Chad's News

January was a good month for class action lawsuit settlements. Some of them have very broad participation requirements.

• Apple iPod Nano scratches
• Dell computers
• Bank of America overdrafts
• Vonage fax service

“Mirroring” (aka RAID level 1) is where a computer has two or more identical drives, and anything that gets written to one is also written to the other(s). This provides a basic level of protection should one of the drives fail. But there are many, many reasons why it’s not a viable backup method, especially for a commercial website. At a minimum, any backup should be physically separated from the computer itself, preferably at a significant distance in case of fire, flood, or similar disaster. I’ve been hearing a lot of radio advertisements for a remote backup system called Carbonite. Also, PC World has a list of 17 online backup sites. If you’ve tried one of these I’d like to hear your opinion on how well it works.

Windows users: ever had one of those stalled print jobs that won’t go away? I’ve gone to the extreme of unplugging the printer and rebooting Windows in order to get rid of them. “Stalled Printer Repair” is a free utility that forces the removal of stalled print jobs.

Link: http://www.fantasticfreeware.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

System Information for Windows tells you most everything about your Windows computer. It’s free for personal use. I suggest selecting the “Secrets” option at the bottom of the “Software” section—you may be surprised at what it uncovers.

Link: http://www.gtopala.com/
(via Lifehacker)

Friday, November 28th is the biggest shopping day of the year. Now you can plan ahead and find the best deals, at BlackFriday.info. The last time I did a Black Friday sale, I arrived at about 6:00am only to find over a hundred people waiting in line already. By the time I got inside the store, they’d run out of the hard drives I’d intended to purchase.

Link: http://www.blackfriday.info/
(via Lifehacker)

Here’s a neat tip—store a spare car key underneath your license plate, using one of the license plate screws to secure it. Sounds better than those magnetic holders.

Link: http://consumerist.com/…

US citizens are entitled to a free yearly credit report from the three major credit reporting agencies. The official site for this is www.AnnualCreditReport.com. Do not confuse this with www.FreeCreditReport.com, which tries its best to separate you from your money.

Link: http://consumerist.com/…

These days, nearly every network adapter has an associated number called a MAC address. This number is (almost always) unique and is defined in the network card hardware—making it permanent and unchangeable. Thus one aspect of wireless network security is to only allow access to devices with specific MAC addresses. And while this is a good practice, it will not keep out a determined hacker. Despite what I wrote above, MAC addresses can be easily spoofed at the operating system level. The linked article explains how to do it in Windows. This is another reason why there is no such thing as total network security without encryption (and even then, it has to be the right type of encryption).

Link: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Mental Floss is holding a contest for students, where five winners will each receive $10,000 to be applied towards tuition. Even if you’re not eligible for the prize, the site is one that I regularly read and recommend.

Link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/…

Here at the Chad’s News network command center we’ve read lots of online articles that list various performance tweaks for Windows—and we’ve even implemented a few. Turns out that not all of them actually increase performance.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

The linked article has a nice list of add-ons for Windows Explorer. I really like the one that adds tabs.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Web designers have long known better than to use the annoying <BLINK> tag (or even its CSS counterpart). But there are some not-so-good designers who seem to consider the <BLINK> tag to be an elegant and forceful statement. Fortunately the linked article tells how to configure Firefox such that blinking text is disabled.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…