New, tips, and more
The New York Times has a nice article about some “how-to” sites: On the Web’s amazing how-to sites, I am studying bar tricks. I should be learning, once and for all, how to do CPR, but all I really want to know is how to mix a Singapore Sling, palm a card and tongue-knot the …
From the New York Times: Removing her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn, a police emergency dispatcher in Rochester. But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, …
From the New York Times: The best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months. Then there’s the rest …
From the New York Times: The Federal Communications Commission formally voted Friday to uphold the complaint against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, saying that it had illegally inhibited users of its high-speed Internet service from using popular file-sharing software. The decision, which imposes no fine, requires Comcast to end such blocking this year. Kevin …
From Download Squad: What could be better than a program that will convert audio, video, and image files from and to just about any format you can think of? How about one that does it all batch-style with minimal clicking? FormatFactory doesn’t care what files you want to swap in what order, just feed it …
The latest issue of Windows Secrets newsletter had some information about driver update software. Several paid products were mentioned, but RadarSync has a free version. I’ve tried it and it seems to work well enough. There isn’t much to say about it other than it determines what hardware you have, the current driver version, and …
From the New York Times: After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.
From the New York Times: “No one wants to die,” said Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” It was a little over three years ago that Mr. Jobs spoke those existential words, in a commencement address at Stanford. His thoughts …
From the Globe and Mail (Report on Business): Have you ever lied in an e-mail? Honestly, you’re not alone. A U.S. study released Thursday shows e-mail is much more conducive to telling falsehoods than using old-fashioned pen and paper. Moreover, people feel more justified in doing it. The findings challenge the notion that e-mails are …
From PCWorld.ca: The release of Intel’s 8086 microprocessor in 1978 was a watershed moment for personal computing. The DNA of that chip is likely at the center of whatever computer–Windows, Mac, or Linux–you’re using to read this, and it helped transform Intel from merely one of many chip companies to the world’s largest.