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Most of the time, the way to get rid of ads is to pay for something or root your device and use a hosts file. I use the crap out of hosts files. :D

Logitech has a Harmony remote app as well. I have no idea if works or under what circumstances, but it's out there. It might just be for their Google TV stuff.

More properly speaking, both of them derive from a classic demonstration program that was often written in BASIC (and maybe other things before that), which allowed two guns or gorillas or tanks or slingshots with birds to choose an angle and velocity in an effort to hit the other gun, gorilla...

An SAS expander would fix that problem as well.

Most of my viewing is done via XBMC. My environment is controlled enough that I can set the volume level on my receiver at a high-ish point and otherwise control volume and playback on my HTPCs. I can VNC into those machines if I need to do something that isn't terribly convenient to do with...

Most but not all of my classroom computers use Seagate drives because at the time I bought the systems I could get a limited but functional copy of Acronis TrueImage to use with the machines. By-and-large, those drives have been fine. Over the years since I've run in to jaw-dropping RMA rates...

OK actually this is the master list of awesome time lapse HD movies. I found it on io9. I actually had many of them bookmarked already because I like to just let these run sometimes.

As I said in another thread here, "My crusade will only be ended when everyone who has ever owned stock in or worked for Western Digital issues a collective apology in the form of seppuku." Yes, I really do believe that after a certain point I'm allowed to take a product's ongoing ability to...

I've not had a problem with Harmony remotes, though many home automation types absolutely despise them for some reason. I normally look for authorized refurbs on Amazon, which can be found for as little as $25 or $30 for the introductory models. The present incarnation of my entertainment...

Totally sweet time-lapse photos of the sky with original music by Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary.

I'm sure that's the case. But I found it amusing.

You would load the OS image into local RAM. It's very possible to set up a modern *nix-based OS that way.

In the ongoing quest to be as annoying as possible to our inconsiderate landlords, my students were at one time offering me ideas for vile music to play at sufficient volume. Ever heard of "Lords of Acid?"

These are discs from a company that is very well known for messing with DVD file structures. Either that or that company has bent the laws of space and time and somehow managed to actually put 78GB on something that isn't even read with a blue laser. The other somewhat amusing disc I found...

The obvious answer is a soulful white-person and acoustic instrument rendition of a traditional African American melody such as "Me So Horny" or "Straight Outta Compton."

Fast pipe plus something that will forward RARP to a listening server someplace on the public internet... it's not impossible to do now.

I'm more worried about bandwidth caps. For the most part the infrastructure to get decent speeds are available everyplace that cable is, and even DSL is technically a lot more capable than what's advertised. Of course we're going to lag more densely populated countries for data service...

I just received some really weird discs today. They have DVD logos on them rather than Blu-Ray. The file structure on the discs uses Video_TS and .vob files. It's just that there are 60+ 1GB .vobs on each disc. I can only assume that it's some kind of fairly unique mastering weirdness; one of...

Well there are a couple worrisome trends. One is the focus on multi-cell memory rather than single cell and the second is the simple fact that smaller transistors mean reduced reliability. I understand that's the only way to make stuff cheaper, but both those things seem to run counter to the...

Found on Slashdot, reposting here. I don't know if I care about long-term limitations of technology because engineers are great at improving stuff, but it seems that we're going to run into them headfirst.

A lot of malware is distributed by completely mainstream Advertising Services like Doubleclick. All it takes it for one ad with a snippet of javascript that invokes an Acrobat exploit to run once every 10,000 impressions on a big site like cnn.com for a half hour or so and a malware author is in...

You probably need to change your grub.cfg file. Here's a gentle introduction. As with a lot of Linux things, you're going to have to do a bit of reading.

That must be one of them old guy things.

Would it make you feel any better if I said "1.7:1" ratio?

The whole point of rootkits is that they penetrate everything. And most of the time they work regardless of other security measures. Neither MBAM nor Spybot do anything about real-time protection, though I've found that many people don't bother with the immunizations that actually make it so...

That's beautiful man.

If you hit the right rootkit, it doesn't matter how many layers of VM there are. Your mistake was probably browsing the web without some combination of ad blocking and javascript sandboxing. Chrome has its own system for updating its PDF reading and Flash components, so at least you were spared...

You might want to have a doctor look at that.

