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I really don't have any strong feelings about whether or not Ukraine should control the Crimea or not. Putin is a shithead and Russia is run by criminals, but the same can really be said for the US at this point. Apparently it was just cheaper to take the land by force of arms than to just buy...

I thought I'd be done in this thread for at least a month or so but here's some speculation on Amazon's new HDMI/USB Stick-thing. Apparently it's going to do gaming now, which would be interesting from the standpoint of differentiating it from Chromecast, the Roku stick or the random Android...

Somebody took the time to build a catalog of Chromecast-capable apps since Chromecast support isn't a searchable criteria on the Play Store at the moment. Which is useful if you have a Chromecast.

I just ran in to my first OS X system with a malware problem. The machine had a memory-resident program called Genieo installed which hijacked both Home Page and Search settings for all installed browsers and seems to have been displaying ads in spite of adblock+ for Firefox, Chrome and Safari...

You probably should go ahead and move to 7 if you're going to keep running Windows.

I've installed everything from XPSP3 to 8.1 from a thumb drive without issue. I will note, however, that not every thumb drive can be made bootable and not all of them play nice with hard drive emulation settings in a BIOS/UEFI. What I thought P5 would say is that his drive letters got screwed...

There are a few third party solutions for Google Drive. Insync is a commercial application that allows someone to sync multiple Google Drive accounts on the same system.

Google Drive dropped it's prices today. Storage plans now cost 1/3rd what they did until this morning. 100GB plans are now $24/year.

A LOT of people are under the mistaken impression that Outlook Express is the same thing as Outlook, or it's what they've always used. In a business setting, sometimes it is useful to be able to send batch messages, schedule sending, check multiple accounts, configure message filters or rules...

Plenty of stuff doesn't virtualize, often because it needs access to hardware in a way that the VM can't provide. One of my customers has a line of business application that still uses (sigh) a parallel port dongle. The application vendor stopped supporting the version of the application my...

Plenty of stuff doesn't virtualize, often because it needs access to hardware in a way that the VM can't provide. One of my customers has a line of business application that still uses (sigh) a parallel port dongle. The application vendor stopped supporting the version of the application my...

... I will say: It is RIDICULOUSLY easy to make IE and Office run in WINE. Office Licenses often aren't transferable to other hardware but there are a couple customers where, in a perfect world, I'd just go in and trash their XP installs for SuSE or something.

My company still does a decent portion of its business training Windows XP and Office 2003. It's the Common Operating Environment for a big customer and they won't be done transitioning to Windows 7/Office 2010 until this August. Several other companies I deal with still have a mandate for IE6...

timwhit, the Chicago Symphony, Symphony Chorale and Children's Chorus will be performing the full score to "Return of the King" on August 7th and 8th. It's $25/ticket + another $10 to park, though the tickets are not available for sale yet. This is your first warning. :)

Not yet. It's just a few buttons that take people to web sites. I cannot imagine that anyone who knows how to mobile device would ever bother to install it.

I can either buy the code outright and publish it myself (+$99 for Apple developer tax) or I can pay $10/month and run everything through the code generator's developer account. This is just coming from a stupid customer mandate and I'm hoping we can put it online for six months and show that no...

I "made" an HTML5 app today using a code generation platform from machine.infinitemonkeys.com. It took about 10 minutes is going to cost $120/year to publish as a Google/Amazon/Apple app store item. All it does is open a web page or dial a phone numbre or pipe an address in to a device's...

I can't believe it's that much of a PITA to get decent .ISO files. Let me see what I can do for you.

SSDs do outlast traditional disks on that basis, but the memory cells that make up SSDs have a limited lifespan of their own. After a certain number of writes, the memory cells stop responding to changes and have to be marked unusable. Eventually enough cells wear out in that fashion such that...

50 Shades and the Twilight novels both have supremely vacant protagonists. The best theory I have about this is that the utterly generic non-persons at the center of the narrative can be a stand-in for the widest possible range of people in need of fantasy fulfillment. I managed to read about 70...

Llama is super-handy for making your phone do things based on its location.

WINE is an odd thing. Some software will actually run better, some worse, and some things not at all. I used Windows DVD ripping software under WINE continuously and it was utterly flawless, and somebody has a hacked-together script for installing Wine and IE for using Netflix under Linux that's...

For future reference, the connection is called an FFC (Flat Flexible cable) or FPC (flexible printed circuit) and is a quasi-standard for electronics guys. The connectors are standardized by the number of pins and spacing between them (in millimeters). Mystery solved, and in a way that does not...

