For some years now we’ve named our home computers after characters in Tintin. First we had Tintin and Snowy, both desktops. Snowy was replaced with Haddock. The two of them were joined for a little while by Nestor, which was called that because it was a server. Haddock broke down (probably a motherboard failure, I ... [More]
I’d normally post something like this over on geekrant.org, but it’s worth mentioning here. Java has suffered from a series of serious vulnerabilities, the most recent found just a couple of weeks ago. This article makes a good case for removing it completely from your computer: Is Java the root of all evil and can ... [More]
A piece of personal geek history: yesterday I had heard that a system I worked on when just out of uni in 1993 just finally got decommissioned. Myself and my mate Brian got out of uni at the end of ’92, and looked for IT jobs. In early 1993 I landed a contract at a ... [More]
A few weeks ago I did brain surgery on my computer. My PC (named “Tintin”) finally got a CPU upgrade — which I needed to move off Windows XP onto Windows 7. It’s quite incredible how much dust was inside it. Just obtaining the faster CPU wasn’t straightforward, as sometime in the last couple of ... [More]
Every 3-4 years I’ll buy a new computer. Here’s the latest, a reconditioned (with warranty) HP Pavilion a6760a, to be called “Haddock”. For the record (because often years later I come back and compare what I got for how much) the specs are: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (2.8 GHz), 2Gb RAM, 500 Gb hard ... [More]
Was chatting a while back to a colleague about his kids in high school. One of them ends up carrying an enormous amount of stuff to and from school, including books and sports equipment, but also a notebook (laptop) computer costing a couple of thousand dollars. Giving students laptops makes no sense to me. Compared ... [More]