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Spybot Anti-Beacon kills the Telemetry crap. GWX Control Panel does a good job killing the upgrade offers.

I knew the person I bought the phone from. They're not a sophisticated phone user. I encrypted then erased it, which is certainly enough to kill anything that might've been left over from her use. Why was it $44? Because that's what I had in my pocket.

Every other Star Trek movie is good. I feel like Star Trek needs to be on TV and not in movie theaters, but that cast is so high-wattage that it's never going to happen. The only way that Star Trek movies become events is that they reunite a cast we learned to love from seven seasons of a TV...

I bought an LG Volt 2 (Boost/CDMA) for a friend's birthday. It was $44 as a second-hand phone but honestly it's not bad at all. It's constructed in the same fashion as my LG G4, has the same tap-on for the screen and can be easily repaired. I'm hoping it gets Android M soon because the only real...

Games that have intense simulation components but no physics engine benefit from more cycles and/or more threads. Dwarf Fortress or a contemporary Civilization or SimCity game, maybe?

Yes. Cortana just "enhances" your Searches with results from the internet. It can also interact with your calendar and Email and some data on mobile devices if you have Cortana installed on them. Nothing it does is terribly useful or interesting and its mind-reading is so frequently wrong that...

The corruption is just a lot more transparent this election cycle. There's no doubt in my mind that these leaks happen one some level every presidential election, it's just that this time the public gets to bear witness to it. At the end of the day, I'm still going to vote for the people who...

My permanent houseguest is a full-blown alcoholic. She drinks a fifth (the middle size bottle?) a day and can do that without being visibly impaired. It's pretty sad.

Cortana is the internet-assisted search service in Windows 10. It annoys me by frequently not doing things I'd want it to do, so I always just turn it off.

They're removing end user control for some group policies. They may yet be exposed to domain members and managed systems.

Stranger Things somehow manages to blend ET and Stephen King's IT into something that borders on nostalgia porn for Gen-X sorts, which is the overwhelming majority of folks on this site. It gets slow in places but I liked it and find that depiction of childhood and school life in the 80s very...

I made 36 VMs and activated them just so I have them. Why not? I can use them for virtual desktops or whatever else. I might do 36 more today (I have LOT of extra technet keys). I don't have any hope that they'll survive being reactivated on different hardware, but I could see keeping a few...

I have a tool to zip up the drivers from a current Windows installation, but I haven't needed such a thing since the days of XP.

The story is an excuse for the visuals and set-pieces. Characters and concepts are introduced and discarded very quickly. The latter Matrix movies have the same problem. Jupiter Ascending probably needed better editing and script consultation to be made interesting, but man is it cool to look...

So there's no attempt to ever load an OS? Can you see a BIOS status code for where it's sticking in the boot sequence?

I bent a few pins on an LGA1366 board some time ago, but I was aware that I did it, saw the impacted pins and was able to bend them back. This sounds like a scam to me as well.

I've run in to something similar with Intel server boards. The system didn't hang exactly. It would just take about 20 minutes to boot SATA3 drives on a SATA1 contorller interface and then an extra-long boot process after that, suggesting a dramatically reduced data transfer rate. I wound up...

How was the film festival? I've been meaning to go but every year I forget about it until it is already over. I don't mind the heat or humidity. It just doesn't bother me any more.

It's in Settings -> Update and Security. At the bottom of that window will be an option to to Go back to Windows 7/8.

You can still buy Cliips. They're out there to be had. They just don't do everything I want a player to do. Bluetooth support for wireless headphones and an OS that will talk to Pandora/Spotify/Play Music/Doubletwist would be a major improvement.

I'm thinking of people with kids and people who work out, especially out of doors. When I go for sufficiently long walks, I carry a small - let's not say purse but satchel - that has a waterproof interior just in case it rains. It seems like a useful feature to me.

That's a setting in the DUN properties for your VPN client to use the default gateway on your remote network, but your work probably doesn't want you accessing local resources on work time or the security headache of policing your LAN for issues.

SLI has never made much sense to me. For ever game where it's godly, there's been some other one where it doesn't work or they actually tell you to shut it off because it causes problems. I understand if you live your life in nothing but AAA-rated FPSes but one big card makes a lot more sense...

Each VM I make seems to need a little over 10GB actual disk space and 2GB RAM. I guess I should've jumped on one of those 128GB Xeon rigs SD bought a few months ago.

... and in one of those things I wish I had know months ago, it turns out that yes, Windows 10 absolute WILL activate almost anything. I set up a VM and activated a license key on the bottom of a scrapped Netbook. It activated. It also activates off ANCIENT and long-since used up Technet keys...

