The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this secret battle stumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, …
Microsoft announced Windows 10, the successor to Windows 8, last September. Like I’ve done in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8, I downloaded the first tech preview in October and installed it on a spare laptop at work to get a jump on learning my way around the newest iteration of Windows. Last …
After I got my standing desk it became quickly apparent that I should upgrade my monitors. My trusty 17″ Samsung 172N was over 11 years old and my 19″ Gateway FPD1960 was pushing 9 years. There was nothing wrong with them, but they were square (4:3) and, now that I was standing, too low on …
During my recent web photo gallery conversion to Piwigo I realized that a lot of my JPG photo files were corrupted! I think this happened last March when I copied everything from my old NAS to a new one. I suspect the network/connectivity issues I had with that new NAS caused the file corruption. I ended up returning …
I guess I’ve never written about it here (except in passing) but for the past 10 years I’ve been running Gallery to manage my photo websites (before that I hand-coded HTML pages!). I started with Gallery v1.4 way back in October 2004, upgraded to Gallery v2.x in November 2005, tried the Gallery v3.x alphas and betas in …
For Christmas I received the Sennheiser RF120 wireless headphones (and charging stand). My old wireless Sony headphones were starting to show their age: the original rechargeable batteries no longer held a charge so I had to use alkalines, the cushioned ear cups were peeling, and there was just too much interference and hard to get a …
The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and …
I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer both at work and at home, so for some time I’ve been considering getting a standing desk (reading reviews on LifeHacker and The Wirecutter) but was never really serious about it. Then for my birthday my siblings all contributed money towards the standing desk fund …
Well, that didn’t last long. Just six months after getting my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Android tablet at work I’ve now been given a 5th generation iPad Air. The Note 10.1 had promise but we just never ended up rolling many of them out. Android is still a minority in my office where the majority …
I’m not what you’d call an Apple fanboy, but for some reason I felt compelled to wake up at 3am on September 12 to place my 64gb iPhone 6 Plus pre-order with AT&T. I was disappointed to learn (later that day after finally receiving my order confirmation e-mail) that my new phone wouldn’t even ship until between …