10 years ago I first blogged about getting glasses [1]. I’ve just ordered my 4th pair of glasses. When you buy new glasses the first step is to scan your old glasses to use that as a base point for assessing your eyes, instead of going in cold and trying lots of different lenses they […]
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I was asked whether it would be safe to open a link in a spam message with wget. So here are some thoughts about wget security and web browser security in general. Wget Overview Some spam messages are designed to attack the recipient’s computer. They can exploit bugs in the MUA, applications that may be […] I was recently asked to get data from a computer that controlled security cameras after a crime had been committed. Due to the potential issues I refused to collect the computer and insisted on performing the work at the office of the company in question. Hard drives are vulnerable to damage from vibration and there […] I’ve recently had some discussions about backups with people who aren’t computer experts, so I decided to blog about this for the benefit of everyone. Note that this post will deliberately avoid issues that require great knowledge of computers. I have written other posts that will benefit experts. Essential Requirements Everything that matters must be […] The Need for Speed One of my clients has an important server running ZFS. They need to have a filesystem that detects corruption, while regular RAID is good for the case where a disk gives read errors it doesn’t cover the case where a disk returns bad data and claims it to be good (which […] I recently had to setup some Linux workstations with 802.1x authentication (described as “Ethernet authentication”) to connect to a smart switch. The most useful web site I found was the Ubuntu help site about 802.1x Authentication [1]. But it didn’t describe exactly what I needed so I’m writing a more concise explanation. The first thing […] Just over a month ago I ordered a new Nexus 6P [1]. I’ve had it for over a month now and it’s time to review it and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini I also bought. Security The first noteworthy thing about this phone is the fingerprint scanner on the back. The recommended configuration is to […] In Australia we are about to have a federal election, so we inevitably have a lot of stupid commentary and propaganda about politics. One thing that always annoys me is the claim that we shouldn’t have small parties. We have two large parties, Liberal (right-wing, somewhat between the Democrats and Republicans in the US) and […] I think that a major deficiency in Computer Science degrees is the lack of sysadmin training. Version Control The first thing that needs to be added is the basics of version control. CVS (which is now regarded as obsolete) was initially released when I was in the first year of university. But SCCS and RCS […] Last year I wrote a long-term review of Android phones [1]. I noted that my Galaxy Note 3 only needed to last another 4 months to be the longest I’ve been happily using a phone. Last month (just over 7 months after writing that) I fell on my Note 3 and cracked the screen. The […] |
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