Geek Stuff category archive

Via PoliticalProf.

Store in a room full of iJunk.

Microsoft’s reputation as the “less cool” rival to Apple appears to have been reinforced, after thieves raided its Silicon Valley offices – but only stole a collection of iPads.

The thieves made away with five iPads worth more than $3,000 (£1,865) from Microsoft’s research and development centre in Mountain View, California, over Christmas.

Microsoft’s flagship collection of smartphones and tablet computers remained untouched in the raid, according to Mountain View police who spoke to The Register.

In a landmark traffic study, Caltrans and MIT have discovered that too many cars on the same road heading in the same direction result in traffic jams.

The story also included this little creepy detail:

The study’s authors anonymously tracked more than 350,000 Bay Area drivers using their cellphone and GPS signals — the first time that’s been done — to gather some of the most detailed data yet on what causes our traffic jams.

(Embed fixed.)

An experienced computer user tries Windows 8. Chaos occurs. (Warning: Mild language.)

Excerpt: “Less user-friendly than DOS.”

Via SMLR.

Quentin Fottrell reviews the symptoms at MarketWatch.

Via Delaware Liberal.

I logged into Facebook today to respond to a comment on one of my posts and discovered, that, once again, Facebook has zucked with the interface to make it difficult to find the stupid “Log Off” button.

Off to delete their stupid cookies . . .

The state’s highest court is reversing a judge’s order that a northern Virginia woman remove negative online reviews of a home contractor.

The Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen said Wednesday that the Supreme Court of Virginia has thrown out the preliminary injunction issued in Fairfax County Circuit Court. The groups had appealed the judge’s order saying it violated both the First Amendment and Virginia law.

The lady felt she had been ripped off by a contractor and published her story. The contractor sued.

I think this is a good ruling.

Details at the link.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

Join the new TWUUG forums and help them grow, then join us tomorrow in person.

Tidewater Unix Users Group

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, January 3.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Reunited and it feels so good.

(That’s somewhat similar to how I ended up in Virginia Beach, the one really good thing that has resulted from my signing up for the Zuckerboard.)

Is Facebook the lonely cloud?

. . . when you’re not yourself?

If you don’t stake out your social media territory, someone else will.

That’s the new reality reflected in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Pittsburgh’s federal court by a foundation head against the networking firm LinkedIn Corp.

Rick D. Senft, president and CEO of the Passavant Memorial Home Foundation, wants to know who put his name, personal cell phone and personal email on the popular site — and so far, LinkedIn won’t tell him.

Dave Mandi is skeptical of storing your stuff in the “cloud” (whatever that is–as near as I can tell, it’s marketese for “remote server”). A snippet:

First off, the cloud’s owner knows about every song and book in your collection. Depending on how clean-cut you are, this may or may not be cause for concern, but “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about” is not a good reason to forfeit your privacy. You may have bought a copy of the book How to Pick Locks for educational purposes, or some of Charles Manson’s demo tapes for laughs, but you shouldn’t have to worry that someone will get the wrong idea about those purchases and report you to the authorities.

Then there are broader privacy questions. Can you be sure the cloud owner isn’t doing anything with your data? Is it conceivable that at some point in the future they might sell or rent it? Imagine how much marketing companies would be willing to pay for personal information stored in the cloud — even if it were anonymized.

If you use any kind of commercial “cloud” service, this is a must-read.

SpamSoldier spreads via text messages, saying recipients have won a $1,000 Target gift card or offering free versions of popular paid games such as “Angry Birds Space,” and on disreputable, third-party app stores, the office said. Once on a phone, it uses the subscriber’s allotment of text messages to reach more targets.

I’ve not seen this one, but from time to time–maybe once a quarter–I get texts telling me I’ve won something or other at Best Buy. Since I loathe Best Buy, they do not interest me.

I follow my carrier’s instructions and forward such messages to their spam-reporting address (7726 or “spam”).

The article goes on to state the obvious–don’t follow links in texts from unknown sources and don’t download programs from third-party app repositories.

In other words, think before you click.

The new version of WordPress seems to have issues.

When I embed a video in a post, test the post, schedule it to post at a future time (you didn’t actually think I sit here all day, did you? Heck, Wednesday I went to Williamsburg for a meeting and my Christmas posts are already lined up), then test the post, the embed works. That is, it displays and plays. Then, when the post posts, the embedded video is gone.

This started when I installed latest WordPress version.

I try to fix it when I notice the void; once the post is published, the embedded videos seem to stick around.

In the mean time, I will include a link to the source of the video in the post. If I feel truly energetic, I might even file a bug report.

Be assured that any video I choose to embed in a post is Deathless Art and Must-See viewing.

If nothing else, it’s got to be better than Honey Boo-Boo or the Six O’Clock News.

From El Reg:

Japan has been at the cutting edge of toilet design for decades and has one of the highest rates of smartphone penetration on the planet, so it’s perhaps fitting that it has now combined the two by introducing a hi-tech Android-powered loo which enables hands-free toilet action.

Video (no human beings are involved) at the link.

Hold Amazon accountable for attempting to place non-accessible devices, that is, Kindles, in schools.

Learn more here.

Via GNC.

Be popular. Fool your friends. Then post them on the innerwebs.

If the embed doesn’t work, watch here.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Police have arrested a 19-year-old Skagit County (Washington–ed.) man who threatened on Facebook to “shoot up every school within a 100-mile radius” if his gun rights were taken away after the Connecticut school massacre.

Authorities had been looking for the man, identified as Korry Martinson, 19, since Friday about 7:20 p.m., after he allegedly posted the threat on his Facebook page, police said.

Some folks aren’t bright enough to wield firearms.

Sadly, they are the ones who do.

Schleswig-Holstein doesn’t like Facebook’s lack of privacy policies.

One of Germany’s top privacy regulators has ordered Facebook to stop its real-name policy, saying it violates the country’s data protection laws.

In response to the social media site’s refusal to allow pseudonyms, the Independent State Center for Data Privacy (ULD) in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein issued an ultimatum to the company’s California headquarters on Monday.

Should Facebook Inc., which operates in the United States, and its Irish subsidiary Facebook Ltd., which runs European operations, refuse to comply within two weeks, they each face a fine of €20,000 ($26,000), ULD said.

Facebook plans to resist.