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Sure, but also definitely educational. You have to start with transitioning from a.out binaries to ELF binaries. You'll go through two or three boot loaders. You wind up changing C libraries, Windowing Toolkits, disk formats and of course kernels. if you can manage all those changes and maintain...

For a good education about what things do and how they work, go salvage a Pentium 2 or the like and try to make it run a pre-Linux 1.0 Slackware. then look at what it takes to upgrade to successively newer software.

I've put them in offices. I know they have pretty decent range, but there's not much actual 802.11ac equipment floating around to try them with. I don't care that they're refurbs since home routers are not terribly reliable in the first place. I actually figure that the ones that have been...

Some manufacturers replace the standard Power controls with their own software. You may find Windows behaves better if you remove their power saving utility. Of course, that could also kill your battery life while you're using a laptop. And yes, you may need to go poking around in your firmware...

Crashplan is $50/year and you can keep all your movies on that if you're worried about it. Your best bet for basic testing is probably the manufacturer tool: WinDFT or WD DLG or Seatools.

Look for refurbished Netgear products.

It was OSS, but the principle devs were supposedly anonymous even to each other. The chain of trust has been compromised at this point, so it really doesn't matter.

The most reliable large (3TB+) drives I have are Hitachi Deskstar models. I've had "enterprise-type" Ultrastars fail but not the Deskstars. I have a reported SMART failure on the 4TB Barracudas on a roughly quarterly basis, which doesn't make me very happy, but those drives are also in the most...

It looks to me like the coded message is that 1. The NSA made us change our code so they could decrypt it. We complied and then stopped all our work. 2. They told us not to say anything about that 3. We also know that every other OSS encryption product has been back doored 4. We think Bitlocker...

One thing worth mentioning is that 802.11ac equipment, with its premium price and early adopter tax, typically has ridiculously nice host CPUs that don't make it down to budget products. That means support for more simultaneous connections, both external (torrents, basically) and internal (lots...

You can. The main reason applications become incompatible is Firefox UX designers really hate the Add-ons bar at the bottom of the screen. They have tried to remove it at least twice, and that is the reason that fairly popular add-ons like ForecastFox do not work right now. I am very aware of...

Since I just had to do both of these things... Time to regenerate a failed 3TB drive in a 5-drive 12TB Server 2012 Software RAID5 Storage space: 3 hours 44 minutes. Time to regenerate a failed 3TB drive in a 5-drive 12TB Synology NAS: 57 hours. The Synology array was only about 22% full. The...

Short version: I am as prediabetic as it is possible to be. A1C of 6.4. This is in spite of being incredibly careful with my diet and maintaining a level of physical activity. That by itself is bad enough, since preventing that state of affairs has been my #1 goal in life for the last few years...

Did you look in to Google Drive at all? You get 15GB by default there.

Have you tried it? Does it actually do anything?

Well this is the pub so perhaps you should also pour a glass and share your woes of late.

I already eat like I'm a diabetic. Tiny meals, controlled portions, almost no sweets. I go to the gym at least three times a week even when I'm ridiculously busy. It's kind of miserable, since eating has been one of the only pleasures I consistently have. I lost a huge amount of weight and got...

IIRC there's a HUGE efficiency gain for chest-style freezers. I don't know if that applies to the bottom drawer style but that efficiency gain may be the reason for the uptick in its popularity in French door fridges. Most American kitchens in single-family homes are arranged in such a way to...

Where I grew up, I was more than once within about a mile of where a tornado touched down. Sometimes my house would be pelted with corn or bits of snow fence. One time I found a car tire in my yard after a tornado went through. A couple years after I moved away from central Illinois, the town...

Diabetes is just a very slow and very expensive death which for me would largely remove what little joy I could take in life.

It's possible to do that, but the way it's been explained to me is that this is something that usually just goes away on its own. Right now I'm looking for medical conditions for which this could be a symptom, like advanced diabetes or brain cancer. If that stuff has been ruled out then the...

Only if you trust your personal data to any number of large and largely unaccountable internet-based services. Facebook and Google apparently don't have a problem but Yahoo does, for example.

DLNA as a specification delivers MPEG1 Layer 3 Audio, which is always stereo (Not always I guess since it could be mono, but definitely not 6 channel). If Serviio is able to deliver anything else to your client and actually have it work, it's basically a coincidence.

Really all you can do is run a command that cleans up anything left over from prior to the most current Service Pack install. I've seen systems where doing that knocks 1.5GB off the total size of the folder, but for a folder that's potentially more than ten times that amount, that's just a drop...

The Ls are fucking tanks, the way the Rs used to be. On the other hand, any random tablet with an Office 365 subscription plus One Note or Evernote is probably doing anything anyone outside a technical field actually needs for their studies and I do think they're credible at this point. Also...