Saw Ghostbusters. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's about a C+. Liked: Kate McKinnon's character, Chris Hemsworth. Most-ish of the cameos from the original cast. Did not like: Melissa McCarthy, the updated theme, the constant snark reminding people that the internet doesn't like...

The soundtrack is interesting. Very Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard. While I was looking at the game on GoG, I also noticed that Dragon Age: Origins is available DRM free on GoG for $8. I bought it again on general principle; my disc copy had EA DRM on it

Your OS install, Program Files and Users folders go in a subdirectory called Windows.Old. When you revert your OS, unless you deleted that folder, you get your previous Windows installation back.

You can always do it and back right out. That combination will have a permanent Windows 10 license. It will always re-activate if you want to go back to it. I've gone ahead and applied Windows 10 licenses to almost every machine I have, even my ridiculous file server. There's just no reason not...

Yea

Ebay doesn't seem to have a distinct listing for the item or wording that suggests it's anything other than a disc in retail packaging.

That's a particularly interesting question since I do appear to have Cloud Drive Unlimited (not just Unlimited Photos). I don't remember paying for it but it looks like I'm cool until at least next February.

That Offline Windows Update installer I have is a freaking godsend for things like that. But it's a one-time deal for you, not something you see every week. You can remember that next time you feel the need to count your blessings.

Hrm. I misread the cost for Glacier storage. I thought there was another decimal place. Even ignoring my vast collection of media files, I'd be looking at about $1000/year to keep things my personal data there. Suddenly running buying an extra Crashplan Pro subscription doesn't seem so bad.

No one is making a 4" Android device with large uSDXC and water resistance. I see a market for that device as a media player, either as an entry-level kid-safe device or an easy-to-use music player, especially for exercise use. I love the SanDisk Clip+ to death, but looking at what people will...

I'd be interested in seeing what the memory footprint on Arq is like. Crashplan is a pig in that respect.

I have tapes, at least until the drive dies. I shuffle a box with a relatively complete archive back and forth between my place and my parents'. Important stuff is replicated in several places. The most important data to me is my email, which is thankfully also one of the easiest things to manage.

Kodi has super-easy 10' navigation and it's my preferred interface for media, but core plugins like Youtube keep breaking and the name brands in streaming services don't work with it unless you're on Android and can use it as a launcher for your normal Android app. Windows also doesn't have a...

The holy grail is a generic Android interface that actually works for an STB. Yes, I could miracast a tablet on to my TV, but that will annihilate the battery. Plus Miracast isn't perfect mirroring and only streams audio as stereo. A trackpad or trackball might work but in my experience, some of...

OK, Matricom Q2 mini-review, executive summary: This thing is a pain in my ass. It's responsive enough and it is capable of decoding 30fps 4k content, but I can't stand it for what might be the dumbest reason of all time: I can't figure out for the life of me where the cursor is. The launcher...

I'll be interested to hear what battery life is like with that 4k panel.

At least your surname lends itself to availability. Shoulda bought mine in 1994 when I first thought of it.

I ran in to that as well. Sometimes it works if Ad blocking is off. I guess some of the site assets are on some CDN that's primarily used for ads? I've shrugged and used it in IE or on my tablet.

Everyone else I know who has gotten married did a justice of the peace thing or something distinctly different from a christian wedding, like a Pagan Handfasting. An actual church wedding is new to me. Free booze at a reception is a lot less appealing if you're not a drinker. I'm guessing the...

The steel mill where most of my students work uses Surecall hardware. They originally tried just getting Verizon boosters but enough people in the plant have other carriers that they had to move to something multiplatform.

Amazon has Fire Sticks for $25, FireTVs for $70 and Matricom Q2s (same basic hardware as a FireTV but with AndroidTV instead) for $75 today.

Other than some mild annoyance at how I have to configure file sources, the differences between Kodi on a FireTV or a Shield and x86 are pretty damned minimal as far as I can tell. I'll have to look and see if the Music library is rendered properly or not, since I never look at things that any...

I like the guys who make HackMaster, which was originally a joke from a comic book but morphed into a fully-formed update to 1st edition AD&D rules. The best part is that they tracked down a bunch of the original TSR artists to create new art for their products. I've never played a table top RPG...

With any luck, this will mean that AVG will stop being a thing, because it is awful and needs to stop existing.

I can't think of a way to turn a pi on. Maybe you could bash together an IR receiver or something? I think I mentioned earlier in this thread that it's possible to add MySQL as a backend to Kodi, which might help with maintaining a config between clients.