David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
How Lionel Fastrack compares to traditional tubular track and competing O gauge track is a common question. I own both, so I can probably make a comparison. Here is my Lionel Fastrack review.
For the most part, it’s not bad. But it’s not perfect. For some people, the drawbacks are easy enough to overlook. For others, they could be showstoppers. You’ll have to decide for yourself.
Booting off USB is easy. You go into the BIOS, find the option that says USB boot, enable it, and then go into the boot order, select USB, and move it to the top. Well, not if you have an HP or a Compaq, you don’t. How do you make HP and Compaq computers boot off USB?
I’ll tell you.
The rhetoric in today’s political environment is toxic. Since before the 2008 presidential election, I’ve been expecting it to take a violent turn. Today it happened. It happened later than I expected, and the target wasn’t who I expected, but now we’ve gone violent.
It’s entirely possible that the pundits and candidates who utilize violent turns of phrase didn’t expect it to happen this way. Their intent matters little at this point. You never know whether violent rhetoric will be interpreted literally or figuratively, but all it takes is one person to take it literally for it to turn into a tragedy. Now it appears that a 22-year-old consipracy theorist did take it literally, and now we have a tragedy. Among the wounded is a 40-year-old Congresswoman. Among the dead are a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl.
Yesterday Lifehacker did a feature on laptop tweaks and upgrades, that basically came down to reinstalling the OS, adding memory, and upgrading to an SSD. All of those are good things to do of course, but there’s more you can do. I posted a response there; I’ll elaborate a bit here, where I have more room to do so.
There are tons of links here to previous content I’ve written; optimizing aging machines is a recurring theme for me. I’ve been writing on that topic for 11 years now.
This week was CES, where companies make a big splash and try to show what’s going to happen in the consumer electronics space in the coming year.
In the coverage of CES, I saw three things that seem interesting, but only one of those three was a surprise.
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Fred “God Hates Everyone But Fred Phelps/Thank God for Dead Soldiers” Phelps and a couple of his family member-followers paid St. Charles a visit today. And I thought of him when I read the Sermon on the Mount. Specifically, Matthew 5:11-12.
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Suddenly I think I know what motivates them.
This isn’t exactly news, as word has been going around for a couple of weeks, but if you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there are some fake defragmenters going around.
I heard mention of it today, and it reminded me that I saw one last week when I was working on my mother in law’s computer. This was especially obnoxious, considering that at the time, I was running Firefox and I was visiting a mainstream site.
So there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.
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Andrew Blasko and I were columnists for the same student newspaper at the University of Missouri. He was a couple of years ahead of me, so I can’t exactly call him a classmate, seeing as he was taking 300-level classes when I was taking 100-level classes. But as the senior ranking columnist when I was the new guy, he was a mentor and an influence.
He had an editorial today in the Washington Times. And while there are perhaps two sentences I don’t completely agree with (and he probably wouldn’t want every reader to agree with every single word), it’s very good. I hope some people in Washington read it and take note.
I’ll be back later with something completely different. But since I just found out about this, I wanted to say hey, read this! I know that guy! (And I do think I’ve used up my yearly quota for exclamation points.)
When Microsoft’s monthly security patches come down, if you’ve ever clicked on the button to see what it’s installing, you may have noticed the Malicious Software Removal Tool.
If you’re wondering, it’s a rudimentary antimalware tool that removes selected vermin from your system. It doesn’t remove all known malware. And I don’t know exactly how Microsoft decides what to remove and when. But given the number of people who don’t run any kind of antimalware software, it probably seemed like a good idea when they rolled it out in 2005. And in the first 15 months they pushed the tool out with the monthly patches, it removed 16 million instances of malicious software. Not bad.
The tool has some power that you can unlock that normally isn’t exercised when you do your monthly updates.
Note: In a corporate environment, you may not get the Malicious Software Tool automatically if you’re managing Windows updates yourself. Microsoft has instructions for deploying it to your enterprise.
A longtime reader asked me about news writing, and writing in general, after complaining about the sorry state of writing these days. I think a lot of things are in a sorry state, and the writing is a reflection of that. But maybe if we can fix the writing a little, it’ll help everything else, right?
Kurt Vonnegut once said writers should pity the readers, who have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after studying it for 12 long years.
He says to simplify and clarify.
As writers, we’d rather live by Zeuxis’ mantra that criticism is easier than craftsmanship. But one way to avoid criticism is to make sure the readers understand what we’re writing in the first place.
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