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If your stuff is all plugged in to a receiver, it will convert whatever you've got into whatever your want. That's the point of having a receiver.

If Austin is the price we must pay to rid ourselves of Dallas and Houston, I say that it is worth it.

If we're going to start canceling states, can we do Texas next?

I stumbled across Dorco this morning. I'm intrigued, but I just bought a bunch of cartridges for my razor so it will be a while before I'll feel the need to try anything different. I just paid $32 for a 16-pack of 4-blade razors and Dorco wants $25 for 24 6-blade razors, so I can see real value...

I believe prices are set and controlled by Microsoft. So discounting will be whatever little scraps Amazon or Best Buy or Newegg feel like offering.

The best circumstances are around 25C and modest levels of wind and humidity. Also acceptable: 35C-ish and surrounded by chicks in bikinis.

She acts like she's quite a bit older. I thought she was in her mid or late 20s. She thought I was in my mid or late 20s. Whatever. It's working.

I really don't see why MS doesn't shave $100 off current pricing for Surface devices. They're selling a whole ecosystem against a couple different ecosystem. I'm sure they did analysis that set the price points, but the almost universal reaction seems to be "it's too expensive." But these things...

So Surface Pro is out. It's fast. It's a real computer that runs full blown Windows apps. It weighs under 3lbs even with the keyboard. And all people want to do is bitch about how the battery only runs four and a half hours and has a small SSD. I can't help but think that if an i5 with a...

I can honestly say that I am no longer dating a teenager. Because she had a birthday.

Do you have a particular application in mind here? Why are you so concerned with being able to ID people from your camera?

DVDflick: OSS/free video file to DVD converter.

Do you have a Windows Server with WSUS 3.0 installed? You can make it a crapload more useful with Local Update Publisher.

I've set up these guys a few times. They're 640x480, which is actually just fine for continuous recording and a nice step up from crappy analog security cams in more or less the same way that a full-motion DVD is an improvement over VHS tape that was recorded at four frames per second. The...

Weekends are usually a lot more busy for me than weekdays, Lunar. This week was not an exception. One of the old servers in my apartment hat a flame-out today. I do mean flame. It set off my smoke alarm and got me a call from my landlord. As near as I can tell, the video card (which probably...

Defender and MSE are fundamentally the same thing as Endpoint Protection, other than the management aspect. They both block or remove the same viruses and malware and use the same definitions and they all have for-shit heuristics, which is the biggest problem with all of the above.

Not a big deal either way.

I know how to work the shutdown command. But power management should be doing something that it is not. In other good news, as of Tuesday, ninite's installer will once again replace Windows Defender with either Avast or Avira. That makes me happy, since Defender is a giant pile of suck.

There's another tool called Tasker that can be used to program a lot of conditional actions including changing lock settings based on 802.11 connection, but it's quite a bit more expensive.

Unlock with Wifi is well worth $3. Basically you can set your stuff up to use a lock screen only when you're someplace unfamiliar. How cool is that?

Windows 7's backup was a substantial improvement on Vista's or any other desktop version of Windows, but File History and "Windows 7 File Recovery" is a step back, if only because of the confusion of nomenclature. If you use the search charm for "backup", File History is what comes up. Nothing...

As far as I can tell that is correct, but when I choose "Sleep" my notebook used to go in to hibernate after some additional period of inactivity and it does not seem to be doing that. Also, hey, has anyone looked at the mess that is Windows 8's built-in backup software? Windows 7's actually...

OK, I found part of the problem: If I use the "sleep" mode from the Settings Charm, my Thinkpad does not ever transition to Hibernate but rather seems to stay in the instant-on state even after six hours without use. If I tell the system to Hibernate using Classic Shell (Hibernate is not one of...

Yeah, I'll do $75.

One of my students lost a day-old Note 2 in a snowmobiling accident. He was fine but his phone was screwed. Verizon made him sign a written affidavit about the nature and disposition of his phone's damage, telling him that doing so was part of the warranty repair process, then informed him that...

It's almost 8PM and right now it's 59 degrees outside. In January. A mile from Lake Michigan. The rain is a little cold, but I sat out and read on my balcony for a while this evening just for the novelty of doing it.

