I was in a meeting last week where two CISSPs were battling wits, and one challenged the other with a question. I elbowed my boss and said that’s a great CISSP or CISM study question. He agreed. So I’ll repeat it here, with explanation.
No matter what brand you buy, you’ll have carburetor trouble
I bought a lawnmower this weekend for the other house. Of course they tried to get me to buy the $40 extended warranty to cover a $162 lawnmower. “You’ll have carburetor trouble no matter what brand you buy,” she said.
The bold print on the warranty paperwork said it excluded carburetor cleaning, so I don’t know what the point of that was. “I’ll pass,” I said. Read more
Ping sweep from Windows
Here’s the best Windows command-line one-liner I’ve seen in a very long time: a ping sweep from Windows. Ping sweeps, also known as ping scans, are something every sysadmin and security analyst is likely to need at one point or another. You don’t need a special tool either. It can be as simple as a one-line batch file. Ping sweep scripts for Unix are common, but you won’t always have a Unix box available. You can almost always find a Windows box anywhere you go. That makes a Windows ping sweep useful.
If you’re not familiar with a ping sweep, read on. If you need to quickly scan your network to see if anyone’s added any new systems without telling you–something that only ever happens to me, right?–this tool will help you detect that, then head off those questions about why you haven’t patched and installed antivirus on that new server yet. Sometimes I run this on my home network too, to help me jog my memory.
How I bought a battery for my aged laptop
The aged battery in my aged Dell Inspiron E1505 held on better than I expected, but when I went to upgrade the machine–I upgraded it with two unsupported but perfectly functional 2 GB SODIMMs and then installed a Samsung 830 SSD–the battery went downhill fast.
I did the memory first, and the battery wasn’t happy with me. I literally went from about three hours of battery life to 20 minutes immediately after the change. Maybe it was a coincidence, and maybe not. Installing the SSD extended the battery life a little, but not enough to make it useful. It was time for a new battery.
There are pitfalls with buying batteries for aged hardware. Here’s how I negotiated them. Read more
How to give a computer or hard drive away more securely
If you want to give away a computer, it’s best to securely erase the hard drive first in order to prevent someone from recovering sensitive data from it after it leaves your hands.
The problem with this advice is the lack of a comfortable, familiar way to do it.
Amiga on x86
Re-implementing Amiga OS on cheap, commodity x86 hardware always made sense, so I’m not surprised that someone is doing it. Mostly I’m surprised that it took me this long to find it.
Am I interested? You bet. I’m sure I can find some PC hardware to run it on. I certainly don’t see myself using it as an everyday machine, but as something to tinker on, and something to have running next to my everyday machine, I can see it being fun and possibly even useful.
This Linux Mint box looks really nice, except for the price
Linux Mint (a close cousin of Ubuntu) now comes bundled on a nice-looking small form factor PC–a small metal box, comparable in size to a home router, ideal for connecting to a television to use as an HTPC and/or as a secondary PC.
Read more
I hope BYOD 2.0 goes better than BYOD 1.0 did
BYOD is “bring your own device.” It’s the hot new trend in IT, except it’s nothing new. But it was bound to happen, I guess. Companies are tired of buying computer equipment, so they want employees to provide it. And counterculture, nonconformist workers are (I guess) tired of using boring corporate computer equipment. (And here I am, a strong advocate of buying off-lease corporate computers for home use.)
So, since companies don’t want to buy computers, and employees don’t want to use company computers, what’s the problem?
How’s about I tell you a story? Read more
89 business clichés and how to avoid their trap
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of these 89 business clichés in the last 6 months, I could buy something nice.
You’ve heard all 89 of these too. The translations are interesting. The common thread is that these clichés tend to be very manipulative, they hide things, and/or are frequently used to justify already-made decisions even if there’s a valid reason to do it differently. Read more
SSDs are below $1 per gigabyte
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting easier and easier to find SSDs priced at or below $1 per gigabyte. You’ll generally have to buy at least 120 GB of storage to hit that price point, but at this point in time, that’s about the smallest drive I would consider anyway.
Read more