Aldiko (the Android reader program I use) can also take a ridiculously long time to import titles, but I have a pre-selected set of books that I load, so it's something I've only needed to do once per device I have.

I've managed to find a few cheapies. Even $5 seems excessive for a flat piece of aluminum with a few strategically placed holes in it. This is just one of those things like companies that want $3 for a molex to SATA converter. It's not a big deal for a one off but if you need to buy lots of...

If I bought a bracket like that for every drive I use, that would entirely negate the savings from buying the 2.5" drives in the first place. My biggest needs right now are for low-cost builds (~$350 desktops) and to replace ailing 5-year-old drives in my classroom machines. In either case...

Desktops. I'm not really all that keen on the idea, because I wind up having to half-ass the mounting. I actually think 2.5" drives are more reliable than 3.5" drives anyway; they're designed to be moved and I've certainly replaced fewer of them, but it bothers me quite a lot when my best...

My yellow cat alternates between staring at the shelf where I keep cat treats and catnip, and staring at my fridge. He likes the fridge so much that he's worn the paint off one edge of it from rubbing on it so much. He'll sit and watch me or my other cat eat, even if he's not particularly...

There is an Internet Traffic report that you can look at, though it's just as likely that one of your neighbors just discovered bittorrent or something.

A few things I can tell you: 1. .mobi and .epub have essentially the same format. One is used by Kindle and things that are compatible with Amazon's offerings. The other is used by almost everyone else. They both offer limited support for embedded graphics and use flow-able, resolution...

I do, but I don't have a data limit. You can set it to notify and then download just while you have 802.11.

Bluetooth = douchetacular.

I'm finding that right now it's cheaper for me to buy 2.5" 7200rpm drives rather than 3.5" models. So that's what I've been doing. I don't really like doing that because not many desktops really fit a 2.5" drive well, but works and keeps costs lower.

I'm not a big fan of birds, but they spread seeds around and help the ecosystem and crap. Plus you will also be feeding squirrels and squirrels can actually be kind of cute when they aren't chewing on your telephone lines and stuff.

5" sounds about right? It will still fit in a pocket. For as much as I use a smartphone as a phone, I'm sure it would do just fine.

It's certainly silly to equate copying bits in any form with theft, if that's the direction you're taking. The penalties for many forms of felonious assault are less severe than what RIAA and the MPAA have forced through our legal system for dealing with unauthorized copying.

Samsung has 7", 7.7", 8.9" and 10.1" 16x9 tablets. They have 1024x600 or 1280x800 resolutions.

I have a Lexar 32GB class 10 card in my Evo. I noticed that my file transfer rates over SMB more than tripled when I switched from the class 4 SanDisk I started with. It helps but I think the best transfer rates I've seen to SD are on the order of maybe 3MB/sec.

This thread was looking lonely at the bottom of the pile so the US Government is apparently ditching BB in favor of ithings and green robots.

There's really very little difference between a Nook Color (800MHz single core) and a Galaxy Tab 7.7 (1.4GHz dual core) for about 85% of stuff you can be doing on a tablet. It matters if your habits include a lot of multitasking or decoding HD video, not so much if you just browse and watch...

No. The Xoom, Galaxy Tab, Thinkpad Tablet, Asus Transformer and Toshiba Thrive all have some legitimate claim based on a tiny number of characteristics that distinguish them. The Samsung tablets are ligher and have nicer displays but crappy storage options. The Asus has the battery in the...

I don't know if it's necessary or not. I suspect that we would all continue to use the forum as a forum regardless. When we had the news site, I still chose to land on the forum page and go look and/or comment on news as something secondary to the forum. I guess it might be nice to have posts...

I have a page open on one of my PCs at home that basically says there's zero difference between any headphones that cost less than $100. Which is pretty much what we all think about computers that come from retail outlets, so I suspect there's some truth to it.

I refuse to believe that anyone who can work a web browser can't figure out ways to listen to this person's music without paying for it. Even my mom knows she can wander over to Youtube and find somebody's video playlist if she really wants to.

I suspect that's quite unlikely. Most Android systems are built from off the shelf hardware, and panel manufacturers largely think in 16x9 these days. Given the choice between 1280x1024 (290,000 pixels more than 1280x800) and 1600x900 (416,000 more pixels), I think I'd still go with the raw...