Search results

  1. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Here's a fun and handy tip for everybody: Windows Defender will re-write your hosts file for you. If you have an entry for something like facebook.com (as I do) or DoubleClick.com, Defender will do a DNS lookup and re-write your hosts for you. You can get around that by either turning Defender...
  2. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    Apparently I won a Kindle Fire from the place where I get my hair cut. Since I won't get it until Friday I'm guessing it will probably be a Fire 2. So I might have some impressions of that later in the week.
  3. Mercutio

    Holy Hurricane, Batman!

    Not kill so much as pound some tiny bit of understanding that their objectivist ranting has no basis in reality when they magically discover that they do in fact need assistance from the government to survive. But you're right: I wish nothing but misery on anyone with your particular political...
  4. Mercutio

    Firefox 11.0 is out.

    Optimized Firefox builds have a tendency to fall by the wayside. I suspect that there's little or no subjective difference between this one and the official binary.
  5. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I understand the usefulness of Twitter for serious journalism or as kind of a replacement for RSS feeds in breaking news of interest to some group of people. I still don't have any fucking clue what a regular person needs twitter for.
  6. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Actually, it's not that difficult to do with Vista and 7: Just untick the box for "Use Default Gateway on Remote Network." The problem comes from workplace policies that say someone has to send all their traffic through the VPN to the corporate proxy server or something regardless.
  7. Mercutio

    Electric Cars

    GM suspends production of the Volt.
  8. Mercutio

    Something Random

    They might not be able to properly implement it. QoS doesn't do shit if you can only use it for originating packets. The upstream router needs to understand and respect your QoS needs as well, which often means dealing with an ISP or a corporate WAN guy who doesn't give a crap what you want.
  9. Mercutio

    Holy Hurricane, Batman!

    Three people, unlike the many temporary occupants of Tampa, who will be on the correct side of history.
  10. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Yes, because I love it when my 50Mbit home internet connectivity has to be piped through to an office that only has a 5Mbit connection and 49 other people using it.
  11. Mercutio

    Holy Hurricane, Batman!

    I liked it better when it was heading for Tampa.
  12. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Because criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot. No, really. Bruce Wayne was scared by a bat as a kid and he decided to make other people afraid of them, too.
  13. Mercutio

    Firefox 11.0 is out.

    I think Chrome is just OK and only for people with light browsing needs. It gets worse and worse the more tabs that a user keeps open, but the builtin flash and PDF support make up for a lot of issues. I usually recommend K-meleon (based on FF 2.0) for a lightweight browser. No modern browser is...
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'll use whatever I'm given, but I like the layout of Swype best, even when I have to hunt-and-peck because I'm entering a lot of funny characters. Which is often, unfortunately. Credit to time as well. I absolutely did not realize how god-awful the OEM mail clients for Android were until I had...
  15. Mercutio

    WD Red

    I have all 24 of those drives connected to a nifty little Server 2008r2 machine. I'm using Drive Bender to maintain a quasi-array and I'm using the drives as a target for file synchronization. I've only been powering up that machine once a week or so to copy over new stuff. Drive Bender worries...
  16. Mercutio

    Something Random

    MaxBurn, have you experimented at all with different text input systems on Android? I like Swype and timwhit is fond of SwiftKey. You may find that one of the alternatives is better for your editing needs.
  17. Mercutio

    OneNote? Windows Live Essentials? 2011Anyone tried it? Comments?

    They basically pulled all the rich client apps out of Windows when 7 was released because relatively few people actually use that stuff. OEMs put all of it back in on their consumer-class machines by preloading Live Essentials, but it's handy to not have extra crap by default if you maintain...
  18. Mercutio

    OneNote? Windows Live Essentials? 2011Anyone tried it? Comments?

    Essentials is just the freebie apps they used to throw in with Home Versions of Windows for free. It's nothing special. SkyDrive is a cloud storage implementation. OneNote can be useful, depending on your workflow. If you find yourself needing to make free-form notes a lot, it's great. If you...
  19. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I've been trying to sell some of the Set top media center stuff I have sitting around. I can't find anyone trustworthy to sell it to. Part of my problem is that I'm part of the Chicago metro area, which stretches all the way to Wisconsin. I had someone from Craigslist offer me $30 for a device I...
  20. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Ebay has many, many problems. Let's start with the fact that at this point you have to compete with companies like Buy.com if you want to sell anything. Of course, Craigslist sucks too, but in a totally different way.
  21. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Sci Fi channel original movies hardly make anything synonymous with anything. Nick Fury as a character is kind of a strange fusion of a lot of different influences, including fighting in WWII and a sort of 1960s psychedelic James Bond science fiction cold warrior. Much of the regular comic...
  22. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    There's been a decent torrent release of it since at least the middle of May. That's where all the awesome animated .gifs came from. Comics cost me $2.60 apiece on average, with cover prices ranging from $3 - $4 these days. Fables #100 was released last year with a cover price for a single...
  23. Mercutio

    WD Red

    Those are WD drives. They don't count.
  24. Mercutio

    question Winamp on computer sync to Android no SD support?

