Literal Barrage:archives

The [in]famous (to those listening to TWiT podcasts, at least) Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne have started up a new Q&A-style website known as “Managing Your Digital Life” or MYDL.me and, in a fit of generosity, are giving away not one, but two Drobos to some random, lucky souls, all for the paltry entry fee [...]

As you’ll note, there was very little blog output ’round these parts two days ago (read: I didn’t post a single durn thing). This was entirely due to a very, very long 16 hour day which featured a large-scale LAN outage. The root cause was a bit of a heat problem we had about [...]

Many of my generation participate in F.I.T. (Family I.T.) activities on a regular basis, including, but not limited to, incidents wherein family members (and family members’ computers) must be rigorously brought to heel. Of particular use in these situations are the following very helpful websites:

Snopes: Useful for debunking outrageous claims, oftentime made in the [...]

I was listening to this week’s TWiT on my commute in this morning when one of the TWiTs mentioned that they were taking a pass on the Psystar Open Computer (essentially a gray box hacked to run OS X Leopard) because the threat of an Apple lawsuit putting Psystar out of business is simply too [...]

There are days that I’m amazed by the Internet, and then there are days that it lives downup to my expectations. Take, for instance, a recent Tweet of mine in which I pondered

I was quickly answered by Stephane, who pointed out the wonderfully-implemented and -documented iPod Shuffle RAID0 array.
A few days thereafter, [...]

No, I’m not talking about the Presbyterian Church in America, I’m talking about Patch Check Advanced.
PCA is the Solaris analog to Fedora’s YUM[1], Debian’s APT[2], or even FreeBSD’s Ports[3]. It basically allows you to completely skirt Sun’s bloated, kludgy GUI-based software update checker and list, download and even install all pending patches available [...]

If you’re not reading xkcd already, you should be. It’s a simply stellar, very geeky online webcomic. Today’s had me in stitches:

Is a cruddy-looking lawn really all that common of an occurrence these days? I mean, honestly, I’ve gotten more of these than “manhood enhancement” solicitations in my Yahoo! spam filter over the last few months:

The first few times I got ‘em, I didn’t even open them. Figured “Grow Your Lawn Faster And Thicker” [...]

For those of you with an interest in educating your extended family on the dangers of phishing websites, McAfee is obviously selling its SiteAdvisor software via this nifty little quiz but it offers a great learning opportunity and more than a few helpful tips on avoiding giving up your personal and financial information.
See if you [...]

Now this is a doozy. A company called “MRT” has decided to sue Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks because

MRT claims that Vista, Adobe Flash Player, Real Player, iTunes and the iPod have been produced “without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American Intellectual Property owners.” The DMCA, signed into law in [...]