Neat Windows Trick

When somebody’s calling me with a computer problem, or they see an error on their screen, they’ll usually tell me something generic like “I got this error on my screen.” Oh, that’s useful. “What was the error?” “Oh, I don’t know, it just went bonkers.” I go on to tell them I need the exact error message before I can diagnose something, I don’t care how cryptic it is. Then they try to read it to me, and something gets lost in translation.

Well apparently you can hit ctrl-c on any Windows dialog box, and have it copy its contents to the clipboard where you can then paste it into Notepad, or whatever. Then they can copy the dialog into notepad, print it, or e-mail it my direction, making it far easier for me to fix something. Thanks to Neil (who has a much better graphical demonstration) for pointing this out.

November 28, 2004

Nigerian Spam Parody

Just got this hilarious Nigerian Spam parody. Basically, if you take the subject and content of about every piece of spam you’ve ever seen, and combined it into one e-mail, you’d get something like this. Read on (and thanks Yoleen for this)…

(more…)

November 28, 2004

Protect Your Scrotum

It’s a very sensitive and important region, after all.

November 27, 2004

That’s Going To Sting

Superglue + condoms + your penis = trip to the hospital.

November 27, 2004

New Gel Increases Female Arousal

After all the stupid male sexual enhancement ads I get via e-mail, I’m sure this is going to hit my inbox soon enough.

November 27, 2004

Top 11 Firefox Extensions

A great collection of extensions that I’d love to see available for Firefox including the GetOffYourLazyButtAndWalkToTheFrontDoorForPetesSake snail-mail sniffer and the ClassiqView 1.1 which simulates MSIE and breaks W3C compliance.

November 27, 2004

Your Color Laser Printer’s Hiding Something

Apparently this has been going on for years, but it’s only now in this PCWorld article that this is becoming common knowledge.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

“It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean says.

The dots’ minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light–say, from a keychain laser flashlight–on your page and use a magnifier.

I have a nice Xerox Phaser 860DP here at the office, and I’m going to see if I can find a blue LED to see if I can find the damn serial number. It just makes me wonder what else these machines are hiding from me.

November 26, 2004

Evolution Disclaimers

If you haven’t already heard, a school district in Georgia is putting the following stickers in their science books: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” Here’s a JPEG of the sticker.

I can’t believe this is being done thanks to some loud-mouth folks who are against evolution (and yes, it is possible to believe in both creationism and evolution — we’re starting to see a two-party system like we are in politics, but I digress). The folks who are against evolution are generally religious folks, and are we supposed to keep religion out of public schools?

Anyway, Davezilla has a great rant on the topic where he suggests some other stickers as well:

This textbook contains material on carpentry. Woodworking is a theory, practiced by Jesus of Nazareth, not a fact, regarding the creation of wooden furniture. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and not undertaken without OSHA-approved safety glasses.

His commenters also have some good contributions. There are some humorous ones (and good discussion on this topic) over at this site.

Thanks to about 400 sites for the link.

November 26, 2004

Portable Playstation 2

This is one killer modification. Thanks Waxy for the link.

November 26, 2004

Things To Put On USB Pen Drive Before Visiting Parents

If you’re like me, you’re the geek in the family and in charge of keeping everybody’s machines up and running. Sadly, if you’re like me, you’ll be spending part of this holiday fixing said family’s computer. It sounds like it just needs to be cleaned up a bit, and I’ve got a USB Pen Drive, so I’ll be loading it with a bunch of the software that is listed here (most of it I already have, but some of them were ideas I didn’t think of). Thanks Neil for the link.

November 25, 2004