David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
Read more
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.
So if you didn’t drop everything and uninstall Java last week, I need another favor. Oracle released a patch for Java, so go patch it.
Sometimes community outcry and pressure works. It looks like this time it did. I just wish Oracle had made a bigger deal about it. Yes, you’re eating crow, but people need to know that this is something they need to do. One of the most frequent questions I get is whether it’s really necessary to patch Java. The answer is yes, it’s just as important as the monthly Microsoft patches. But nobody seems to know or care. They’re afraid they might break something, so they don’t do it.
Sears has the Nook Simple Touch on sale for $70. That’s about a 30% discount. (Thanks Dealnews!)
I guess I’ve had mine for about six weeks, and I like it. It’s the #2 e-reader, and I’ve run into problems in the past buying the #2 just on the basis of technical superiority (Amiga, anyone?), but if being able to load books on an SD card and the availability of free public domain e-books isn’t enough, you can root the device, load the Kindle Android app, and turn it into a Kindle.
I’m reviewing and revising policies and practices at work, including data forensics, the unfortunate necessity caused by employees misusing their company-issued machines.
Early in my career, I had to make the phone call to HR on occasion when I discovered something on an employer-owned PC that shouldn’t be there. I even did forensics once, guided by a lawyer. I had a sector editor and knew how to use it; the lawyer knew what she was looking for. That wasn’t the right way to do it, but this place wasn’t willing to go to the expense required to do it right.
But now I work someplace that is. Read more