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I read the hell out of the Amber books when I was about 11. I read more science fiction and urban fantasy rather than high fantasy, mostly because a lot of series (e.g. the Shanarra series) are really just an excuse to see how much Tolkein they can steal without being called on it. I also had a...

You're not a Gamestop customer in the first place. The people who are buying and selling used games are for the most part young people for whom a $40 expenditure represents a significant chunk of income rather than the weekly sum of the value of their workplace bathroom breaks. Don't the...

I don't think even for a second that it will fail in the marketplace. It looks like MS has negotiated a pretty killer set of exclusives. S*ny is still hamstrung by its entertainment division and its need to prevent all manner of non-approved media access, so a lot of the cool stuff the Xbox can...

A couple of you hold him down. I'll be right back with the bag of Micropolis hard drives.

I gave the Belgariad and Mallorean books to Nitsirk a few years ago as a birthday present. She loved them. Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, Thorn" books are excellent. The first in the series is called The Dragonbone Chair. I don't see Raymond Feist on this list either. His "Empire" books are...

The obnoxious thing about Netbooks was the MS-imposed limitation on screen resolution, RAM and CPU speed. Yes, they'll run real Windows, but only at about the same speed as a 10-year-old Pentium 4, with at most 2GB RAM and with no more than 768 vertical pixels. Chromebooks don't run Windows and...

I fix way too many broken ones. Especially screens. And I have to say Acer/Gateway/eMachines stuff is generally about as sturdy as a wet tissue. And this is Coug we're talking about. Also, Acer is really awesome for magical mystery hardware. Give them a model and serial number and the best...

The only issue I'd like to raise is the possibility of finding a Samsung, Asus or HP rather than an Acer device, solely because I hate the idea of giving those bastards money. Regardless, I think an Android/Linux machine is probably a great idea. I want so much to tell my students to Just Give...

Xbox One. Pretty much the same hardware as a PS4 only with more "online" and "motion" and "TV Integration." I don't see anything anywhere that says it can handle either 4k video or 3D TVs - gaming being one of the few things that might make a 3D TV kinda neat. They run something Windows 8-ish...

I really don't envy people who only own consumer-class laptops with room for a single drive. Yes, you CAN have more than 1TB of space local to your computer, but to do that you have to give up all hope or pretense of performance.

Are you looking at value brands at all? I bought Vizio 60" TVs for a couple of my classrooms and I've been really happy with them.

This fucker was going contemplating a Hiro-snack this morning. There was hawk-poop on my TV and my little yellow buddy was cowering under the couch. I didn't even think he FIT under the couch. Needless to say I closed my screen door. No zoom on that. I was about 18" away when I took that...

DOSbox Turbo really does work on Android. I copied over a few games from my retro-gaming machine and I've found them to be amazingly playable on my phone with a BT keyboard. Apparently it's possible to get Windows 95 working on DOSbox. That might be an interesting project.

Here is what will happen: 1. Adobe will release their cloud thing. 2. Two days later, one of the many, MANY pirate groups will have disassembled all the online components and removed them. There will be a moderately annoying install process, but 99% of the functionality of the Cloud Thing will...

I was in the room with the people who were being gifted. They did not receive them immediately.

Use a native SATA port?

Mildly not safe for work because of words, but wholly apropos and very, very funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa2umu1vILI

Monoprice.com or Amazon.

I have no idea. Apparently the gift purchases aren't processed until the next day at the earliest. On Amazon, I can buy an eGift or send a gift card and everything about the transactions occurs in real time. Givers even get feedback when the recipient acknowledges the gift, which for example is...

Absolutely all of my feedback-less gift transactions went through on itunes. For future reference, if you buy a gift app using iOS itunes or the App store and the window turns completely black and the app freezes, that is the ithing telling you "Yes, I made a successful purchase that Apple will...

I really hate the Surface's on screen keyboard. I love having real shift and alt and all the keyboard shortcuts, but it needs to offer a drag-style keyboard in the worst way. I'm probably three times faster at text input on my phone and that's just sad.

Hiro Protagonist, who thinks he is a lion.

You can do it using a combination of the Windows Automated Install Toolkit, a program called RT7Lite and driver packs from driverpacks.net.

Your configured DNS server might be dying under load. You could look into that with a tool like Namebench. Or you could just manually assign your DNS servers to be 8.8.8.8 or 4.2.2.2 and see if your stuff magically speeds up. You can also check the Internet Traffic Report to see if there's some...

A LOT of general purpose computing these days is exceptionally complex because we're in essence running miniature operating systems that sit on top of operating systems in the form of web browsers. Shit, Chrome has its own natural language speech processor now. Web browsers have an AI/Expert...

