David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
From time to time on classic computing and/or videogaming forums, the question of how to track down the current copyright holder to a particular given title comes up. Sometimes someone knows the answer. Frequently they don’t.
This week, when George Lucas announced he’d sold Lucasfilm to Disney, illustrated precisely how this kind of thing happens.
The ATX standard has changed very little in the last 15 years, which means some rather old computer cases can still accept new motherboards, as long as you also replace the power supply.
The bad news, as I stare at the case that once housed a Micron Client Pro 766 Xi (a 266 MHz Pentium II that was state of the art in 1997) is that front-mount USB ports were unheard of in those days, as were digital camera memory cards. Instead, machines of that era used obsolete floppy and Zip disks for removable storage. They also typically had more 5.25″ bays than we need today. When CD burners cost $400, most of us kept a reader in as well, to avoid wearing out expensive burners prematurely.
For now at least, I edit a lot of security documents as part of my job. Today, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: Word 2010 was hiding all of the headers, footers, and whitespace in the document. That made navigating the document a whole lot faster and easier, but it also meant I couldn’t verify that the headers and footers were correct. I figured out how to hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word.
The solution was simple but non-obvious, and works in all versions of Word that I know of. Read more
A longtime reader asked me to verify the easiest way to migrate from an obsolete hard drive to a new, shiny SSD: Is it to use the SSD migration tool included with the drive?
Yes. Yes it is. And it may even be able to help you if it doesn’t come with the drive. Read more
Over time, I’ve been experiencing weird issues with my blog. Plugins worked, then stopped working. Or they’d just run really slow. Occasionally I’d get error messages saying the plugin ran out of memory, but frequently it would just do nothing.
I found a solution inside wp-config.php. Read more
One day a Cleveland-area man walked into a Bass Pro Shop, and they offered him a credit card with a promotion that would pay the sales tax. The savings amounted to $50, so he accepted. A few weeks later, he received a letter in the mail informing him that his credit score was 848. Perfect score is 850.
A longtime reader asked me recently about putting an SSD into a laptop optical bay. The idea has crossed my mind–the extra storage is increasingly more useful than the optical drive as time wears on. Thinkpad warriors have been doing this for a long time, though IBM’s caddies were a bit pricey.
It’s not an expensive project anymore, and it’s not limited to Thinkpads either. Read more
Linus Torvalds called hard drives evil, nasty platters of spinning rust in an interview this week, while saying he likes SSDs.
I didn’t say it. He said it. Though it’s no secret that I like SSDs too. Read more
I ran into a former supervisor from many years ago at the local Home Depot this evening. We had a pleasant discussion. It reminded me of a question I asked, right around the time he and I last talked. I asked whether it’s better to be a consultant or an employee.
Here’s what I would say to my 2005 self if I could, somehow. I present it here since I know someone else must have the same question.