David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Here’s a good, timely Google search query: scraping by advice.
I looked, and I’ve never written anything that matched that query well. I know a lot of people are hurting right now. I’ve been in some tight spots and I’ve gotten out of some, so let’s talk about what I would do, on a really practical level, if I ran into another tight spot next week.
I found this short guide today to troubleshooting Windows 7’s power management.
You can use powercfg.exe, a command-line utility, to figure out what programs are keeping your computer from suspending, and if your computer is waking up at weird times, what program is waking it up. Useful, and non-obvious.
My name is Dave. I am an Amigaholic.
I thought I was recovered. But I don’t think you ever recover. Not really.
You see, this week I was trolling Craigslist for garage sales. I look for trains, toys for my boys, and other things that strike my fancy. I spotted a sale that advertised an Amiga computer. I shouldn’t have put it on my list, but I did. I didn’t want to buy it, but I had to see it. I had to. Like I said, you don’t recover.
Yesterday I saw (and edited) the final proofs for an article that will be appearing in the January 2012 issue of Classic Toy Trains, due on newsstands 6 December.
The article, “Smart wiring for the gateman,” shows some different ways to wire the venerable Lionel gateman accessory, first introduced 75 years ago.
Read more
Dennis Ritchie died this weekend, aged 70. You may not know who he is, but if you’re reading this, you’re using something he invented.
Dennis Ritchie was, among other things, co-creator of Unix and the C programming language. Even if you run Windows, Windows was heavily influenced by Unix, and a lot of programs you run were written, if not in C, in its successor, C++.
Read more
LED lighting is slowly getting cheaper. Home Depot has its 40W equivalent bulbs under $10 now, and Lowe’s countered with a $13 40W equivalent. The Lowe’s bulb uses less wattage, so I think that’s the better value.
I bought some.
Read more
And here’s some first-person testimonial about book-writing in the 21st century. Most of it rings true. It took me 9 months to write a book, vs. 2.5 years. But my advance was smaller than what she got. I don’t know my sales figures, but she seems happy with sales figures that I would have thought were disappointing. Royalties of a dollar a book are about right (mine were closer to $1.75), and working for less than minimum wage is definitely a possibility. She’s also right that publishers will not promote you. You absolutely, positively have to promote yourself. They’ll put your book on store shelves and send a few copies to reviewers, but from there you’re on your own to sink or swim. Read more
I’m way too tired to do the kind of Patch Tuesday writeup I did last month, so I’ll just remind you, and hope that suffices. This month we have vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, and .NET, some of which can cause remote code execution, which is a holy grail for spreading malware. So apply those updates. The Silverlight update applies to Macintoshes as well.
Here’s a question I hear quite a bit: Is there something better than Robocopy? If you’re looking for alternatives to robocopy, read on.
I immediately thought of Xxcopy. Depending on your perspective, it could be better. So-named because it’s an extension of Xcopy, which was itself an extension of copy, it’s a third-party copy utility that mimics the familiar xcopy command, which Microsoft’s own Robocopy does not. Read more
A common piece of good-meaning advice you’ll hear is that you should never use software firewalls. But is that good advice, or bad?
On the surface, it’s good advice. It’s much better to use the firewall built into a cable/DSL router. But the software firewall built into Windows XP, Vista, 7, and (presumably) 8 makes for a good second line of defense, so I don’t recommend disabling it.
I’ll explain further.