27 March 2018 | Computers, Gizmos, How Does it Work?, Video |
In the olden days, our gizmos had electro-mechanical power buttons. When the thing was turned off, no power was sent to it.
Nowadays, things have changed with the advent of electronically-controlled everything – including things like washing machines.
You can even look at the specs of most gizmos these days, and you’ll see two power ratings: Max power consumption, and “Sleep” power consumption.
Puters haven’t been off-off for a long time now. Smartphones are also never really off in many cases, and neither are smart TVs.
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13 February 2018 | Computers, How Does it Work? |
A friend recently asked me about what backup hard drive to buy.
He mentioned an external SSD, which made me do a double-take. External SSD?!
Well, yeah. Apparently, they’ve been around for years already, although only recently have prices become a bit more reasonable.
And, until now, I hadn’t even seen an ad for one!
An external SSD as a backup drive has the primary benefit of SPEED!
But is it worth it? And are they reliable enough for use as a backup drive that might sit on your shelf for months or even years on end?
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30 January 2018 | Computers, Networking |
Way back in 2009, I wrote this article:
How to Determine the Master Browser in a Windows Workgroup
I also released a tool called LAN Scanner that lets you see all the puters on your local network, their IP addies, MAC addresses, and which puter is the Master Browser.
That’s great… except that recently, it stopped working!
While digging into this problem, I discovered that the traditional “Network” browsing in Windows has kind of become broken since Microsoft has officially poo-pooed (and disabled) SMB v1.
What that means for you is that if you have a home network with Windows 10 machines, you’re going to want to switch to using a HomeGroup – but there’s a catch!
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15 January 2018 | Computers |
It’s been several months since Windows 10 1709 was released. Even now, not all puters out there have received the update. As with all versions of Win 10, Microsoft rolls them out slowly over time.
Sometimes, you might not get the latest version because of some incompatibility or other issue. Other times, maybe your internet sucks and it just takes a long time to download 3GB in the background!
In any case, you’ll get the update soon enough – but that doesn’t mean it will work.
The following is my collection of fixes that usually work to convince a puter to successfully install the latest flavor of Windows 10…
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7 January 2018 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Programming, Video |
By popular demand!
Meltdown and Spectre are the recently-publicized exploits that take advantage of flaws in modern processors.
These flaws are big news, but what’s the actual scoop?
It turns out that they ARE a big deal, but with a few important caveats…
Since the exploits themselves are so technically complicated, I have tried to explain them in a simplified way without sacrificing actual useful details.
That way, you can make up your own mind as to whether or not you should run for the hills!
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18 December 2017 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Video |
We hear a lot about A.I. – artificial intelligence – these days. But is it really here?
Should you be worried about Skynet and terminators and some little punk named John having to grow up and save the world?
Not quite. At least not yet, anyway…
While so-called machine learning algorithms are insanely powerful these days, they aren’t really true AI.
Then again, we keep changing out definition of AI with every advancement in technology…
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11 December 2017 | Computers |
Lots of people are using the search engine DuckDuckGo these days.
It’s a bit more “friendly” than behemoth Google, and it still gives great search results.
In fact, you may have read my earlier article Search like a pro with DuckDuckGo: Better privacy + great search results.
In that post, I recommended against using the DuckDuckGo add-on.
Well, now there’s an even bigger reason not to use it!
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4 December 2017 | Computers, Gizmos, How Does it Work?, Video |
A few weeks ago, I published a video on how to get max speed from your USB 3 gizmos, which you can find here:
Slow copy speeds with USB 3? No problem!
Right, but if what about lowly USB 2 sticks? They’re far more prevalent than USB 3 sticks, and many of them are veeeery sloooow…
There are a few things to watch out for when buying your next USB stick.
And you don’t even need to be a technical genius!
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27 November 2017 | Computers |
Firefox 57 – also known as Firefox Quantum – was released recently, bringing all the glorious new performance improvements to the world.
Well, that’s nice, especially if you pronounce “Firefox Quantum” in a Mr. Moviefone voice… BUT…
The new version of Firefox also includes a “better” tab bar, which is supposed to be better than the old one.
There’s a problem: by default, it kind of sucks.
There are also a few other (annoying) changes.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix most of these problems…
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21 November 2017 | Computers, Programming, Video |
Everyone knows that coders are weird people.
Interrupt them, and you often encounter a rather strange and “interesting” reaction. Why is that?
Well, it’s all about what happens in your brain when you’re programming something. It’s probably one of the hardest things to focus on, at least for me.
There’s a reason why programmers tend to work late/early hours: fewer distractions!
Fortunately, there are a couple of tricks I have taught myself over the years that can make everyone much happier.
Even if you aren’t a coder, you can still benefit from these tips!
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In the olden days, our gizmos had electro-mechanical power buttons. When the thing was turned off, no power was sent to it.
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