I'm doing an internship in our local university library through April, and my main task is scanning their annual 'Reports To The President', a précis of college activity sent up to main campus and bound in a book, usually hard-bound. The oldest book was 1965-66, the newest that I've seen thus far is '98-99. I believe there are newer already in ( Read more... )

Specifically, Windows Media Player and 32-bit apps ( Read more... )

There's some pretty good stuff in this deal for $25, particularly the VPN and dupe finder. mSecure is a program that I've been using on my iPhone for pretty much as long as I've had one, and I've found it invaluable: it'll be nice to have a desktop version. And the PDF/OCR program sounds like it'll be quite useful with all of the medical records ( Read more... )

Or a computer geek with something to prove ( Read more... )

Did it New Year's Day. A brand-new 27" iMac, top of the line, 4 GHz i7 with 16 gig of RAM, 3 TB hybrid drive, and AppleCare. Should be here next week. Don't ask the price, it's kinda painful (I did get an education discount), but I expect many years of service out of it making the cost per day more bearable (just the sales tax was over $200, at ( Read more... )

Excellent article by Bruce Schneier. "Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market...all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased ( Read more... )

First, Isaac Asimov wrote about the 2014 World's Fair after attending the 1964 World's Fair.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html

My blatherings on it....
( Read more... )

Well, it's a new wireless data transfer specification. 802.11 is the IEEE standard for "... is a set of physical layer standards for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5 and 60 GHz frequency bands" (Wikipedia), and currently there are four finalized and approved standards: A, B, G, N (not in ( Read more... )

A computer pioneer of a different sort, Jack was the maker of the Commodore 64, undeniably a seminal computer in the PC revolution. He had quite a history: born in Poland, interred at Aushwitz, and started a typewriter company that became a computer company that made one of the first truly affordable computers ( Read more... )

I had this long post about how my desktop Win XP Pro machine in Cloudcroft toasted its power supply ( Read more... )