Just because you can afford it now…

Dave Farquhar Christianity, Saving money , ,

Today, the sermon at church was based mostly on Nehemiah 5. Nehemiah 5 talks about the ruinous financial situation of the children of Israel at the time the book was written. Check out Nehemiah 5:4-5.

“We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards. Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our fellow Jews and though our children are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”

In other words, in order to pay their bills, some had resorted to selling their children into slavery. Sadly, some Americans find themselves in that situation today. Or close to it. At least it’s uncommon enough that we’re offended when we hear about it. Read more

LED night lights

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

With two young kids, we find ourselves fumbling around in the kitchen at night more than just occasionally. At some point, we turned to flipping the microwave’s night light on.Which was fine, except I found that one of its settings uses 30 watts, the other 60, and more often than not, that light stays lit 24/7. That’s more power than I want to leave on full time. LED night lights solve that problem neatly. Read more

Short takes: Ed Felten, Sparky Anderson

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

Sparky Anderson died today. When I was a kid, Anderson was the manager of the Detroit Tigers and already a legend from having managed the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati in the 1970s. He was always a true gentleman in every possible regard.

He actually managed longer and won more games in Detroit, but his Tigers teams never matched the mystique of that great Reds dynasty.

A poignant quote from the article linked above: “The biggest thing that young people can learn is, do the best you can at what you do, and then when you’re through with it, don’t try to live it again. I don’t live baseball anymore.”

And in much happier news, Ed Felten got a job at the FTC. Felten is a rather outspoken computer science professor at Stanford. He famously demonstrated that Internet Explorer could be separated from Windows 98 in various ways during the Microsoft anti-trust trial in the late 1990s. He has a long history of being an advocate of allowing people to fix and modify the hardware devices they paid for, as opposed to the all-too-common-today idea that if you take something apart, you’ve violated some license agreement.

His insightful, sometimes snarky Freedom to Tinker blog is always a good read.  His series Fritz’s hit list is an Internet classic. 

Felten’s statement says his role will be an advisory role. They would do well to do whatever he says, because he understands technology much better than anyone else in Washington.

It’s been 15 years, and computer stores haven’t changed much

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the early 1990s, I learned how to fix computers because I got tired of long waits and shoddy repairs from computer stores.

Last month I took a friend to go buy a computer. I didn’t want her to get stuck with retail junk, so I took her to a computer store that I knew sold quality parts. Plus I know the owner. He wrote an O’Reilly book too. I figured it would be a smooth experience, since I knew exactly what to ask for. The salesperson said he’d get back to me within two days with a quote, then it would take about a week to build the system after we gave the OK. Seems pretty smooth and reasonable.

It turned into a nightmare. Or at least a mess. Read more

Outlook send button is gone? Here’s the fix.

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , , ,

“My Outlook send button is gone,” one of my coworkers told me. Microsoft wasn’t much help. The relevant knowledge base articles said the e-mail account not being configured causes that problem. Except it was. He could receive and read mail just fine, he just couldn’t send anything out.

Ultimately we ended up deleting his mail profile to fix the missing send button. Read more

Bias is good?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , ,

Blekko could be an idea whose time has come. It’s a search engine with bias.

The idea is, you punch in what you’re looking for, and include a slash term to bias the search in a particular direction. That could help filter out spam sites–sites that are loaded with keywords and a few links but no real content, for instance.

But I imagine some significant percentage of its users will use it to try to find content they already agree with. Read more

Getting bombarded with political calls tonight? Don’t hang up–hit #

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I read this trick today. So far, hitting # worked on the political calls I’ve been getting tonight. Or, if in doubt, hit #0* as one of those key combinations usually works to kill the call.

And if any candidate calls after 8 PM and wakes up my kids, I automatically write in the name “Fidel Castro” instead of voting for them. Not that any of them are reading this. I’m pretty sure a good percentage of them can’t read…

More later, I hope.

Buying a new TV that won’t kill your electric bill

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , , , ,

As television technology improves, they become more energy efficient. Generally speaking, at least. The CRT TV ranging in size from 26-32 inches that was common in living rooms for most of my lifetime used around 130 watts. But some of the monster TVs people are buying these days use more power than the fridge. Read more

I got a new side gig

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I’ve been talking a lot with WhiteQueen at Rabbit-Hole lately, and learning a lot. It’s one thing to learn security from textbooks and learn enough to pass a test. It’s one thing to patch servers and make sure my servers pass annual security audits. It’s quite another thing to talk to someone who actively seeks out hackers to study their movements and try to keep them out. Or who stands up servers just to see how difficult it is to get in by force instead of through the logon prompt.

Both WhiteQueen and RedQueen have tons of ideas and tons of knowledge in their heads. But neither likes to write. After I banged out a 600-word article this week based on a five-minute conversation with him, WhiteQueen approached me with the idea of posting security-related articles on Rabbit-Hole. We think having quality, useful articles going up over there on a semi-regular basis will help them build a larger audience, and I’d never attract that audience working on my own. I’ll be learning as I go, and sharing what I learn in the process.

I’ll continue to write here about whatever it is I feel like writing about. I must have a half-dozen things not related to security that I’m working on right now anyway. When I post something over there, I’ll link to it from here to make it all easy to find.