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... and in the latest "You've GOT to be kidding me", Windows 8 has to be fully upgraded to 8.1 before an 8.1 system image can be restored. And if the system was booted on UEFI, the recovery disk has to be in UEFI mode. And if the system cannot be configured to boot USB drive in UEFI mode, hope...

Disk clones often fail if more than a certain percentage of the drive is in use. I frequently find that it's necessary to pull user data off a drive prior to cloning. That's something that is theoretically scriptable, but can still take a stupid-long time. The magic number for cloning success...

It's still going to happen. HDDs will move to a near-line archival storage option, but Seagate and WD will do everything in their power to extract every last dollar of consumer demand for traditional magnetic disks before that happens. Tape is still the only viable option for real backup though.

Dammit. I bought eight $180 4TB Hitachi drives to use for backups just four weeks ago. I would've jumped on these in a heartbeat.

Did you not get sufficiently buff and hairy from the last course of stereo ids?

Ghostery helps a lot with that stuff.

Just saw the half-season cliffhanger on Agents of SHIELD, and something I thought might be true for a while was confirmed for the comic book nerds. Sky's dad is given a name: Cal. Which is probably short for Calvin Zabo. Further confirmation came when he hummed a song called "Daisy" for his...

https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3

The grab bag works. Do not knock the grab bag. It also scales very well to the hardware capabilities of the client. It's relatively lightweight overall, but components can be omitted for older or limited-use systems, whereas integrated security products are more or less designed for hardware...

For comparison, I was probably 200lbs. when I was 12 and a few years ago I was wearing pants with a 56" waist. I need to get more serious about weight training. For some reason it's a lot easier for me to find the motivation to spend 75 minutes on an elliptical than 20 minutes with a dumbbell.

In my system images and classroom PCs, I've also gone ahead and impregnated the Default User account with properly configured Adblock Plus settings for Firefox and Chrome. If those browsers are installed (and on a machine I'm responsible for, they are), stuff is configured beforehand for...

You can search for "abp subs." On first install, Adblock Plus asks if you want the Social Blocking and Malware Domains lists, but many people don't scroll down far enough to see that and just close that tab. The full list I use is Easylist, Adblock Warning Removal (for sites that bitch at you...

182lbs. today. Not bad.

There are 3rd party controllers that work pretty well with the FireTV/Nexus Player. The one I have was made by Nyko and I think I pad $18 for it (also: gaming on FireTV kinda sucks and there aren't enough games unless you really needed another platform on which to play GTA:Vice City). Also...

Science says you'd need a couple football field lengths of speaker wire before there's distortion significant enough to measure due to attenuation. Just run long cables and be happy.

On my not-stick FireTV, I actually use XBMC as an external player rather than playing videos in Plex. I lose the ability to resume if I stop watching, but XBMC has full support for multichannel audio and thus can handle native playback of more video files without transcoding. IIRC I had to get...

AVG is heavyweight to approximately the same degree as an aircraft carrier's anchor and its default behavior to do a daily virus scan, most likely as part of system startup (i.e. "Please let us make the first 45 minutes you spend on your computer today the worst experience possible."), does not...

One suspects those entities license things in a different fashion. My cats have an daily event called Cheese Time that happens when I come home from work or around 6PM if I didn't go anywhere. They all know when 6PM is, and even if they don't all run to the kitchen, they at least quit hiding...

Cookies aren't intrinsically bad and insofar as there might be any real concerns that come from them, it's related to privacy much moreso than security. There's really nothing IN a normal cookie to cause a problem and frankly if they're doing something weird with data from third party sites...

RAM soldered to the motherboard?

An almost word for word re-enactment of what happens every time my boss wants me to do something on her latop:

I'm not suggesting anything elaborate, but by all indications sed's family isn't exactly filled with technophiles with high awareness of his interests. A little encouragement could go a long way. Another thought, if physical parts might be seen by some as detrimental, might be a udemy course or...

Seems we have at least one scare a year.

Some of my students do TV/Appliance repair. Most of them have a pretty negative impression of Samsung as far as customer service, after-sale and repair-ability. Apparently it's practically impossible to get Samsung to honor the warranty on flat panel TVs that aren't still available in stores...

It's pretty nice for a TV stick. The remote is smaller and the UI isn't quite as responsive as the big-boy FireTV. It's also missing the voice search function, but the experience is otherwise very similar. Mine is probably going to wind up being someone's Xmas present, especially since I should...

