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Yes. When you sign in with a Microsoft account, your wallpaper and tile arrangement and crap show up just like they are on other machines. And there's Skydrive and Skydrive Pro, which are pretty much the same thing as having Dropbox or Google Drive other than the confusing fact that they're...

I've never had a reason to save a .mht in my life but apparently this Thunderbird add-on will give you that functionality and took a whole eight seconds for me to find.

On tablets I keep a Gmail widget on my home screen. I have a Plex remote widget on my phone and living room tablet. Every Android device I own has a full-page calculator widget on the first screen to the right of the home screen. My home screen consists of a few app shortcuts (Firefox, Google...

The gamefaqs walkthrough for Angry Birds is shockingly comprehensive.

I guess that depends on your perspective on copyright violation.

For what it's worth, I pay $50/month for a 1U server on an unmetered 50Mbit connection in a Colo that's 45 minutes from my apartment. If you have serious bandwidth constraints, it might be productive to move some of your crap off-site.

I really, truly wince at the idea, but Sharepoint is kind of made for this sort of thing. You can also share folders in Google Docs, but that might not be the most natural workflow in the world for a lot of people, especially if a lot of random folks might be uploading to any one folder. The...

I've done SmartBuyGlasses.com most recently. Their ordering and fulfillment people are in Texas though the glasses shipped from IIRC Hong Kong. Between Oakley frames and the ridiculously light plastic of my lenses, I think I saved about $400 over going to a Lenscrafters or something.

Today I poured a bunch of Skittles and Reese's Pieces in to the candy dish full of M&Ms out by our reception area. Possibly the most evil thing I will do all year.

Couldn't you just set up WebDAV and let them manage the folders through Windows Explorer?

That's one of the reasons I have an LTO changer. The aforementioned collection of loose drives are generally stored in my office at work.

"RAID5" is essentially the default setting in the Drobo's management software. I just didn't bother changing it when I set the silly thing up in the first place. I'm aware of the deficiencies of RAID5 for large individual member disks and you can rest assured that there was zero chance of a data...

... And just to play with the Drobo a little more, I yanked out one of the drives after I finished copying data to its destination on another system. It says it's going to need ~75 hours to rebuild my array. Yikes.

Job security at its finest!

I found this article completely fascinating. Does anyone think that computer security is anything other than a complete joke at this point?

Today I learned that iSCSI targets can be added to Windows Storage Spaces just like any other fixed disk.

It worked. I have a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure as well and as I recall it was a royal PITA to get working, but the Drobo was fine.

Thunderbolt worked for me.

It's too functionally limited to be of interest in my opinion. It does Netflix and Youtube. So does every other piece of electronics with enough brains to run an IP stack and a video output.

There most certainly is, but what that interface might be depends on your hosting provider. Many hosts allow FTP and (UNIX) shell access for making changes, but some providers only have some kind of lame control panel or something. Either way you'll need a username and a password from the...

My tablet is foremost a device I use for reading. My phone is capable of doing that, but it's not nearly as comfortable.

I just found this thingie on Ebay, but given my recent experience with Android STBs I think I'm going to wait until I can find one from a reputable reseller.

The 2013 Nexus 7" looks fairly awesome but now that there are 7" 1080P screens my next question is why does it still cost a young fortune to get a desktop display with any more pixels than that?

Neither Classic Shell nor Start 8 are complete matches for the Windows 7 shell and that also does not address the Start Menu replacements that big OEMs are providing. Very often, the people who need help with using something as basic as a Windows start menu are the very people who would have...

I don't feel like starting a new thread for this but I could see how someone or other might be interested in reading it so... I had occasion to test a Drobo 5D last night. The 5D is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) that operates over Thunderbolt and USB3. Mine is set up with four Hitachi...

Tracking is occasionally not an option if Amazon is using a small, local carrier. Every once in a while I get an Amazon Delivery from some stoner in a 20 year old Camry, but he'll have a badge on that says he works for some Courier company I've never heard of in any other context than handing me...

Crossloop, TeamViewer and ShowmyPC are all fantastic, but they're not ideal for every circumstance because of bandwidth, security requirements or just circumstances of convenience.

I buy about 90% of everything except groceries and clothes from Amazon. It's not unusual for me to get deliveries every day of my work week.

