quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur
Let’s buy a Cheeseburger, a Quarter Pounder and a Big Mac all at once, unwrap and bite into each one, and take pictures, comparing the craftsmanship at two different McDonald’s restaurants. This is what the Internet is all about. Be advised that I fully intend to repeat this activity with different pairs of fast food…
For various reasons, including needing to make space in my garage to bring the Beetle in so I can work on it under cover, I recently decided to start disinterring, cataloging, in some cases restoring, and in most cases properly mothballing my vintage computer collection. I also want to bring out at least one Commodore…
A week ago, in my last post, I discussed my decision to move my daily driver OS from Windows 10 to Linux, and the purchase of a ThinkPad 460S to be my new Linux machine. This post is a quick update on what has worked out – and what has not – so far. Ergonomically,…
Since the Microsoft BUILD 2015 conference, when I received an attendee gift of an HP Spectre x360, I have been using Windows 10 as the primary daily driver operating system on most of my personal machines. In many ways, I think this operating system is one of the best products Microsoft has released (at least,…
At the end of May 2018 I was looking for a project/fun car. My top requirements for this vehicle were that it should cost $3000 or less, it should have a manual transmission, that it should require no more than $1000 of repairs to be a reasonably trustworthy daily driver… and that’s pretty much it…
Whenever I’m traveling, particularly outside the US, I have range anxiety on my cellphone. Not only is it my communications (and my important poster-of-pictures-of-food-and-cocktails), it’s more importantly my navigation and often the way I summon transportation. In some countries, I can ask my way using schoolboy French or German, but my travels necessarily direct me…
A coworker of mine who works remotely about 100 miles from the office, and whom I consequently don’t see face-to-face very often, has been talking to me for probably close to a year about a) giving me his old not-believed-functional XBox with cables and controllers, and b) taking some of the retired 2TB hard drives…
I don’t, of my own choice, watch television. By this I mean, I never pick up a remote and turn on a TV, regardless of whether I’m at home or at a hotel. However, I’m occasionally exposed to TV when I’m in a room where someone else has turned it on, and this is essentially…
In a desultory fashion, I have been converting a trashpicked classic all-in-one Mac into a whimsical NAS device (see Youtube video 1, video 2 and video 3). This device is ultimately intended to replace a dedicated Linux PC that has been serving the role (through various hardware upgrades) for about seven years now. This project…
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! I wasn’t unhappy at all with the X220 I bought almost exactly two months ago, but Microsoft has announced that on Dec 31, 2017 they are changing the rules on free Windows 10 upgrades. It is no longer clear if it’ll be possible to use the XP/Vista/Win7/Win8 OEM keys on…