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December is the month when absolutely no one bothers to do anything but go to holiday parties and talk about going to holiday parties, as near as I can tell.

One of my customers sent me to look at their accountant's (not an employee, just some guy who does their accounting) PC today. It was a high end Dell XPS machine, but the guy was probably 60 years old and it was pretty obvious that the only thing he knew how to do was run Quickbooks. Anyway, he...

Also they're yanking the Harry Potter discs after the new year so they can make a new extended set for next Xmas. If you were planning to buy them, better do it soon. The theatrical editions seem fine to me but at least the Netflix version are really barren of special features. They don't have...

The BSG Blurays were HEAVILY discounted for the holidays. so were the extended editions of Lord of the Rings. I paid $250 for BSG when it came out but I saw the whole set for $60 this year. I don't really mind. I'm glad someone made so much good entertainment affordable.

Basically, if you have Wii Sports, you already have the only decent thing that's available for Wii. Everything else might as well be a Gamecube game but with some stupid motion control gimmick. I gave my Wii away a few weeks ago after I realized that I hadn't even had it plugged in for over...

I can't speak to that model specifically, but Asus routers and APs usually have pretty obtuse firmware. Not as bad as Buffalo, but bad enough that I feel like I should mention it before you go buying one. At the end of the day, Home Routers are one of those things where there's just no magic...

There are actually people I know whom I no longer communicate with because I don't have a facebook account. It might not be a huge deal in the Philippines but the amount of data mining that is done on US and European Facebook users is completely sickening and I don't want any part of it.

I celebrated our shared African unity by going to JC Pennys and buying a pair of shoes and some chinos that were on sale.

RDP only allows a single viewer per console. If you want something other than that you're really talking about doing something that's based on VNC somehow.

I'm not impressed at all by Airport Extreme blahblah. They don't even appear to have good compatibility with Apple stuff in my experience.

The problem with Remote Assistance and VNC is that both require firewall configuration that are beyond the reach of most users.

Kwanzaa doesn't start until tomorrow.

Crossloop and Teamviewer are both good. You can also use Showmewhatswrong.com, which makes a video you can look at, for some things.

I started point #7 twice and then carriage returned and forgot about it. No big deal. That thought became point #8. I legitimately prefer a 7" screen and the paperback-sized form factor to overlarge and heavy 9"+ screens. I emailed myself a few .epub files and they read just fine.

Hey, if you want a bunch of that stuff on YOUR credit card statement I'm not going to stop you. I'm sure I could find a nerd girl who would be happy to have it. :P But anyway, there's a lot of power and potential in some other photo manipulation applications, like Paint.Net. The biggest...

OK Kindle Fire time: 1. Fuckers don't include Google applications. And they aren't on Amazon Marketplace. I'm going to have to sideload Youtube, Picasa and Gtalk. That's a HUGE annoyance, as is the lack of direct integration with Google services. 2. The Amazon interface is inconsistent. Home...

One tiny annoyance with the T420: It's very easy to pop the optical drive open. I've accidentally done it probably a dozen times in the last 24 hours.

Branchcache is the only new feature introduced in Server 2008R2 aside from the updated UI stuff that I can think of. All of Microsoft's training materials focus on the core Server 2008 product anyway so I tend to think of the extra stuff as optional. There might be some other things but they're...

All of Purdue's UNIX hosts are configured to properly handle NTP queries. In cases where I've needed it, I've pointed hosts at addresses there for years.

For my M1505, I was able to find a set of instructions for enabling and changing some firmware functions that were disabled with the IBM version of the LSI card.

FreeNAS doesn't even really install. When I stuck it on a drive I just used dd to write an image of it to a drive. I don't know what's going on with your stuff but as I recall there's an Intel toolkit that lets you check the drive and there might be a firmware update for your drive like there...

I really can't even begin to care what you think you need it for. If you're paying for it, and I sincerely hope you aren't, you're supporting something that does not deserve to exist, let alone your money.

Chrome is fine for some applications. Firefox's add-on infrastructure and better memory management with large numbers of tabs make it the superior browser for my needs. I like to use Chrome on Virus-infected systems so that I can otherwise uninstall outdated Adobe shit, since it has its own...