Here's a completely nifty thing: Android 4.0.3 running natively as a Windows application.

It's theoretically switchable if both show up in device manager, I think. I'm not sure which is being used by my notebook but I do know that it's hot on the rear left side and that the system fan is running a lot more than it was under 7. I've reinstalled most of the Lenovo apps just to see if...

Battery life on my T420 appears to be about half what it was under Windows 7, even with current drivers for everything. I'm investigating, but one likely culprit seems to be the nvidia switchable graphics. I note that all my multi-monitor controls only function properly in the nvidia control...

Not to take away from an otherwise breathtaking rant, but assloads of ISPs don't support IMAP. The usual bullshit excuse is that they don't have storage or bandwidth to support that application. Here in the US, large ISPs by and large go one step further by directing users to webmail services...

bubbleshooter.net, my good man.

I'm a big fan of XnView, but I've found that messing with the default image viewer in Windows can break the association that makes Explorer generate thumbnails for folders that are in icon view.

Someone asked me today how to cut/copy/paste in the Metro interface. I'd never tried and my own strategies for dealing with Win8 involve pretending Metro does not exist. I can select one or even multiple files. But the UI's only option once files have been selected is to delete them. No...

How much time is left on the warranty clock?

The App Store relies on an affirmative ID system. It could just be that they don't want people installing App Store apps as administrator because it's semi-anonymous or might associate the app with the wrong account. Plus, Microsoft doesn't really want ANYONE using the named administrator...

You basically have to have a Core i-series CPU to get the features required to make Hyper-V go. In typical Intel fashion, it's not enabled line-wide but rather an artificial point of differentiation between chips. I've also found that many, MANY consumer laptops can't enable virtualization...

One of my customers is talking about buying Surface/Surface Pro devices because the new point of sale system they're looking at will support them. They're the first group of people I've talked to who are genuinely gung-ho about Windows RT.

It's useful for both, since it means that there could be a smaller I/O plate on a system and the ports are where people actually want them. Er, if anyone is making monitors that actually HAVE USB/Firewire/eSATA/Ethernet on them and accept Thunderbolt input, anyway.

I think the value it has is as as a single point of connection. Plug a display in, tuck the computer someplace out of the way and run whatever other connectors you need off ports in the display. It's clearly wasted as being yet another high speed external disk interface, but as one universal...

Well if you want to see something hilarious, watch how long it takes to copy 33 million 100kB files to a RAIDZ2l.

The amount of stuff sitting around my apartment is in the same ballpark, actually. I've been tempted with the idea of moving to Server 2012 and Storage Pools for performance reasons rather than zPools like I'm presently using, but I'm mildly terrified that the underlying technology would not...

Speaking of XBMC and media centers, these look kind of neat. I don't like that they're 802.11 only, but that's hardly a deal breaker. I'm trying to find a way to justify getting one or two different models to play with.

You've sort-of reminded me that I've been meaning to see what the Enlightenment people have been up to since the late '90s.

They're pretty easy to access, actually. Unlike the Pavilion dv6 in that video where they're buried underneath keyboard (which requires removing every optional part from the bottom side of the unit) AND parts of the mainboard assembly, all the fans are right under the bottom plate. Of course...

It indexes all of them. I actually set up a crapload of different image libraries as part of my normal profile config and I *want* them to be in those libraries. Apparently the stock answer to this question is just to move private stuff out of your libraries, but that's lame since it completely...

That might in fact have something to do with it. Until recently, all my "personal" photos were just pictures of my cats or rack setups at customer sites or something. Now I actually have personal photos that I'd prefer not to show up in the live tile or thumbnails. I'm surprised there isn't an...

I can't say that I spend much time looking at disk controller logs unless I see a hiccup someplace. I suspect dd's in about the same boat.

I went ahead and created another account, just for taking screen shots and using with a projector. It's not worth the chance that I'd get in trouble.

Well... yes and no. You have to bear in mind that there are costs just for having the port that the disk sits on, and the costs for the chassis, and the power and the labor and and and... And somewhere there's a beancounter who knows exactly what all those costs are. And in a RAID10 or RAID50...

Does anyone know a quick way to conditionally exclude library folders from Metro's live preview? Let's just say it might be handy to know before I go hooking my personal notebook up to a projector.