David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I just saw that LSI Corporation bought Sandforce, maker of high-performance SSD controllers, earlier this week for $400 million.
LSI makes a lot of things. I’ve owned a couple of SCSI controllers over the years with their chips on them. I’ve administered servers with their RAID controllers in them. They also make system-on-a-chip solutions.
A longtime reader wrote in this week recommending TCP Optimizer. I’ve used this program off and on for years, but don’t seem to have ever mentioned it on the blog.
I talked about similar programs in my book, but TCP Optimizer works with all modern (and many ancient) versions of Windows, and it can make a tremendous difference. It’s a small, self-contained program that doesn’t require any installation, the way programs ought to be.
Want a $199 tablet? Want something more open than a Kindle Fire? Want it a couple of weeks sooner? Don’t mind a slower CPU to have device portability on your books and more open access to the operating system?
Kobo is betting with its Kobo Vox tablet that the answer to at least one of those questions, for some people, is yes.
Rather than just opening, Firefox tries to be cute by opening the tab halfway, then sliding open the rest of the way. If you have a fast enough system, maybe you don’t notice. But if you’re like me and like things to be as fast as possible, you can disable this behavior.
If you’re not concerned yet about the danger of people finding random USB devices in parking lots and plugging them into work PCs, eventually you will be. The answer to the problem is to disable USB mass storage on business PCs. Of course, then there’s the question of how you connect hard drives for legitimate company use.
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Besides all the changes to the GUI that happened post-Windows XP, they also made one useful change to the command prompt. When you run a command, it’s now possible to pipe output to the clipboard.
If you’re like me and write a lot of documentation, or you just take a lot of notes while doing computer maintenance, it’s a big boon.
Antivirus software can be among the hardest software to uninstall, because its hooks dig so deeply into the operating system. I’ve seen it fail to uninstall for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it requires a password, which was entered by someone other than you and never written down. Or sometimes something gets corrupted, and the program’s uninstaller fails. If you need to remove stubborn antivirus software, there’s a solution.
Enter Appremover.
Needing a secondary case fan for my current PC build, I picked up an Antec Tri-Cool Double Ball Bearing fan, the 92 mm size. Even on its highest speed, I found it to be quieter than the fans in the PCs on my desk at work. On its lowest setting, you pretty much can’t hear it at all. At its full retail price of $25, I wouldn’t bother with it, but when it’s on sale for less than $10, that’s not bad.
Google announced this week that it’s defaulting to https (secure) searches, and not passing search queries on to the sites its user clicks anymore. It’s the end of an era, I guess, and I’ll miss it.
Yeah, I looked at the search queries that come into this site. I’ve been doing it for years.