David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
In Amsterdam, a couple of times a month volunteers meet up in community centers to fix things. Anyone can bring items that don’t work anymore to get it fixed. It reduces waste, people save money, they get to meet their neighbors, and it provides opportunity.
Opportunity? Hear me out.
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From time to time, I have to deal with new revisions of familiar implementation guides or other system documentation, and the authors rarely include a changelog in the document. And of course the first question anyone asks about the new guide is what’s changed. That means I have to find the differences between two Word documents.
This week I found myself collaborating on a long-ish document and needing to synchronize some changes. Word’s tracked changes and comments can help somewhat, but generally I find them clumsy and annoying.
If you have five minutes and a willingness to use a command prompt, you can find the differences easily, then work from there.
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My boss’ boss (I think we’re just two levels of management removed now) spent half the day composing a long e-mail message containing a large number of questions. He sent it to my boss, who forwarded it to us. I read the 10 or so questions that pertain to me.
Then I took a walk. Walking to the bathroom and using the facilities always seems like a good idea before I start writing. Read more
A longtime reader sent me a really good question today. If I had a USB flash drive and I didn’t know where it’s been or what it’s done, how would I clean it to make it safe to use? He said using Linux was fair game, so that made the answer a lot easier.
Note that as of 2015, a knowledgeable attacker can make a USB drive that will survive this cleaning method, so I only recommend this 90% of the time, and the problem is, it’s impossible to know which 90%.
In the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, a high school principal is resigning amid allegations that she posed as a student and friended 300 students on Facebook. School administrators seem to be obsessed with what goes on on Facebook.
I suggest they should be paying more attention to what goes on in their own hallways.
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Last week, Symantec issued a surprising report stating that religious web sites are more likely to harbor malware than sites that offer dirty pictures and videos.
I’m pretty sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Read more
I’ve seen a couple of Commodore-related search queries hit lately, so I’m going to take a stroll down memory lane with two questions:
Can you connect two computers to one single 1541 or 1571 disk drive?
And what was the fastest Commodore modem? Read more
The Sears anchor store at Crestwood Plaza near St. Louis closed in May 2012. It was a long, slow decline, and nobody knew what was next. More than five years later, there’s still nobody who knows what’s next.
I went there a couple of weeks before it closed, and I bought a multimeter at a heavy discount, but most of the kinds of things I would have been interested in buying were long gone. The rest of the old mall was mostly empty. The last of the smaller tenants left in 2013. Read more
I understand Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s predicament. I don’t agree with how he handled it.
You see, both Scott Thompson and I work in the technical industry, and neither of us have a degree in computer science, computer engineering, some other kind of engineering, high mathematics, or another socially accepted relevant-to-the-industry field. Read more
I was looking for something else entirely when I found this PC World article: Speed Up Windows by Stripping it Down.
That’s a familiar concept. It includes several tips that apply to XP, Vista, and 7.
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