    The playlist I imported from WMP shows up on my device in both WinAmp and Google's Music app. So it does appear to use the same playlist store.
  25. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Also: Black Nick Fury does have an in-comic precedent. Marvel has a second comics line called "Ultimate Comics", which features modernized takes on classic characters. Hulk isn't just a brute who wants to be left alone, he's a monster that's ruled by his id. In his first appearance, he eats...
  26. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    One tiny little detail that I liked about the Avengers was the fact that the Hulk has some flab on his gut and normal body hair. I went back and watched the Ang Lee Hulk after one of my many viewings of the Avengers and the changes to the level of detail are utterly mind-blowing.
  27. Mercutio

    question Winamp on computer sync to Android no SD support?

    I messed with it a little bit and it looks like if I use Windows Media Player (the only place I have a playlist defined), I can transfer the whole playlist through that. I deal with things as albums or directories of files, but that's because I might very well have four files that comprise 70...
  28. Mercutio

    WD Red

    As weird as it is for me to say this, I don't actually need any more drives right now.
  29. Mercutio

    question Winamp on computer sync to Android no SD support?

    I always just transfer stuff with an SMB client. What's the value of "sync" as opposed to just copying the files in some more convenient way?
  30. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Does Adobe tie its shit to a motherboard or something? You should be able to reinstall or migrate a license to a different machine. Also, frankly, you should be stealing Adobe's software since you feel that you have to have it. There's no justification for actually giving those worthless fucks...
  31. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    I installed it on a clean drive. OS upgrades are usually a bad idea.
  32. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    The rumor right now is that there's going to be a Windows 8.1 next year and that MS is going to try for faster releases and less expensive OS upgrades for the future. Which would play hell with Common Operating Environments but maybe they don't care. One nifty thing about Office 2013 (I'm just...
  33. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    I installed Windows 8 on a 2GHz T60 with an 80GB x25 and 3GB RAM. It really boots up and resumes from hibernate quickly (~12 seconds?) but there's no other subjective difference in performance from Windows 7.
  34. Mercutio

    So I wanna rip my SACD collection...

    Yeah. It didn't. It's just on the latest firmware revision now. The guy that swapped (for a laptop hard drive and a copy of Windows) it to me didn't understand why it was so important that it hadn't been connected to the internet. It does play SACDs over HDMI. I guess that's nice. Too bad the...
  35. Mercutio

    So this is a thing

    I've always brought in my own hardware.
  36. Mercutio

    So this is a thing

    That's my work computer anyway.
  37. Mercutio

    So this is a thing

    I may pull the circuit board and see if I can find somebody who is better at soldering than I am, but I'm not sure if I'd be better off with a 27" screen or a pair of, say, 23" ones.
  38. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    I've gotten as far as an Akamai timeout. Anyone want to bet that the ISO is already on the Pirate Bay?
  39. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    It's up now.
  40. Mercutio

    So I wanna rip my SACD collection...

    Last night I managed to obtain a PS3 that HAD appropriate firmware on it. Unfortunately, the gentleman I got it from chose to plug it in and update it immediately before he sold it to me. Either that or it connected to an insecure 802.11 AP right after I plugged the stupid thing in. Either way...
  41. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Today is the big day. I've got a nice new system all set to run it. As yet it's not on Technet but I'm guessing it will be posted by noon.
  42. Mercutio

    I want to buy a new car

    They're all pretty big on smoking and doing whatever they can so they don't actually EAT anything.
  43. Mercutio

    Preparation for 8/23 laptop warranty expiration

    The things that will wind up killing your laptop at this point are probably fans going bad and/or a good old fashioned AC-plug becoming disconnected from your mainboard. If the AC plug wiggles or fans are making more noise than they used to, I'd suggest sending your laptop in to Kentucky for...
  44. Mercutio

    So this is a thing

    It is out of warranty. It keeps dropping in to sleep mode. If I unplug it, it will come back on for five or 10 minutes. From what I've read it probably has some bad caps on its main logic board, but I can't say for sure and I don't know if I care.
  45. Mercutio

    StartPins redirect

    It's my experience that if MBAM and Spybot from safe mode don't do it, Combofix won't help either.
  46. Mercutio

    So this is a thing

    And since my 27" Dell Ultrasharp just, like this very minute, died, I suspect I'll be buying one of these guys pretty soon.
  47. Mercutio

    StartPins redirect

    Does Combofix ever actually fix anything?
  48. Mercutio

    The sad state of AMD's processors

    So there's an issue with video drivers, not the CPU, right? I'm a tremendous fan of the i3-2120. Support for four threads, good speed, under $100 (on sale, at least) and they work just fine on cheap H61 motherboards. Side-by-side with an AMD 1100T x6, there's an obvious subjective difference in...
  49. Mercutio

    Google Tech Talks: The Graphing Calculator Story

    Here's the same story, but from the good people at "This American Life."
  50. Mercutio

    I want to buy a new car

    Honda Elements are rated very highly by the 23 - 28 year old stripper demographic.
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