Does your old host offer FTP access? Usually the easiest way to grab everything is to just replicate the FTP directory structure. Otherwise you can use some kind of spidering program, but if you do that you'll lose server-side scripts.

Yes, but they are not standardized. Which means you have to figure out which of the shell replacements the user is talking about and hope you're familiar with it or else fall back on sentences like "OK, tell me everything that's on your screen right now." and "OK, what happens when you press the...

It's FUCKING HUGE for training and support purposes. I don't mind not having a standard UI on *nix systems because the people using them are smart enough to figure shit out on their own and I don't think that everyone needs to be locked in to exactly the same settings for everything, but I bet...

I've heard of something very similar from a company called SmartSnake. I don't know if your deal is the same outfit or not, but SmartSnake's people phone and represent themselves as Microsoft employees selling a service for either one year ($200) or a lifetime ($450) of system maintenance. The...

The only folks I see buying new machines right now are the ones who thought a netbook or one of those super-crappy $250-at-Wal-Mart laptops would be an acceptable primary computer. And all those people would be better off with a Nexus tablet anyway.

DNS is pretty cloud-y to begin with and for the most part it's completely manual. It sounds like you'd just be moving around a single point of failure but moreover by the nature of DNS, you're not going to have any control over the speed of propagation regardless. What about something like a...

One of my customers paid for Solarwinds and for their stuff and I will admit that I'm monitoring a lot more than their servers with it.

Why aren't you just setting up the DR's DNS servers as a secondary zone so that you have something on-hand to edit when the time comes? Presumably then it's just a matter of editing a record with your registrar to get to something usable. Am I missing something about your configuration?

Of course, I'm looking for a zero-administration, commodity-parts, no-noise client to go with Plex Servers I'm putting together. A laptop with either Windows or Linux on it explicitly not those things. Howell: In torture testing, I've managed to get eight simultaneous 2 - 3Mbit streams to play...

I've been investigating my remaining Android media player options and I have to say the choices are all fairly unappealing. It's possible to get dual core 1 - 1.2GHz ARM systems with 1GB RAM. They're all over the place. Many of them are in "stick" form factors though, which means that they don't...

It's not that it's failed. I don't care that it's failed or that it hasn't. It's the baseline configuration for every computer with Windows 8. The PROBLEM is that there are dozens of non-uniform replacements and overlays that are being deployed on top of it. Ultimately that's going to make new...

You would think, but the answer is still no. Believe me. I had 24 of the goddamned things and tried everything I could think of to make them work in any kind of array or logical grouping at all. I thought I had gotten somewhere with Storage Spaces, since that let me address the underlying disk...

WD and Seagate's energy-saver drives are the problem children and probably everything else you could possibly get is fine. Ironically I think the WD Red drives are also "energy saver" drives, but they don't have the problems that the WD Green drives have. Nice to know you're paying an extra 33%...

Email practices can vary widely between organizations but yes Outlook will give you a particular file type that stores contacts/mail/calendar locally on your client and it will be at least possible to manage it if you choose to.

Well Notes is god-awful. I've never been forced to be a user, but I've had to do support for it and if you've been exposed to absolutely any other E-mail system in the last 15 years it's pretty easy to understand. I know there are organizations that keep it because of the fantastic ability to...

As an aside, I think Google's insistence on threaded replies in Android Gmail is eleventy times worse than either the ribbon or the start screen. It's ridiculously easy to delete an entire chain of emails on accident instead of a single message and it puts long conversations out of the context...

Enterprise hybrid drives. Which might actually make some sense, especially if they're paired with a faster spindle in the first place.

That's some quality randomness right there. Thanks Chewy. I'm pleasantly surprised with SanDisk's RMA service. They turned around an RMA on a 64GB microSD card in a little less than 48 hours including all the transit time.

They are fine for that purpose.

The -k CPUs have their own set of drawbacks, principally from the loss of hardware virtualization support. If you want to run a cheap server on desktop parts, you have to go live in AMD's world.

Indeed. I think dd really got transvaginal'd on this CPU. But Intel has to sell those -EE SKUs somehow.

That's definitely the benefit of the ribbon. I'm more than a little peeved at how many precious vertical pixels it needs, but does make sense from a workflow standpoint. I understand entirely why it was done. You can also "un-pin" or collapse the ribbon so that it's not taking up space unless...