David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Well, that was a disappointment. It was retracted nearly as quickly as it burst onto the scenes. Crud.
A reasoned, level-headed analysis of the problems that current copyright law creates rocked Slashdot yesterday. The amazing thing is, this thing came from Washington.
Here’s the highlight reel: Read more
Whatever you do, don’t call this post Optimizing Android 2.3 for Games, Graphics and Multimedia. I’ll kick your… nevermind.
But of course the first thing I wanted after I installed Cyanogenmod 7.2–which is based on Android 2.3.7–on my Nook Color was to make it run smoother and faster. What else would I want? So here’s some stuff I did, since adding three CPU cores obviously isn’t an option.
Over the past year, I grew tired of hearing people say nobody wants electric cars. There are certain people, who for reasons I can’t figure out, want the masses to believe nobody wants electric cars. I don’t know why the Chevy Volt is a flop.
But what I do know is that there’s a dedicated number of individuals who have been putting plugs on Toyota Priuses so they can charge them overnight, and these modified Priuses are popular. Starting now, that’s no longer necessary–you can buy one with a plug on it.
So, after most of a year, I finally revisited Cyanogenmod 7.2 on my Nook Color. Competent tablets are available for around $100 now, so perhaps this is less interesting now, but I had a Nook Color, and figured I might as well try it out before spending money on something else.
I was never happy running it from an SD card–it was way too laggy and sluggish–but Cyanogenmod 7.2 is competent when installed on its internal memory, at least for the things I most want to use a tablet for–light web browsing, reading e-mail, watching SD video, and reading PDFs–and it leaves the SD card slot open for storing the media I want to consume. Read more
It’s still a couple of weeks off, but we already know two retailers will be offering sub-$200 laptops on the day the United States gorges itself on bargains.
The question is, what do you get for your $200 on these minimalist laptops? I’ll answer those questions, then you can decide whether they’re worth $200 and braving the crowds, the weird hours, and likely the cold. (Yes, there are costs beyond the money you spend.) Read more
Earlier this year, I did some cosmetic fix-up of a house that, among other things, had a lot of painted-over outlet covers. Preventing that is easy–it takes a couple of minutes to unscrew the cover and put tape over the outlet–but if someone didn’t do that, the cleanup is cheap and easy too, even years after the painting mishap. And all you need are common household items to clean paint from outlet and switch covers or other types of wall plates.
My latest lighting experiment is a 900-lumen bulb from G7, which is rated at 9 watts and priced at around $16. It’s advertised as equivalent to a 65W incandescent. I’ve had two of them for about two months now, and my initial impressions are favorable overall.
It’s not often that you end up talking about computer hardware at church. It’s especially not often that you end up talking about a RAID failure at church. But one such conversation got me thinking again about ways to reduce RAID failure rate.
This past Sunday, I talked with the executive director, who told me five of the drives in the 8-drive RAID array failed all at once. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said.
It isn’t. But I know why it did.
Fed up with trying to host a network printer on a Windows 7 box on a mixed network, I broke down and bought a Jetdirect card for my aged HP Laserjet 4100. Don’t worry–used Jetdirect cards are cheap these days. I paid $7 for mine.
Of course I made installing it harder than I needed to. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home. Read more