David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and 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
I’ve had a ton of downtime this week (this seems to be the busy time of year for my web server), but I think I traced the problem to a known issue.
Here’s a good question: Can you use Lionel O or O27 transformers (or, for that matter, American Flyer S transformers) with HO or N scale trains?
The answer is, not directly. It will make a terrible noise if you hook it up. But you can make it work properly if you add a bridge rectifier. Look for one that’s 10 amps or more; don’t expect to have to pay more than a couple of dollars for one. Read more
This week in PC Magazine, John C Dvorak said the future of retail is search. He’s right.
MySQL crashed on me sometime late Sunday or early Monday. Somehow the server managed to serve up 5-6 pages per day in a catatonic state on Monday and Tuesday. So I spent my lunch break digging into the problem. Read more
Ars Technica said yesterday that Mozilla needs to make 64-bit Firefox on Windows a high priority. I agree with this completely. With web browsers, you can’t have too much security, and Firefox on Windows is a big target.
Read more
I finally bought my boys a box of Suretrack, after thinking about it for a mere two years. Wait. Make that a long two years. A long two years of the most destructive forces known to humanity (two young boys) ravaging their wooden track.
Here’s the drill: I spend 45 minutes building an intricate layout to their ever-changing specifications, and of course since they think there’s no such thing as too many bridges, that layout comes tumbling down about 45 seconds after the first train hits the track.
Sound familiar? Read more
I had a chance to take a look at the Insignia Flex tablet, Best Buy’s $249 house-brand Android tablet. If you need a basic dual-core tablet that’s reasonably well-built, it’s not bad. I found it responsive and usable–there just wasn’t anything flashy about it. The two things I found I didn’t like were that the settings control panel didn’t let you change much, and it has a 4:3-perspective 1024×768 screen, which is unusual in this world of 16:9 tablets. I’m afraid the old-school resolution might eventually be a problem. And there’s no Cyanogenmod 9 or 10 for it.
But if you need a value tablet in the 9-10 inch range, I have a suggestion for you. Read more