David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw this week on Cnet that Pharox is selling basic, bare-bones LEDs direct from its web site, hoping to get consumers to try out LED bulbs.
The Pharox 300 is a 6 watt, 360 lumen bulb priced at $6.95.
The Pharox 200 is a 5 watt, 240 lumen bulb priced at $4.95.
Computerworld is predicting that the end of the line for SSDs will be the year 2024.
That’s based on the projected year MLC flash memory becomes impractical to continue producing. There’s one problem with that assumption: it assumes SSDs will still be based on flash memory in 2024.
After last year’s flip-flopping on getting rid of its not-quite-as-profitable-as-they’d-like PC business, and the resulting self sabotage, HP needed a good idea to try to undo the damage.
Their idea is completely unoriginal, but it’s tried and true and more likely to work than anything else they could possibly do: Bundle their premium PCs with premium-level customer service and charge a little more.
I saw a question about a Fastrack layout getting hot at a track joint. That’s a conductivity issue causing voltage drop, which in turn causes the heat. While not likely to be dangerous, it’s a sign of inefficiency and can lead to other problems, such as the train slowing down at some parts of the layout. Poor conductivity also causes motors to run hotter than they should, which can eventually damage the armature.
I can think of two fixes, none of them especially expensive or time-consuming. And although this question was about Lionel Fastrack, it can happen with other makes of track too, and even other scales.
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I couldn’t tell you the last time I thought about Joy Division, and then one of my college classmates posted a story about a stash of Joy Division and early New Order master tapes showing up in the basement of a former bank, along with guns and gold (but presumably, no butter). Yes, the jokes write themselves.
Instead of talking about the contents of the tapes, the story talked about New Order going on tour. I was vaguely aware that Peter Hook quit the band, and another story on the site discussed that: New Order is back together without Peter Hook, and Peter Hook is planning on touring as himself and playing Joy Division songs. And he’s writing a book about his time in Joy Division.
As a guy who spent way too much time listening to Joy Division in college, and who for a time ran the largest Joy Division tribute site on the Web, yeah, I have some opinions on all that.
Cleaning heat sink grease off a processor is something I hope you don’t have to do often. But if you find yourself needing to remove a processor from a motherboard, it’s a good idea to clean off whatever compound is on the surface of the chip and apply a fresh batch.
You can do it with household tools.
My new fire-breathing dragon of a server is sitting idle at the moment. I would have liked to have had it up and running today, but now I’m starting to realize why it took me so long to migrate off my Pentium II-450. Setting up Linux web servers is a lot more complicated than it was in 2001.
They can do a lot more than they could in 2001 too, but when I first built that server, the process literally went in about three steps: Install Debian, apt-get install apache mysql php, then download blogging software, create a MySQL database and account for it, edit a config file, then start blogging. You could get it done in an hour, and a lot of that time was waiting for stuff to load off a CD-ROM or download over a 256K DSL connection.
Model Railroad Hobbyist is a monthly online-only magazine about, as the title suggests, model railroading. The quality of the content is very high–I’ll argue the writing, editing and photography give Model Railroader and/or Railroad Model Craftsman a run for the money. I really think which is best in any given month has more to do with the reader’s interests than anything else.
If you’re interested in model railroading or any other hobby that involves trains, dioramas, or both, it’s worth bookmarking and visiting every month. Perhaps more frequently, as you peruse back issues for gems you missed in the past.
I’ve discussed vacuuming Firefox before to make it run like new, but it’s not something everyone is exactly comfortable doing. I found an extension called Vacuum Places Improved that allows you to vacuum Firefox automatically.
Most importantly, in the options for the add-on, you can make it run, say, every 50th time Firefox starts. That way, the vacuum process happens transparently–at the expense of every 50th load being slower, the database gains automatic maintenance. I’ll gladly trade occasional slower load times for improved performance.
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I dragged my computer back over to Micro Center this afternoon. It took three of us, but we got the computer working.
It’s a long story. It would have been a much shorter story if I’d remembered my rule #1. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say the second technician, upon hearing the only thing we hadn’t swapped out was the power supply, dragged a power supply out of the back. We plugged that power supply in, and heard the sweet gimme-some-memory scream from the motherboard failing to POST. Incredible. So we powered down, reinstalled the memory, and watched the system POST.