I just had another run-in with the dreaded capacitor plague. The first case was the power supply in a G5 iMac. This time it was a Samsung SyncMaster 22.5 inch Display. After two years of working well, the monitor started acting up by flickering and taking a while to turn on. Eventually, it completely stopped [...]
To go along with yesterday’s post, here are two stories that were shared with me: First, Ben Popper of Betabeat realized that he had been using the term hack incorrectly, and mostly fixed his usage in his article “Hacked to Death: A Brief History of Tech’s Most Two-Sided Term”. Second, David Goldman of CNN demonstrates [...]
I can’t take it anymore! Nearly every time I have listened to or read the news few weeks I have heard the term “hacking” abused, usually in reference to News of the World. The constant references to “The News of the World phone hacking scandal“ show that these reporters are hopelessly clueless in technical matters, [...]
For some mysterious reason, some people make external links from their website open in a new window. This is a user unfriendly feature that good websites stopped using over ten years ago. But some clueless people still think forcing a new window is a good idea. I believe they think it is a way to [...]
I’ve seen this quote a number of times recently: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is typically misattributed to Albert Einstein, but is probably from Rita Mae Brown. The quote is often true, but is misleading. Sometimes you do the same thing several times [...]
I’m still freaked out by webcams. It is nice having a camera on my computer for the occasional video-chat, but I’m still reminded of 1984. Since most notebook computers and many desktops now include webcams, it’s nice to see that some now have lens caps built in. Although, this still leaves the problem of the [...]
The internet needs an editor, but that is against the spirit of the ‘net.1 The next best thing would be a search engine that is better at eliminating spam sites from search results. Google is wonderful, but the number of spam sites seems to be overwhelming them. There are many sites that scrape contents2 from [...]
Yesterday I was talking with another grad student, and the topic of self-driving cars came up. He thinks they are a good idea, I don’t. In high school and college, I would have thought they are an interesting project that I would like to work on. I still think the research is interesting, but I [...]
One useful feature of OS X is the built in PDF handling. It is always easy to export a file as a PDF, and to do some basic editing of PDF files. A post on Mac OS X Hints today got me looking at some customizations. The hint is that creating an alias in the [...]
One of the many modern ‘conveniences’ that actually take more time than they save is voicemail. Answering machines and voicemail are occasionally useful, but more often than not, someone just leaves a rambling message with details they end up repeating when you call them back. Fortunately, Caller ID has mostly eliminated the need for voicemail: [...]