Point of order: You can get a WSAPI plug-in for Winamp.

I'll have to give that a listen. For the most part I divide audio into "things I'm going to enjoy critically and needs to be .flac" and "things that I just need to be able to hear and can be 64kpbs .mp3 for all I care." One of my personal annoyances is that my phone will play .flac just fine if...

There's really very little functional difference between the two.

Even if I didn't think that the UI was total shit, I'd still thing Photoshop is worthless shit by association. And the UI is total shit that has unfortunately contaminated every other program with similar functionality. Fuck Adobe and everyone who works there or supports its products.

Comics are just like any other form of literature. They can be juvenile but they can also be a wonderful vessel for adult storytelling. It's not all super heroes and funny animals and even in those genres there is material of real literary work; Alan Moore's Swamp Thing (yes, really) or Brian M...

Did you not get a 20GB SSD with the board?

I've been using Server editions of Windows on desktop machines for a long time. Yes, Adobe crap runs on Windows Server.

Usually I run into that when there's something stupid like a printer with a built in card reader plugged in.

You can make the drives non-removable and do it, but it's really not a good idea, since Windows will mark the drives as not responding at the drop of a hat. You'd do better with eSATA or Firewire. I've played with it on Linux and found that something stupid like unplugging a thumb drive can...

Care to elaborate on your experience?, I'm planning to mess around with custom ROMs more in the coming weeks, but I'm curious why you ditched it. Lunar, I can't comment on problems with your email system, but I can say that my phone and email program will open attachments just fine.

Why bother with AAC in the first place when you can do FLAC and know you're getting audio identical the PCM source?

Those people are wrong. It would be bad to get me started on the matter. Superman and the rest of the static and indistinguishable Mad Libs collection of DC Comics characters really haven't added anything positive to super heroic fiction since their creation in the 1930s. Anyway, this is the...

Does anyone even know what version Chrome is on off the top of their head? Do version numbers for non-sucky browsers even matter any more?

You shut your whore mouth when your betters are talking.

The Thinkpad X130 looks like a pretty solid buy, once they're finally available. They have a proper i3 CPU and I'm sure they're up to snuff in other respects as well. It might be worth the price premium.

Synctoy is hugely inefficient for large numbers of files. It also generates a tremendous number of very small (1 byte? 1kB? Don't remember) temp files that can create a large overhead in the filesystem and also annoy the piss out of you when a sync fails.

Catwoman pals around with the Superfriends. She's a DC character. DC characters pretty much universally suck.

Windows Server has dfs, if your files are hosted there.

They started building the legend of Kim Jong Un (Une? Whatever) several years ago much as they did for Kim Jonh Il. I'm sure this won't result in any measurable change for the people there.

Yes, the T420 and yes I configured it as the only drive in the machine. There's no subjective weight difference between having the mechanical drive and not.

The only thing I can say is that I had no issues cloning the Lenovo disk image onto it. It's fine. Windows 7 loads up in ~16 seconds and everything is nice and zippy in the way that I'd expect. It might be a bit low end compared to more modern SSDs but it's fine for my application.

I quite liked Community.

That's the conclusion I came to as well. I still have to stick with HEC cases that include a bundled PSU most of the time, but if I'm building a reasonably nice computer, that's what I'm going to use from now on.

I didn't start buying them until November 2010, after a string of problems with 2TB 5400rpm drives. They were priced low enough that I could get a comparable amount of storage (4 1.5TB vs. 3 2TB) for the same amount of money. So far I haven't had any issues with them. Given my recent experiences...

Been there. Universal restore is normally helpful.

I have an existing machine that is apparently conversion proof. I've tried using the current VMware converter and tried converting from a VHD and from a TrueImage backup. I guess my fallback is to try the old standby P2V converter that I've used in the past but so far my results have been the...

Recent-ish drives I know to be reliable: Samsung drives 1.5TB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.11* 2 & 3TB 5400 RPM Hitachi Deskstar Drives I know to not be reliable Any Seagate or Western Digital "green" drive. In fact, every 3.5" Seagate drive that isn't a 1.5TB 7200.11 Every WD drive ever...