David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Right around a year ago, I wrote about the difficulties of making a good $100 tablet. But then, today, I read on Slashdot about someone finding a nice $45 Android tablet in a Chinese bazaar, then finding a similar unit at Fry’s back home in the States, priced at $89.
That raised a couple of questions. First of all, what’s the tablet?
Slashdot asked today if SSDs are “finally worth the money.”
I’m wondering since when they haven’t been. I’ve been buying SSDs since 2008. And their price has been falling at a rate faster than hard drives did, historically. Read more
I don’t remember much about playing baseball in the fifth grade. I was an outfielder, but I don’t remember if I played left or right field that year. I don’t remember if I hit at the top of the order, or if I hit sixth.
My main memory of that year is one specific incident. I don’t remember the context, but either during or after a game, one of the players was hassling another player.
“Hey!” I heard my dad’s booming voice yell. “He’s your teammate.” Dad didn’t have to add the words, “cut it out,” because the bully understood. Dad’s stern rebuke, plus the glares from the coaches put an end to it.
I have an opportunity to read Margin of Safety, the 1991 investment book by Seth Klarman that’s long out of print and regularly sells secondhand for hundreds, if not upwards of a thousand dollars.
Suffice it to say, I feel a certain obligation to read it since it’s highly regarded enough for people to pay those prices. Read more
I had a disagreement last week with a technical writer who argues that a sentence should always have as few words as possible. No exceptions, for no reason.
I don’t agree.
So the dryer stopped drying a few days ago. The dryer is relatively new; I think we got it about 18 months ago to replace a dryer a friend gave me. That was a little early, given my old dryer lasted so long. I learned how to fix a dryer that heats but won’t dry.
That old dryer, by the way, was a Whirlpool that looked like it probably could remember Ronald Reagan, and maybe even Jimmy Carter. So it seemed a little odd for this new dryer (a rebadged Whirlpool from a local scratch-and-dent dealer) to develop an old-age disease this quickly.
Lifehacker came through with a gem this morning: How to block annoying political posts on Facebook. Though it’s really about filtering, so you can filter on pretty much anything with it, not just the names of political parties and this year’s candidates. Pretty much anything that people rant about on Facebook would be game for this.
It’s easy enough to just unsubscribe from certain people completely or in extreme cases, un-friend them. But this gives you a less extreme option.
Amazon replaced the Kindle Fire today; the basic model gets a price cut to $159 and a faster CPU, and deluxe models get nicer (and in one case, a bigger 8.9-inch) screen. And, predictably, Amazon released new e-reader Kindles with a bit of a price cut and, again, nicer screens.
That wasn’t all.
I recently edited a long document whose original author capitalized way too many words. I needed to fix it. To speed up the process, I needed a way to find capitalized words in Word–all of them, and automatically. Then I could make a decision whether the capitalization was appropriate.
Another time you would need to find capitalized words in Word would be when you’re creating an index. I’m sure there are others.
It’s easier than it sounds.
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I’ve mentioned several times that I hadn’t seen Office 2010 yet, so I couldn’t comment on it, and would reserve judgment until I’ve seen it. I’ve been working for companies that were a bit behind the times on that.
I’ve been working with it for a week now. I won’t be buying it for my own use at home.