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It's pretty much true that everything we do online results in a net loss of our privacy, but I'm not sure Microsoft can legitimately point any fingers about tracking. Google is the biggest advertising company on the planet, but the SECOND biggest is now Microsoft. I understand that it doesn't...

My workflow for dealing with discs is to use Handbrake with AnyDVD HD. I never write back to disc and I've owned my copy of AnyDVD for something like 10 years now. That system obviously works, but I can't justify telling someone to go buy a $150 program just to copy a few discs. I know DVDFab...

NUCs are fantastic little boxes. They make dual NIC models that can work as micro-servers as well as NIC/WLAN versions. Since you pretty much have to pair them with Intel or Crucial mSATA drives and they have Intel-branded guts anyway, the only potential source for vomit would be the RAM, and...

If you're tempted by a consumer desktop and have a good working knowledge of hardware, all I can say is prepare to be disappointed. I've opened up HP desktop machines that had no (ZERO) expansion slots on a MicroATX board. In 2012. It's not at all uncommon to find desktop machines that only...

I largely disagree about Java. The biggest single non-corporate use is almost certainly Minecraft, though Blackboard is also a pretty big deal for college students. I don't think Minecraft justifies the continual risk for malicious applets. As far as Linux goes, no you don't need an antivirus...

Philippine prisoners escape from prison, rebuild their homes and their communities and report back to jail.

Chrome on Windows is bundled with its own Flash libraries that get updated at the same time the browser does. It's a special case. Since Chrome updates are always background, behind the scenes things, Google can push out an update that just updates its Flash library. Chrome's installer and...

This got a laugh out of me.

As a point of order, Yahoo free mail accounts have neither POP access nor the ability to forward mail outside Yahoo without having a for-pay account.

If you have ever paid for a Yahoo Mail account, even if you don't pay any longer, a flag gets set on your account that gives you access to a bunch of things that make Yahoo webmail barely tolerable, like POP3 access, mail forwarding and the ability to set the spam folder to auto-delete. I...

"Single" drives are packed in cartons of between eight and 24 drives depending on the manufacturer, at least as far as shipping to the local vendor. The interior of the carton is custom foam of some sort so there's very little room for the drives to move around. The singles are pulled from one...

On your desktop, look in System Properties, Advanced System Settings, Advance, Startup and Recovery. Make sure that Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit is the default OS and un-tick the box for "time to display list of operating systems." Failing that, I'm going to guess there's something goofy happening...

I was googling for random crap I wanted to hand out to my students for a class tonight and I ran across some guy's repository of collected "cheat sheets" on various topics. Lots of useful things there and they might be worth a peak.

All I'm going to say is that I seem to have a statistically significant number of additional problems with WD drives vs. anything else I have ever purchased, no matter where bought them or how they were delivered to me. That is the least biased comment I can make about it. My common practice...

Apropos of almost nothing, HiSense is selling a 50", 4k TV through Walmart and Costco for $2000. Nothing to do with Ultrasharps but that's definitely a step up from Seiki on the OEM food chain.

I don't have any specific complaints about browsing under Linux, but the computers I use the most from day to day are Windows machines. The Linux machines sort of sit quietly and just behave themselves. Most of the time if I'm using one it's through a shell prompt anyway.

Have you named them yet? ;)

It's just a side gig. I kind of don't want to link it. Maybe if I actually decide to publish something. I post there under my unique internet handle rather than the one I use here and one of the things that's keeping me away is the desire to preserve that identity since I argue a lot about the...

I have a older 22", 24" and 27" Ultrasharps at my desk and I've been messing with those Asus 24" IPS displays and here's what I can say: For day-to-day work, the quality of my older Ultrasharps and the Asus monitors is subjectively very similar. They're all worlds different from crummy TN...

It's available when you want it, man.

During a workout I'm most concerned with drowning out the shit they play on the PA (the gym has a some kind of weird religious affiliation so half the time it's Jesusy Heavy Metal and the other half there's a 100% correlation to what gets played in a strip club and it's terrible either way)...

Speaking of random, I just got an out of the blue job offer to write techie how-to articles for a web site based on nothing but discussion thread participation.

I use S voice and Google Voice Search in my car quite a lot, particularly to select music and navigate. The Xbox One is supposed to support voice commands in a way I'm intrigued by. I'd very much like to be able to say "Computer, bring up MyHarto on YouTube and play the newest video" and have...

I almost hate to ask this, but does anyone have any strong opinions about bluetooth headphones? I've had BT headSETS that were pretty crummy for audio quality, but I'd like to find something I can use with my phone while I'm working out that: 1. Doesn't require a cord and works with my phone or...

