I hate to say, “I told you so!”, but: I told you so!
Actually, I don’t hate saying it. I’m relishing every second of this glorious moment, and I’m not ashamed to admit.
Okay, I was ashamed for the few seconds it took me type the first sentence, but I got over it.
What the heck am I yammering about? Green hard drives, of course! You may recall a previous post I wrote:
Recently, Seagate came out and openly called “BS!” on their own green hard drive BS.
I suppose we should praise them for this, but it would have been better if they hadn’t let their marketing bozos direct their engineering department in the first place!
Read more…
Scottie Computers, Spare Me! green, hard drive, hdd, seagate
You’ve probably heard of ARM processors a lot lately. They are used in all kinds of devices like smartphones, tablets, routers, and so on. I’m sure you’ve also heard why they are so great: They’re powerful, and they’re extremely energy efficient!
Well, so is my Intel processor in my desktop computer, frankly. On average, it uses about 9W of power (I measured), and it’s a quad-core chip!
Well, 9W is a lot for smartphones, which have very small batteries. But still, what is the deal with these mystical ARM processors? What exactly are they, and what makes them so great?
Read more…
Scottie Gizmos, How Does it Work? ARM, CISC, processor, RISC
This article originally appeared in Issue #14 of The Dot Connector Magazine.
Cell phones: they’re everywhere. From the “Battlephones” of the olden days, technology has progressed inexorably to today’s Smartphone. Crikey, some people even sleep with their cell phones!
Much has been written about the health effects of the gigahertz electromagnetic radiation that emanates from your trusty phone. Whether it’s brain cancer, or interfering with sleep, or mental fog, everyone has heard of some study or another that cell phones are dangerous.
Well, let’s get real: When you hold a microwave-frequency transmitter up against your head, what do you think is going to happen?! Of course, your average cell phone emits signals at power levels that are thousands of times weaker than a microwave oven – and at a different frequency. But still, cell phone emissions are nonetheless microwave radiation, and that can’t be good for you.
To make matters worse, your super-intelligent, handheld-computer “smart phone” just loves to gobble up the juice from its battery. But what if you could minimize your exposure to cell phone radiation and increase your battery life?
If you must use the darn things, you may as well do it correctly, yes?
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Scottie Gizmos, How Does it Work? cell phone, health, radiation
Well, heck, everyone else is talking about it incessantly, so why not me, too?
Of course, there are much more important topics to be worried about, like the fact that the global economic and political situation seems to be destabilizing in numerous ways. But this is a techie blog, so we’ll forget about all that for now.
Since Jobs died, I have read far too many tributes about all the wonderful contributions he made to the tech world. Well, to be fair, he was more or less responsible for many shifts in the tech industry. Whether or not those shifts have actually benefited humanity as a whole, well… that’s a whole other ball of wax.
He was also, according to many reports, quite an ass at times. And let’s not forget about the infamous Reality Distortion Field (henceforth referred to as the RDF)…
Apple’s new lack of a its Reality Distortion Field is the primary reason why I believe that Jobs’ death is in fact the beginning of the end for Apple.
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Scottie Computers, Spare Me! apple, rdf, steve jobs
Hope he reads this post!
Everybody loves superglue. It bonds darn near anything to darn near anything else, darn near instantly.
There’s only one problem: it also bonds skin.
Another problem: it’s hard to remove from skin once it dries – or even before it dries.
Most people will tell you to use nail polish remover. Others will spend way too much money on official “Superglue Remover” products.
But there’s a very simple way to remove superglue that works in seconds…
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Scottie Do-It-Yourself acetone, superglue
I have to say that I simply can’t stand it any more.
I’m talking about Apple and their damned lawsuits. They are suing anyone and everyone who makes any product that even remotely resembles an iThing (gosh, I hope they don’t sue me for putting that lowercase “i” in front of the word “Thing”!).
Seriously, all computers look alike. Mostly that’s because they all use the same exact components, and they all serve the same basic function. The same is true of tablet devices and cell phones.
So how is it that Apple gets away with actually forbidding other companies from even selling their products now?
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Scottie Spare Me! apple, lawsuit, patent
©1995 United Artists Pictures
This article originally appeared in Issue #13 of The Dot Connector Magazine.
Whether it’s the “Iranian Cyber Army”, those darn “Chinese Hackers”, or just your average script kiddie, everyone is aware that there bad people out there who want to mess with your glorious internet surfing experience.
You probably have heard of things like DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, and you’ve most certainly heard about viruses, trojans, and worms. But there is one thing I’m betting you haven’t heard much about: DNS cache poisoning.
You’ll see why this is a very important type of attack to be aware of a bit later. First, I should probably cover a few basics in case you aren’t a techie nerd. Just for the record, nerds don’t wear coke bottle glasses anymore; they wear contacts. Junk food is out, and healthy eating is in. Flannel shirts? Yes. Pocket protectors? No. And contrary to popular belief, we are generally good-looking. It’s all part of Nerd 2.0.
But, I digress.
Read more…
Scottie Networking denial of service, dns, dos, hacking
Let’s say you were using Rails 2.3.x, and you made the (wise) decision to implement heavy fragment caching. Then let’s say that you updated to Rails 3.x. At that point, you probably noticed that Rails 3 does something seriously annoying with the paths where it caches fragments.
In Rails 2, doing this:
<% cache('posts/123/123456/main') do %>
Gave you a cache file that looks like this:
RAILS_ROOT/tmp/cache/views/posts/123/123456/main.cache
However, in Rails 3, the same cache code results in a cache file that looks like this:
RAILS_ROOT/tmp/cache/925/AB2/posts%2F123%2F123456%2Fmain
WTH? That’s not documented in the Rails 3 API. So what’s going on, and how do you make Rails 3′s fragment caching work like it used to instead of using those crazy hash subdirectories? Read on!
Read more…
Scottie Programming caching, rails, ruby
Until recently, I got a lot of use out of Google Translate. It worked great, it was fast, and its web page translations were good enough.
But then, something changed.
Now when I use Google Translate in Firefox to translate a certain URI, it seems to get stuck in some kind of loop and then craps out.
So I found a lovely alternative: Bing Translate!
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Scottie Computers bing, google, microsoft, translate
With the advent of Thunderbird 3, searching messages became a bit more sassy in the old bird.
There is one little problem: it is not readily apparent how one actually searches for text inside an open e-mail.
It used to be that you could just type Ctrl-F and the little “Find” bar opened at the bottom of your message pane/window. Type in some text, and all instances of that text would be highlighted in the open message.
In the latest Tbird, that doesn’t work in certain cases. In fact, searching in an open message has become downright annoying, and nobody seems to know how to make it work. Several people even filed bug reports about it.
This situation was obviously intolerable, so I finally managed to solve it!
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Scottie Computers e-mail, search, thunderbird
I hate to say, “I told you so!”, but: I told you so!
