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How I know I live in Derpistan: I drove by a restaurant today with a sign up that said "Never Forget 9-11-12" after seeing several that said some variation of the normal sort of 9/11 memorial. I really didn't get it until, on the way home from work, there was a brief mention on NPR that the...

My Norco 24 bay chassis use 12 5V molex connectors. My big boxes have splitters no matter how big the PSU is.

I've noticed that brand name desktop systems have dropped precipitously in terms of overall build quality, particularly with motherboards and power supplies. This seems to be true even for business product lines (Thinkcenter, Optiplex) let alone vomit boxes.

In an industrial setting, a little electrical tape would probably go a long way toward keeping the connections covered.

I've never had a problem with a contact failing on a modular PSU failing. In fact, I've never had a super-premium PSU of any sort fail. Amazingly enough, when I buy a $100+ PSU, it's probably going to last long enough that the connectors get outmoded before the power supply craps out. That...

Happy birthday to you Mark. Rather than a hawk on my balcony, this morning I had a raccoon on my balcony. He was just hanging out, being a raccoon, and I'm not sure how or why he got up there in the first place, but I keep a dish of cat food and some water out there, which I suspect is what...

Avast, even with all its shields running, plus all the extra crap it does (webrep, software update checker et al) is a lighter-weight product than MSE, which is what I've been saying for about a year now.

There's nothing wrong with Windows 8. It has some interface weirdness that Classic Start largely fixes but on the whole it's not any bigger deal than the random shifting between default GUIs in your random Linux distro of choice.

I'm just glad that Technet provided an entirely different set of product keys for it; they only gave me 15 activations of Windows 8 on my sub (compared to 30 for any Windows 7 SKU) and I legitimately burned through all of them except the one that resides on my personal laptop with actual test...

The thing I can say along those lines is that it's very typical for new motherboards and video cards to run fans at full speed until OS installation is completed and drivers have been loaded. There could have been a power management feature or something you couldn't directly interact with that...

Kind of. It's a remote view application, but given the choice between having a remote interface using somebody's special tool (pretty sure it's just a VNC implementation anyway) and having a full blown private network that can support anything you damned well please... I'll take the latter.

Last I heard PCAnywhere was security risk central.

I've tried to do pilot setups of Forticlient a few times but something-or-other always pulls me away from it. I know Forticlient has had a free AV option for at least four or five years now. Last time I tried to configure it at a client site, the system where I installed it was hosed in less...

Good thing Intel is out of the motherboard business. We wouldn't want any uniformly high quality suppliers cluttering up the place!

I primarily use Seasonic and Corsair power supplies. My big file server has a PCP&C 1kW power supply in it, but that has more to do with the fact that I had that power supply sitting around than because I had a specific intention to use it. I also buy a lot of Antec Earthwatts and Corsair Bulder...

1. Make a Hamachi account on the web. 2. Create a Private Network for your purposes. 3. Deploy Hamachi on relevant computers. 4. Go in to Services.msc to configure the service (LogMeIn Hamachi) to restart every time it stops. 5. Use the Hamachi web interface to make sure every computer is...

I promise that was not the case for my Z8NC, Bozo.

I'm shocked that Asus went so far as to actually issue an RMA number, Tannin. I've never gotten so much as a single response from them at any point in the last 15 years. My assumption when I deal with Asus is that the boards have absolutely zero support. Oh, and my other favorite hilarious...

This might be helpful if you're doing this just to get something usable in Word.

People who type things in plaintext and want to print them out? Notepad is one of those things that's ridiculously hard to remove from a functioning Windows computer since it's something that the system file checker will put back if the binary in your Windows directory is different from the...

This is fascinating and actually kind of apropos: Why does notepad.exe need to connect to the internet?

What I'm seeing at this point is very little interest in actual computer classes that I need to TEACH but instead a great deal of interest in projects that happen to involve a computer. People for the most part have just given up on the idea that they should know how to work a computer because...

I have a two hour meeting scheduled this morning wherein I get to explain to managers at a fairly large company that the IT project they're trying to bid out is in fact 100% part of Windows and has been since 1993. yay

I'm fairly certain Microsoft will be picking up Blackberry, too. And all of that is to get it back to a level of credibility it never should have lost in the smartphone marketplace. Based on my limited interactions with current Windows Mobile products, they're a better choice for "simple"...

BeyondPod has native support for playback speed control but Presto might be what you're looking for.

Last time I moved, the box that had all my actually-valuable comic books and my DSLR both magically did not make it to my new place. I can only hope the mover who took them is enjoying what he got. I have shit-tons of moving people karma though. I joke about it how often I help other people...