For what it's worth, a guy I went to college with still maintains a 486 and contributes kernel patches to Linux 2.4. Or at least he was still doing in in 2011. He did finally give up and start compiling binaries on a Pentium 4 in 2008 or thereabouts. For all the haters all I can say is that...

Just to argue this a bit: Firefox has a different layout and javascript engine than Chrome/Safari/Opera, so one thing it absolutely is NOT is a Chrome clone. I know you've never liked or appreciated the power of Firefox's addons, but for the application that we probably all spend the single most...

How complete do you need? I have a stack of E6300s (the OLDEST C2Ds) on Intel G31PR boards with 2GB RAM and a bunch of old 250GB SATA drives that will start XP/Vista/7.

I'll probably send something like a Gigabyte G41 microATX board. I have a few brand new ones set aside for spares. I also have some Intel boards but they were purchased as refurbished and those are more valuable to me because they match my fleet systems.

Greetings sedrosken. Thank you for stopping by.

I'd donate a motherboard if anything. I have a small stack of LGA775 boards in particular for machines that I've decommissioned over the last year. But in this case my thinking is that moving the RAM has no impact on the operation of the power supply or overall electrical load, so if there were...

Here's how I break it down for my students: Firefox + Rich ability to customize, particularly for things outside what mainstream sites want you to be able to do (e.g. Ad blocking on mobile, Streaming video downloading) + Easier to secure because of Noscript/Ghostery + Uses fewer resources for...

As I suspected, the first thing I was told was "too tall." But I bought a dozen of them anyway and I'm going to fight to keep them. My students are 60ish men who refuse to wear their reading glasses. The largest monitors possible are the only ones that make any damned sense.

Your motherboard should actually have a "PC Health" category in the BIOS which will give you some idea of whether the PSU is behaving. You can also spot check it with a voltmeter. Yellow lines should be 12V and red lines should be 5V, with plus or minus 10%. A more thorough examination requires...

There's a reason most of humanity lives within 50 miles of a coastline.

Why does Taco Bell need to be open at 9AM? Don't drunken benders usually end around dawn?

Essentially a phone call is a demand for immediate attention. I'm very attentive, but at this point there are people who expect the phone to be answered instantly at all hours of the day or night. I won't answer while I'm driving for example and lately that's caused problems for me. Using...

I refuse to hand out business cards. I spent a fortune on them up to about 10 years ago, then realized that the fewer people who have my contact info the happier I am. The worst part about the "helpless"-type people is that I know I would give them five or ten cards over a couple years and...

Windows has had Internet Connection Sharing built in since Windows 98 and the ability to form ad hoc WLANs since XP. Is this doing anything extra above and beyond those things?

The correct answer is that it depends if the PC was meant to be sold with a Window 7 COA or Windows 8. You have to have a Pro version of Windows to downgrade at all, but assuming the machine has a Win 8 sticker on it, you can just do an upgrade install using the Windows 8 license number...

That's an Ideapad. It's explicitly not a Thinkpad. Not all GMs are Cadillacs.

Crucial, Kingston or Corsair for me.

Here in the US, replacement parts are probably a fairly substantial chunk of the total cost of the printer. Sounds like you got a bum unit (and it might not be the drum - the fuser could be just a touch under recommended temperature and smearing stuff just a bit). You could try to sell it and...

I'm generally willing to discount RAM as cause of problems in the first place. RAM is pretty damned reliable these days, but nothing in that laundry list tells me you've done a full hard disk diagnostic. Honestly, no, I don't think that's what's going on, but you really should use WDdiag or the...

Print online. Kodak (out of business) was king of low cost consumables and Canon is generally said to be next cheapest. HP OfficeJets are Lexmarkian in their reliability. OJ6000s are the #1 reason I'm so familiar with Brother 2270DWs.

One word review of Chromecast: Meh.

I only beat the ones that say Western Digital on them. But to be fair, they deserve it.

There's a file server in my back bedroom with 36 high capacity 7200rpm drives attached to it. It's shoved in a closet with the door closed and there's not really any moving air. The machine itself is relatively cool (4U case, giant Scythe HSFs on both CPUs), but there's no active cooling at all...

I've gotten Brother HL2270DWs for $75. They're monochrome, duplexing networked printers that support 802.11. They usually sell for $110, but they go on sale pretty regularly. They're relatively small and quiet for laser printers, so they're actually my first choice for personal printers at this...

I do believe we have an extended set of exercises for demonstrating the concepts, but some people are too dense to work with the abstraction and/or decide it's just too damned much work. As an aside, I do quite like the balance struck by Android, in that users can choose to use folders and...

Weird.