As I recall, post-SP1 is around 90. Pre-SP1 might be 140. I create new install media every few months with updated driver packs and integrated updates. I have to install from an 8GB thumb drive, but it's still worth doing just to be able to shut a newly-deployed machine off instead of letting...

There's no reason to panic. You check the update history, find the one or two things that failed and then search out what retarded thing failed. 90% of the time there's a 2-minute auto-fix from Microsoft that makes it work and the rest of the time you have to edit something in the registry by...

I just replaced the whole LCD. It was a PITA, though I think doing the headphone jack and related assembly was actually worse, which is a big part of why I just bought a new phone when my old one started messing up. Doing phone/tablet stuff is mostly just a matter of patience and record keeping...

$70 for a screen assembly and probably 90 minutes of your time the first time you take one apart, if my iphone experiences even remotely have any bearing.

This $85 Jynxbox is an Android appliance with XBMC, Play Store support, built-in Ethernet and 802.11 and support for USB ATSC tuners. It reportedly works with optional XBMC components like the Fusion repository and comes with an air mouse for remote control. That's probably pretty close to an...

I'm 10 miles from an outlet mall with J Crew, LL Bean, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and about a dozen other clothiers. My reaction to almost all of that stuff when I walk in to those places is "These are not what I want to wear." LL Bean stuff is at least well made. I can't comment on J Crew...

There's an outlet mall not too far from where I live. J Crew definitely tries to frame itself as more upscale but they're both sort of "preppy" brands. Wool slacks are a pain in the ass and you have my sympathies for having to wear them, time. I have one pair of Van Heusen wool pants and I've...

The Grand looks like kind of an odd product. It's the same size as my S4 but has specs that are more in line with the S2. I don't tihnk those are offered in the US.

I've actually been strongly tempted to get an Intel NUC system except that HD4000 graphics have some pretty serious compromises if you want a full AV experience. Given that nVidia makes high performance ARM SoCs and GPUs, in another generation or so I suspect that we'll have an Android-based...

Because she dropped it (or threw it at a wall) and that isn't covered by the warranty.

The same customer who gave me a hardbound, signed by the author copy of the Jobs biography last December gave me a Chia Romney this year. They are being used as stands for my busts of Lenin and Marx, respectively.

7x00 ATI GPUs have hardware support for decoding and displaying 4k video, which means the other, wrong-er people probably can with current GPUs as well. For the rest I'd probably look at a low power i3 and run XBMC.

One of my friends has a 920. It has a very nice screen and seems fast and responsive. She has to reboot it every few days because it stops making data connections after a while. I don't know if that's common to that model or just a problem with hers.

One of my friends' iphones did something almost identical after she threw it at a wall. I may have added a bit more emphasis this time.

On the other hand, I think there's a lot of wisdom in the 2:00pm scheduled naptime.

RIM just announced that they're releasing Blackberry Messenger - their closed IM client, basically - available for Android and iOS. I don't think I know anyone at this point who still has a Blackberry but I'm sure this is a significant milestone in the death watch.

Why is it easier to extract content from an ipod touch (no "use as hard drive" option) using Linux than either Windows or OSX? Yes, even with itunes.

On the other hand, PS/2 and VGA are standard connectors and they always work on systems that are equipped to have them. That is not true of DVI (DVI-I vs. DVI-A vs. DVI-D etc) and may not even be true of USB for some poorly configured BIOSes or operating systems. How many different video...

It's not just that the Apple thing is different, it's that the individual could not accept that 1. Someone wouldn't be immediately be prepared to cater to her Apple-centric need or that 2. Someone might have something negative to say about Apple, even if it's something like "Hey, everyone who...

I was under the impression that EU regulation required smartphone vendors to standardize on a single data/charging connector. I'm not sure how Apple gets around that. Maybe they just pay the fines.

The iphone5 cable only works with the mini and the newest ipad model.

That's a fucked up screen and a user not willing to admit that they dropped it. One of my friends' iphones did something almost identical after she threw it at a wall.

As far as I know the iphone is the only smartphone made in the last three years or so that does NOT use the same micro-USB connection as every other smartphone being manufactured. The problem isn't that it's a weird $2 cable, it's that the individual simply refused to believe that I didn't have...

Also today someone was actually incredulous that I did not "just have" Apple-appropriate data/charging cables because "every computer guy has an iphone, right?" It would've been justifiable homicide. The app I was using as a test case for gifting was a $1 game called "Color Sheep" and I forgot...

Things I learned this morning: Windows Marketplace does not do gifting. This is probably not surprising. Google Play has no mechanism for gifting apps. They tell you to buy gift cards instead. Amazon does, but it's not even remotely intuitive, and a vanishingly tiny portion of Android users...