Oh, holy poo, has it really been that long since I last posted ( Read more... )

Somebody had recommended f.lux to me as a way to deal with the screen on Skippy, which can be very hard on my eyes. Well, it turns out Win10 and/or the Streambook has a "Nightlight" setting (under System - Display), which does much the same thing. I've got it set to about half-way down the spectrum right now, and the screen's gone from messing up ( Read more... )

Happy New Year! (How on earth did that happen?)

I ended up with a surprise week off from the Day Job, I think because my manager forgot to put me on the schedule. So I decided I would spend it querying Highway of Mirrors. Good plan. I also told myself, way back at the end of November, that I could take a month off from Lightning Strikes TwiceI ( Read more... )

What the hell happened to ThinkGeek? It used to be a good source for tech toys of a practical nature along with the silly stuff, with decent write-ups about actual usability; now it seems to be entirely media tie-in tchotchke. I'll admit the Hogwarts tableware is seductive, but I'm just trying to buy a good low-profile USB drive ( Read more... )

So I was all set to buy the 20-year-old computer that I previously mentioned, but for due diligence I called them first -- ostensibly to confirm that they tested their floppy drives, but really to make sure I could talk to a human being who sounded legit ( Read more... )

Last night wasn't a 200-at-2am debacle; it was a 1000-at-1am debacle. I'd pretty well decided to give up on it several hundred short of quota, even knowing what that would do to my catching-up schedule, but then I looked at how little I had left to do (relatively speaking) and got stubborn and powered it out ( Read more... )

Skippy the Streambook had his first outing yesterday ( Read more... )

New hardware has been acquired ( Read more... )

NaNo-ing took a hit today, as after work and a bunch of other things good and bad, I finally sat myself down only for my laptop to decide to malfunction. It's done the thing with constantly typing "eeeee" all by itself before, but never this bad through this many reboots ( Read more... )

So we returned home Wednesday evening to find our answering machine blinking, for the first time in seven weeks and two days.

Yes! We have dial tone! Huzzah!

...It is typical of this whole process that the very first message on our newly-restored landline was from the phone company, asking us to confirm a carrier change. Which we had *not* ( Read more... )