell is standing on some shaky ground right now. Bill Snyder has a good summary of the problem.
In recent years, Dell computers have, shall I say, made me nervous. Some of it’s been concrete. Some of it’s just been touchy-feely. Now one of those touchy-feely problems is more concrete. Read more
While I’m on the subject of Word 2010 weirdness, this week I had to deal with a document that had a number of misspelled words–except they weren’t misspelled. Word was insisting that, for example, the word “Change” was actually “hange,” and flagging it as misspelled and miscapitalized.
The one thing all of these non-errors had in common was that they weren’t the original beginning of the sentence, but now they were.
Word seemed to take issue with the way a previous editor had capitalized the word. When I deleted the entire word and retyped it, correctly spelled and capitalized, Word’s spelling and grammar check accepted it. Accepting those specific changes also made the problem go away.
I found an account of Commodore’s rise to prominence on a vintage computing forum. It’s interesting reading. Then again, I’m partial to anything about the rise of Commodore.
I had an issue with a Word 2010 document whose table of contents entries were ridiculously off–entries being on page 45 of a 24-page document, for example.
The problem appeared to be due to track changes. The pages it was putting in the table of contents seemed to correspond with the page numbers of the marked-up document. Unfortunately, the only way I found to fix the issue was to accept all the changes in the document, but after I did that, the table of contents updated correctly.
I have a collection of magazine scans that, inconveniently, came as a series of JPG images rather than as PDFs that are more conducive to reading. I wanted PDFs, so I found a way to turn lots of images into an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.
Building the PDF manually took a good 30 minutes per issue, so I wanted a faster way. Using command-line tools, I was able to convert the entire collection (about 40 issues) in less than 30 minutes. Read more
I alluded to this the other day, but some people might find it worth mentioning in its own right. As most people know, Amazon offers free shipping on orders over $25. And if you’re buying something small, shipping can end up being a large chunk of the total bill.
So when buying something sold directly by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon, you can save the shipping by building a shopping list, if you can put off the purchase a little while.
A longtime reader asked what I know about buying tires. Not a lot, but I’ll share what I know.
I’m several months late to this party, but I just saw Marcel’s post on Google’s two-factor authentication with a smartphone.
He’s right. It works until someone steals your phone. Once someone steals your phone, you’re in a world of hurt. It’s just a compromise, until we find a way to do two-factor authentication the right way.
The right way is with a smartcard, issued by some sort of central authority. Read more