For some reason I am reminded of the words of Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Harvey Kellogg in "The Road to Wellville." I will share with you his wisdom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Hoz5574VA

... and of course, 95% of the time that I want to clone a drive, it's a 250 or 320GB HDD to a 120 or 240GB SSD.

I suspect a 5400rpm notebook drive would be an even better choice than a green drive, now that I think about it. Slightly more expensive, yes, but you'll have the opportunity to add additional insulation without modding your enclosure.

I need less money and more one of these.

Think about how often your car or your phone needs fixed and how often operating systems need to be patched. Would you really trust human technology at its present level with your consciousness? "What's wrong with your hand today, robodrueding?" "I got some sand in it and now only my...

I've tried TrueImage, DriveImage XML, Clonezilla and Easus ToDo. In my case I was swapping 250GB HDDs for 120GB SSDs in HP Probooks. The Windows backup tool disk images I tried first were puking no matter what I tried.

I spent a while experimenting with a proper way to clone a drive on a few Windows 8 machines that were configured to boot off UEFI. So far, exactly none of them have worked 100% properly. The most likely error I seem to run in to is an error in the Windows startup files on the System partition...

I really don't, but I had already disabled almost all that stuff anyway.

The S4 got it's OTA update to Kit Kat last night. So far, the only difference I can find is that a half dozen of my favorite apps don't work any more. Both Justpictures and Andmade Share are hosed now. I don't notice any new functionality or performance change but hey I got a new version of Android.

The CSR has made it clear that they're going to make it right if I get the drive to someone who works for Samsung, but that depends on at least two other people doing the right thing. Having an employee spend basically an entire work day on a $150 bad drive doesn't make a lot of financial sense...

So I sent an 830 back to Samsung a couple weeks ago. Or at least I thought I did. Turns out, I didn't. Since I actually registered the drive for warranty purposes (because I bought it "late" in its life and didn't want to lose eight months of warranty based on date of manufacture), when it...

I haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet. I'm not sure if the bar part contains any points of contact or if it's just there for tension.

The guy told me that the bracket (the black piece in your photo I think - I haven't actually seen it) came off with the ribbon and now he can't find that piece. I've never seen one that works that way. I guess I'll go buy some locktite.

One of my students brought me an Inspiron 1750 this morning. He had attempted to replace its keyboard and in fact had downloaded the proper documentation and followed along. Normally, a keyboard repair is dead simple but in this case the guy broke the little keyboard ribbon cable retention...

Depending on your hardware, that may actually be incorrect. Trying to use Aero on a low-spec system (particularly some of the systems that first shipped with Vista) was a good way to eat CPU time on systems that never should have tried to run it. For the most part, I'm completely fine with...

Chrome has its own internal config, but it also interacts with the registry and with GUID entries in its own profile folders (there are at least two that I know of) and bad guys can interact with any of the above in an effort to make their mal-extensions as difficult to remove as possible. I've...

I'm not sure that this is actually surprising, but is it really a case of particular engineering solution, or just that some devices have faster CPUs and are better able to deal with incoming data? Some of the Apple device scores are a bit lower than I'd expect compared to the generation of...

Wait until you run in to something that manages to convince Windows that a particular Chrome Add-on that it was installed "by Enterprise Policy."

Why would you want to push out Firefox?

I'd say that's partially true at best, given Microsoft's reluctance to issue any amount of out of band software patches. Game-breaking bug? "We'll send out a fix second Tuesday of next month." IE10 and 11 with Tracking Protection Lists are definitely not as bad as older versions. I still don't...

I just found out that one of the people in my office still maintains a few web sites with Frontpage. By itself, no, that's not a big deal. It makes code that works and hey, at least it's not shitting Javascript all over everything. But thinking of a straightforward replacement, the only thing...

GetMacApps.com requires a little more work than using Ninite, but it's the same basic idea, only more OSX-y.

Consistently, the biggest problem I have found with OpenOffice is something less than 100% compatibility for complex Excel stuff. Granted that I can (and do) make things in Word that don't work right either, but it's enough of a headache that I usually don't bring it up unless someone asks me...

I think this is a sign you've been staring at price lists too long. ;)

Rackmount hardware is usually really loud. This may not be a factor, but if you're buying this hardware for a single user and that equipment isn't going in your datacenter, that's something you might want to consider.

Can any VPN link stay up? Can you run an SSH tunnel between those two boxes, for example?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B16Bo47KS2g Yes, that is going to tie in to the Avengers movies. With Vin Diesel as a talking tree and the redheaded babe from Doctor Who as the bald, blue-skinned big bad. Over the weekend I watched a movie called "Europa Project", primarily because it was...