It's a Gigabyte Z77n-WIFI. It has a pretty serious heat sink on the north bridge. I'm going to try the PicoPSU route next and see what that gets me before I start cutting in to the case to add more fans.

The stock fan is in place. The RAM is 1.5V Kingston something-or-other. One 8GB module.The machine is completely fine without the discrete GPU. In Q3A, at least. It's the graphics card. I don't really want to cut out the side of the panel to add a 120mm fan to push air out, but that's the only...

The stock fan is in place. The RAM is 1.5V Kingston something-or-other. One 8GB module.The machine is completely fine without the discrete GPU. In Q3A, at least. It's the graphics card. I don't really want to cut out the side of the panel to add a 120mm fan to push air out, but that's the only...

I'm trying to build a mid-range-ish living room game system because of reasons. I modded a USB hub and notebook DVD drive in to the 5.25" bay for extra-easy gamepad and flash drive plug-ins. It's kind of ugly but it's a nice feel for something that's meant to be console-like. I have a Cooler...

That's probably a perfect use for it, since they're big files that don't change very often. I put it to work syncing web sites and home directories and for the most part I can say that it's fast and efficient at least for small projects.

Nothing at all to do with gaming: I was explaining the Humble Bundle to a couple people today in the context of a unique internet-based distribution system for "stuff" like games and books. I brought it up and right now they're offering recordings of comedians. And some of them are pretty...

Speaking of almost-babysitters... Ladyfriend wants me to go out to drunken college parties this weekend. I haven't actually said no yet but since I'm technically old enough to be the father of college aged human beings it's weird to even contemplate.

Hope you have an understanding babysitter for the evening. ;)

Is anyone using BTSync, perhaps as an alternative to rsync for replicating a directory structure across the Internet? I was able to copy around 45GB of .jpgs from my apartment to a file server in my office overnight, which as a proof of concept suggests that that it would work very well as an...

I had a full height PCIe SAS expander on a 16x right-angle card in my FreeNAS box. It worked fine. No, that's not the same thing as a high end graphics card but to the best of my knowledge PCIe is remarkably un-fussy about such things.

There's quite a lot of "moving shit around just to move it around" in Server 2012, but some tasks are definitely streamlined for new releases vs. old, like setting up VDI, sometihng that was absolutely horrific on Server 2008.

Dubstep is not something I'd choose to listen to but it's not rap and it doesn't rely on recycling recognizable chunks of work by other musicians, so it's already a big step up from certain other genres. Anyway, if I believe the retail box for this Asrock N68C-GS FX, it has special powers for...

I'm not sure how offended to be about this. Yes, it's stupid. Frankly, I don't know why .NET assemblies aren't a mandatory part of the OS install in the first place, especially since out-of-order installations can seriously hose them. But on the other hand, given that a lot of Windows...

Overall I still think Avast is the best free option. Newer versions insist on themselves more than old ones did; "Hey, look at me! I'm doing stuff for you! And I'm free! But you can buy me!" And I appreciate some of the not-strictly-AV functionality even if I don't use it. I normally disable...

Stand alone sound cards are getting a bit hard to come by but I think Via Envy 24DT based hardware is a step up from Realtek. Then again, a USB DAC might be a better long term investment.

Well it's not like I've been keeping a detailed log, but I definitely have to clean up machines that had up to date MSE on a fairly regular basis, and the couple customer sites where it's still in use are also customer sites where I still have to deal with malware-related issues that I don't see...

That doesn't align with any way that I've heard of audio hardware breaking, but I suspect that it is a hardware issue, particularly since the problem can be addressed by manually fixing the volume on the speakers. The cheapest fix is almost certainly to purchase a different sound card.

Absolutely not. MSE is abysmal at actually detecting much of anything. It's not worth the CPU cycles to run it. I'll put it on a little old lady's computer so that she can have some peace of mind but it doesn't belong on any machine that actually needs security software.

I kind of want to know more about the processes involved and how they would fit in to current methods of energy production.

The following thoughts have occurred to me: 1. Why do we CARE about who is running the show? Microsoft has never been a company that's near and dear to anyone's heart. If it takes a tumble because of shitty management, it was well-deserved. 2. The things that Microsoft does right are largely...

Maybe they'll let an accountant take the reins so Microsoft can REALLY soar!

Lay's Chicken and Waffles flavor potato chips are quite possibly the perfect distillation of junk food. The platonic ideal of a chip: Salty, crunchy, maple-sweet. I do not know if other places have these things but if you are a person who has been known to enjoy the mighty potato in all its...

Conversely, the Note 2 has an enormous screen, but because of different expectations of its form factor, it also has an even more enormous battery.

I can ask a park ranger that very question. She knows many things about a wide variety of scat. Scats? Whichever.