Posts by Michael Kean 176 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
AnyDesk has remote printing options, although I'm not sure how useful that would be.
I'm currently using a paid addon for Microsoft Outlook which auto-prints emails sent to a specific address for our community radio station. That email address isn't publicised anywhere. We have the HP E-print option too, but it doesn't handle image attachments nicely compared to the outlook one, and I often email Facebook screenshots to it. (Community announcements etc.)
So, back in the'90s I was asked by a third party to check the status of the battery in a UPS at a remote location.
I guessed a null modem cable attached to the serial port on this APC UPS would let me talk to it on 9600,N,8,1.
I guessed wrong. Immediately upon connecting the serial cable to my laptop, the rack became much quieter.
UPS, or OOPS?
We were all young and naive once.
Well, I think Google still wins with the ability to select random folders from your computer to be backed up, whereas OneDrive still requires the files to reside within the OneDrive folder.
Although, admittedly, Google's backup and sync does like to break some apps from time to time by holding their files open during backup; and to mysteriously create gigabytes of files in %temp% for eternity.
Same.
Only drama is that it gets blocked by Facebook etc, so I couldn't publicise the backup stream for our community station that I was running back then. Ended up using a different streaming platform so the problem went away; but was annoying that it was automatically flagged as evil.
Gotta be careful though - if you were to put a rope around yourself and the tree's trunk, and the tree decides to split down the trunk while you're tied to it; you might find yourself suddenly quite narrow at the waist as your body attempts to arrest the split. Results may vary.
Search Everything is indeed great, but it only searches filenames and not their contents; so there are times when Windows Search is useful still.
I'm an IT guy who fixes random computers so I still end up bringing up an administrative command prompt and using DOS since at least I know dir /s /a file*.* will actually look everywhere.
So many years ago in a remote Australia town, I was asked to check the battery status of a large APC UPS - the likes of which I hadn't seen before at that time. (This might have been the first rack I'd seen.) I was the only permanent IT guy in town.
The only means of communication appeared to be a serial port on the back. So I figured I'd just plug my laptop into it with a serial or null modem cable and have a chat at 9600/n/8/1 if it was in the mood.
The moment I connected that cable, the UPS immediately turned off. Along with a few racks of servers. (I think it was a digital concentrator, or whatever it was that replaced analogue dialup modem racks back then.)
Nice bit of evil design there, thanks APC.
It's a common problem with the Moto 360 range as well.
Life as a battery in a smart watch is not a pleasant thing - a fairly full-on daily duty cycle with occasional deep discharges, a constantly warm environment (especially with wireless charging), and relatively high current usage compared to capacity (>1C) all contribute to short overall life spans on early generation smart watch batteries.
On the plus side, if they engineered them appropriately, you could argue that spontaneous disassembly when you need a new battery is a handy feature! Sure saves all that heating, unclipping, etc.
My three+ year old Moto 360 is on its third battery. Motorola has given up making them.
Had a second hand laptop to sell, but it didn't have a Win10 license.
Wiped it and installed Windows 7 x64
Activated same.
Installed latest Windows 10 from the Media Creation Tool
Setup froze twice with black screen, no cursor.
Eventually booted up to the point where it came up with the familiar desktop folder not accessible.
Gave up and sold it with Windows 7 instead.
You still have the original "Google Drive" capability that you had before, so that shoudn't be a problem for you.
The only new feature is the ability to select random folders on your computer to have backed up on your Google storage space - not as part of Drive, but as a traditional backup feature. (Some versioning available, but I think the restore of older versions is from the web interface only.)
Will be handy for some customers since Code42 has decided to murder CrashPlan for residential users.
"Bit Coin was to be the big one -- proper unicorn poo and all that."
Bitcoin Cash keeps to the original vision of Bitcoin - that is that it can scale up to Visa / Mastercard size (transaaction wise) simply by having larger blocks. It removes the temporary 1MB limit that has hindered its growth.
The original Bitcoin (with or without SegWit) is still hobbled by the 1MB limit, resulting in much higher fees for use - hence a financial motivation for the miners on that chain to stick to it to the detriment of Bitcoin's growth potential.
Google likes to randomly kill things. I've moved from Skype to Duo because call quality is much better; but I guess it's shaky ground too. Oh well, nothing lasts for ever. Good thing mobile phone numbers and email addresses stay put as the technology changes around them. (GSM, 3G, 4G, 5G, POP, HTTP, IMAP, etc.)
Hmmm.
I guess you could flash the hard drive LED and watch for that, but that'd take longer.
Or throttle up the CPU fan and listen to the speed changes.
Or play modulated audio over an 18KHz and hope there are no teenagers working there.
Or embed a hub inside the mouse and hide a doohickey in there...
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