quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur
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…
More or less every three to six months, I tinker with different portable computing options. This is partly because my mobile computing needs change over time, but mainly because my needs are conflicting and it is difficult to find a single hardware solution that optimizes for all my use cases and dogmas. Most recently, I’ve…