Archives for posts tagged ‘Hardware’

Get it while it lasts—Microsoft’s easy way to lock down a shared computer

Do you have a shared computer somewhere in your life? A computer that anyone and everyone uses in order to hop online to do a quick web search or to print a document? I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer [...]

New life for an old PC—no geek card required

Do you still have an old machine kicking around in the basement or the back room, long forgotten? For no cost and almost zero effort, you can set it up as a dedicated network appliance, using one of the many turnkey products from the open-source TurnKey Linux project. I’m serious. You don’t need to know [...]

Never say Never, or How I bought an iPad five minutes after walking into the Apple store

I have to admit that I mocked the device from the outset. I sort of chuckled as I said “Boy, they really hit the ball out of the park with the iPhone, but this thing doesn’t know whether it is a laptop or a iPod Touch. Why would I want one?” I have a nice [...]

Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

A silly tip for the tips of your USB cables

Life is too short to keep trying to figure out which side of a cable fits where. Here’s my silly little tip for simplifying one miniscule part of your life.