After the service call for the computer at work (see post from earlier today). I got a call from starmalachite that the desktop at home was making unaccustomed noises. From what I could hear over the cell phone (and remembered from a brief intermittent incident last week that I never got around to following up), it seemed like a fan issue. I suggested shutting ( Read more... )

I set up a backup to portable hard drive to run tonight so I could park it at the office as an off-site backup. It worked, except for two little details:

1. I should have run it from the master admin account so it could access the data files on both my and starmalachite's accounts. The log had a long list of "could not access file..." complaints.

2. Turning on ( Read more... )

The new keyboard (Digital Media Pro) arrived to replace the generic one that came with the desktop. So far, so good -- the key feel is a bit "mushier" than the old one, but in general it's more comfortable. Unfortunately, the new keyboard and driver install didn't fix the one recurring annoyance I have with the machine (it won't wake from sleep ( Read more... )

So far, the shift to the new desktop is going well, except that it locked up twice when I started Firefox first thing in the morning. I suspect that the underlying problem was that Windows Easy Transfer directly ported all the plugins that had been installed under XP straight into the 64-bit Win7 program (they all automagically showed up in the new ( Read more... )

From Gizmondo:

Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into military computers looking for evidence of UFOs in the "biggest military hack of all time," did so using his home computer and a 56k modem....

Using a limited 56-kbps dialup modem and the hacking name "Solo" he found many U.S. security systems used an insecure Microsoft Windows program ( Read more... )

I amused myself over the weekend by, among other things, producing an animated GIF icon from Friday's "I Am Not Good With Boomerangs" xkcd webcomic. (The author specifically OKs this sort of use as long as it's properly credited.)

During lunch, I checked LJ from the office, and found that the bonk-to-the-head stage of the animation had gone all ( Read more... )

Federal Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel

Nearly two dozen federal agents yesterday raided the Washington headquarters of the agency that protects government whistle-blowers, as part of an intensifying criminal investigation of its leader, who is fighting allegations of improper political bias and obstruction of justice.

Agents fanned out ( Read more... )

I woke up last night and found that the desktop had shut itself off. My three working theories were ( Read more... )

I've been playing a bit more with adding documents to my T-Mobile Wing. So far, it seems to handle Word docs much better than the old PDA (especially documents with pictures ( Read more... )

I've been getting random crashes on the desktop. At first I thought it might be a problem with Exact Audio Copy, but they didn't always happen when (or even after) using it ( Read more... )