Hrrmm. OK here's the thing: Plex on mobile platforms is less than ideal. Because the Plex version for mobile platforms doesn't support high quality audio formats. If you're ripping BDs and preserving anything nicer than stereo MP3 or AAC, it's not being delivered through Plex (or, for that...

It's more valuable the more information you have about a person and the more specifically valuable demographics the individual provably belongs to. A mass dump of just valid credit card numbers is worth pennies on a per-name basis since banks have actually gotten really good at clamping down on...

My friend got me an appointment with a GP who only charged me for lab work. I'm waiting on an A1C but I'm not hypertensive and all my other vitals are really good. Assuming my blood work is OK, I need to go get a CT scan to show to a neurologist to rule out cancer and/or the world's worst sinus...

I'd probably look at a Thinkpad T440s as a good general-purpose option. The S-series are supposed to have nicer screens, and they're lighter than the regular T-series. The only problem the regular T-series has is the lack of a 1920x1080 screen option, but that's enough to make me not consider...

I have my friend do one once a year. She's not a GP but she checks my BP and does the usual cheeks. I haven't had an official visit with a GP since I was maybe 23.

I have sixth nerve palsy. I'm told that if I go to the neurologist, he's going to order as much medical imaging as I will pay for and do an extended test to confirm that I do or don't have any other nerve damage. The wiser thing to do is go to a GP first, but that means that I actually have to...

Nope. I sideloaded it off my phone. If you do that it'll show up in the "All Apps" screen under settings. Sideloaded apps don't show up on the home screen.

Today I saw an Opthamologist. Tomorrow I see a neurologist. Awesome.

I tried that once and found that it hosed my ability to uninstall or repair software installations on that machine.

As I was driving to work this morning, I realized that I was seeing double. Closing my right eye fixed it. I called around, hoping to use my shiny new medical insurance to get in to see a GP and found no one could see me on less than two weeks of lead time. I walked in the vision clinic at my...

Well, other than the fact that having expensive electronics in a room that's regularly at 100% humidity probably isn't the best thing for those electronics.

Thor is in Asgard. Iron Man's operation was trashed at the end of Iron Man 3. The Hulk could've smashed, but then someone would have to deal with a hulk rampage in Washington D.C. That pretty much just leaves Hawkeye, whose particular skills might not have been very helpful.

I've seen Vista machines with 90GB WinSXS folders. 25GB doesn't even sound that bad to me, but of course that's more data than either OSX or Linux uses in a complete install.

The WD TV Live would work, but it's sort of slow. Also, you don't want to leave it connected to a giant shared folder using Windows file sharing, because it will reindex stuff all the damned time. The TV Live is definitely happiest when it's connected directly to a disk drive. The thing about...

As far as I can tell from observation, Red Bull + Vodka leads to feeling no pain.

There's no DLNA client without sideloading. I got Amazon MP3 working on mine using APK Share from my phone. I don't think Twonky would be a big deal, but sideloaded apps don't get put on the home screen, which of course reduces the wife acceptance factor.

Ok actually the only places to get multichannel audio are Netflix and Amazon instant Video. Plex is entirely stereo. There is no supported access to Amazon cloud music. The music features are really pretty lacking. You have Pandora and Plex and some video services like Vevo. That's a little...

It's definitely very responsive. There's no "pushing the button and waiting to see if it does anything"-crap like on a Roku. The on-screen keyboard is an abomination, but that's given from the fact that it's an on-screen keyboard. There are a total of about a dozen FireTV-approved apps for it...

You can get Twonky for Android, and Plex media server presents as DLNA if you have one plus doing all the other cool stuff that Plex does, but Fire TV is an Android device so even if it's not in Amazon's app store you're going to have DLNA as an option somehow. I just got mine today and I'll...

Only in the most wholesome way possible.

The FireTV is sideloading-friendly and is already running XBMC. That's an especially big deal given how much of a hassle it is to get it going on random Android hardware.

There's a bluetooth receiver in my bathroom that's connected to a set of Klipsch Promedia 2.1s. I stuck the subwoofer for it in the cabinet under my vanity. The bathroom tablet is a controllable Plex client so I can actually send an audio stream to it, and it's running Google Voice and Vonage so...

Winter Soldier takes itself much more seriously than Iron Man 3 or Thor: The Dark World. Tonally, it's more like a spy thriller out of the 70s or one of the Bourne movies. The Black Widow has nearly as much screen time as Captain America and the whole thing is extremely SHIELD-centric...

Here's the thing about the Fire HDX 8.9: It's really nice. Ridiculously nice. It weighs less than some 7" tablets. It's really fast. The 2560x1600 screen is gorgeous. The speakers, not traditionally a strong point on a flat computer-like object, are loud and clear. The Amazon media-based...

FireTV. $100. Tentatively I'll say that it looks really interesting. It has the fully checklist of streaming services support. Plex is a launch partner. It DOES have a full Youtube client (this is an issue on Fire tablets and Microsoft devices). Amazon says it's going to add screen mirroring...