David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Let’s say you need to shut down or reboot your computer from a command line, a batch file, or a desktop shortcut. Maybe you want to shut it down right now, or in an hour. You can do all of that and more with the Windows shutdown command, shutdown.exe.
Read more
Declining incomes have more people paying a higher percentage of their income in rent than in the past. I blame the recession. And what caused the recession? People getting in over their heads, buying more house than they can afford. I blame the big banks for that, because I personally experienced it. If I’d bought the kind of house loan officers were telling me to buy in 2002, I’d have been foreclosed on, too.
Here’s a very easy way to figure out whether you can afford a particular place. Read more
Rob O’Hara beat me to the punch with his excellent analysis of Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind, and I find myself not disagreeing with a word of it. So rather than duplicate his work, I’ll talk about how I came to learn of Nevermind and its reception in St. Louis.
Windows 7 can suffer from old-age disease, where it thrashes hard drives, programs quit responding, and it generally becomes unusable. I’m beginning to wonder if my main PC might be suffering from this. Microsoft prescribes this cure.
If you’re comfortable with a command line, I can make the solution faster and easier.
Read more
On the heels of yesterday, the same technique that swapped hosts files can be adapted to toggle registry settings too. The registry, if you’re not familiar, is a central database that stores Windows configuration settings.
Perhaps you want to be able to toggle your screen saver timeout from the default of 1500 to a value of 9999. That way, you can easily choose between the screen saver interrupting you or not. I run into a problem when running certain emulators with the screen saver timing out on me; this would solve the problem.
Dealnews had a shocking deal today: An OCZ Vertex Plus 60 GB drive for $45. That’s an after-rebate price, but even writing off the $10 rebate, at $55 the drive is still priced historically low.
I didn’t buy one. And I didn’t buy three. Here’s why.
Read more
A longtime reader wrote in asking if it was possible to easily toggle between two hosts files. There are several possible uses for this. When I’m at home, I need to address my web site by its internal, private IP address. On the road, that private address obviously doesn’t work. He wants something like this for other reasons; I believe he’s blocking ad servers with his hosts file and needs to unblock one or more servers temporarily for select sites to work properly.
This solution would make my Computer Science 203 professor rescind the B I received in his class if he saw it, but it works, and I don’t think he reads this blog anyway.
Consumerist had some fun today at the expense of a Best Buy ad from September 15, 1996.
Here’s the kind of price deflation we’ve seen in 15 years.
Read more
I can think of two times someone has asked me to fix their computer when it has suddenly lost the ability to connect to the Internet. Assuming there’s nothing wrong with the modem or the network card, the problem usually comes down to something messing with either the TCP/IP stack or the Winsock. Security software frequently does this, as does malware. A few years ago, I briefly worked for an ISP that provided a security suite based on F-Secure, and that program was notorious for breaking the Winsock.
Here’s the simple fix.
Read more
A longtime reader asked me today if I have a tip jar. The short answer is no. But if you like what you see here, I am on the Amazon affiliate program. So any time you follow a link here to Amazon (whether it’s in a post when I mention something on Amazon, the banner ad on most of my pages, or this link: Amazon.com
) and buy something–even if it’s a different product than what I linked to–you’ll get the same pricing on Amazon as you always would (promise!) but I’ll get a small commission.
The commissions help to underwrite the cost of running the site and occasionally buy a little something for the family.