Spend another $100 on an SSD and you'll have a machine that's essentially indistinguishable from a brand new system. Speaking of value: I can't believe that, now that we have sub-$100 240GB SSDs, none of them are making their way into modest consumer hardware. A trip to the usual retail...

I usually have at least 100 on my main desktop. 107, at this very moment.

I have a small claim judgment for $300, basically the MSRP of that drive when it was new. I'm still trying to figure out how to collect on it.

I believe the two logins are for Origin and Bioware. I've been looking for something to run on my new PC, just to see what it can do. It looks like Witcher 3 is the most graphically-intensive title available on GoG.com. Has anyone played those games?

The thing that seems to do more to hose my browser RAM utilization is tumblr. Certain tumblr layouts absolutely annihilate all available RAM. Some of my friends use tumblr for one reason or other and I believe it's entirely the reason I've had to switch to Palemoon or Waterfox. I did have some...

You could also buy a drive from a company that doesn't require a court order to get a drive replaced when they fuck up your RMA.

This should make Coug happy:

Crucial is usually pretty good stuff but the machine BSODs with astonishing regularity if I have one particular DIMM installed. It's a little like getting the paint scratched on your brand new car. It's also extremely quiet, though I haven't found any reason to make the video card do anything...

Not yet. Next week. It's depressing. New PC is definitely insane in most respects but one of the DIMMs I was shipped seems to be bad. Amazon wants the whole kit back and Crucial says turnaround on the RMA is three weeks. Goddammitsomuch.

The Lego movie was charming but most of the good stuff was in bit moments. Lego Batman was for sure the best part.

meh.com has a refurb 28" Samsung 4k monitor today for $330.

Acer/Gateway/Emachines notebooks are INCREDIBLY poorly constructed. Not just cheap but actively bad design. The screen will break because there will be some kind of minute tap to the edge of the screen (like shifting off the thigh to the wooden arm of a chair) or the center of the cover side and...

I think those people are probably lying. I've also seen fake batteries with markings close enough to OEM that I probably wouldn't be able to tell if I didn't have several examples of the real thing at hand. I went back and looked and the last good clone I got came from this Amazon seller, but...

The aggravating thing about the teaser is how much of it is blank or static images. That worked for Phantom Menace, but at this point fan-made Star Wars productions can be amazing and other than the ships, there wasn't a lot going on to show me this is the real deal. I'd like to see some more...

Not that this will make you feel any better, but my father's active service in the US Navy ended because he threw his back out during to a particularly vigorous attempt to to void himself after a very long period of constipation. This is not something he will ever live down. At any rate, back...

Since an awful lot of people don't want to buy a $100 battery for a three year old laptop, I've experimented with non-OEM replacement batteries for Lenovos many times over the years and been burned probably 66% of the time. I can also say that efforts to buy a "good" clone battery by dealing...

Just go ahead and buy the replacement LCD panel now. Your mom will break it soon enough.

Screen mirroring is pretty hard on battery life on everything I've seen that can do screen mirroring, including Airplay. You normally CAN'T turn off the device's screen during mirroring. Some apps such as Plex and Youtube do allow for screencasting, which sends output to a screen and normally...

Also, the failed drives? The one that I can tell is FAILED is a WD Red, the only one I have. The one with status "lost communication" is a Seagate. I'll pull it and it'll probably pass all of Seagate's diagnostics, but I'll RMA it anyway.

I had my first two-drive failure in a Storage Space last night. My data is in arrays of six 3TB disk stripes with one extra drive allocated as a hot spare. I initiated a rebuild after one drive died and a second drive dropped out of the array during that process. My data still appears to be...

I think because it looks cool and there will be people who buy it on that basis? I don't understand the point either. The images being viewed are fundamentally rectangular. All the curve will do is distort the rectangle.

I haven't used any of the 6TB units yet, but yes, you can use "NAS" drives for whatever you want. They're just drives, purportedly with firmware optimization that make them better for arrays. Personally I think NAS drives are just a bullshit reason to get people to pay extra money to get fully...

I'm more disgusted with the devaluation of free will that leads people to purchase Apple, Acer and HP consumer laptops than anything that might've been on the keyboard. I have bleach wipes and Purelle but some laptops are just born in the crotch-stink of evil.

Walmart is going to have the 50" Vizio 4k for $700 on Friday. Even though I've been a few places that have had the 4k Vizios, all of them had the Samsung 4ks on display and none of the Vizios were turned on, making it very difficult to compare them.

A Soft Murmur is a really nifty white noise generator. There's also an Android version.