Wanderings of a RuinExplorer

I have been working a lot recently with millennials. There is a phrase I believe is at the heart of their problems and quite possibly the population at large, "I can't." In my personal experience, there exists no more damaging claim - no more debilitating, depression invoking, self-fulfilling prophesy in existence. I recognize that millennials in particular were raised in a world where they were brought up believing they could do anything. Compound that with mobile devices where the answer to nearly anything was immediate. When smacked square in the face with 'adulting,' this combination made for disaster. (their word, not mine) 'Adulting' is hard and nothing is immediate. Everything they know is now challenged. Some adapt. Interestingly enough, it seems those that have already endured hardships adapt fastest. Adversity becomes a source of strength. More power to them. But what of those with expectations borne of YouTube successes? (this applies to much mo...

<warning>this post contains far more unrelated detail than you're probably anticipating</warning> Last night was a ton of fun. Had a dozen friends over for a card game tournament which went late into the wee hours (2:30am before the after-game games started - I went to sleep, sorry Liz - should have warned you...). It served as a fantastic distraction to the 'real world.' Woodworking as recently evolved for me. It use to be something I simply enjoyed. You're might be familiar with various species of wood, their different grains and characteristics. Woodworking has always appealed to me on some level for its intention to abruptly bring amazing order to the product of decades of uninhibited entropy. But that's tangent for another day. Recently, due to a desire to wrap up or at least make great strides on the bunk bed project, my wife has been playing interception to allow for greater stretches of uninterrupted time working on it. I'm more frequently fi...

Didn't get near the progress I had hoped over the last week. I've read in a couple articles now that people tend to paint a clearly positive view of their lives on social media, Facebook in particular. The admonition from some is to share the trials and tribulations too so that readers understand that there is still diversity and in doing so, perhaps help them through something of their own. To that end, progress has been slow because I'm in pain. Four weeks ago I got off a plane and proceeded to limp for the entirety of a business trip. It felt like those charlie horses you get in your calf that will jerk you out of a deep sleep. Usually stretching helps ease the pain and eventually it ebbs. My leg hasn't. It's that same intensity constantly. I finally made it into a doctor who rushed me to an ER. They did ultra sounds to verify it wasn't a clot. I came up clean. Apparently that was sufficient for the doctor as I was sent home with painkillers. A week later, I...

Next to moisture, dust is the second biggest environmental threat to your electronics. Dust builds up, blocks airflow over heat sinks and in extreme cases can actually carry a current. Now lots of people blow out their PC periodically with canned air. When we work on PC's here, we use an air compressor. This allows us to clean much deeper using much higher flow and pressure. Here's an example mid-size tower with just a few fans moving air though the case. This is about three months worth of buildup in a home office that admittedly doesn't get vacuumed more than perhaps once a month. Here is the CPU heat sink. Keep in mind the function of the heat sink: The fan pulls air across the fins. The heat exchange occurs between the moving air and the surface area of the heat sink. In this case, the dust buildup is actually blocking the fins of the heat sink reducing heat exchange efficiency. Dust similarly affects airflow in other areas such as graphics cards and power...

There are a number of reasons why someone would want to enable content filtering on their home network. Most don't know where to start or use software that may not exactly address their need. I personally use and recommend OpenDNS FamilyShield. It's free, it's relatively easy to use, and best of all, when installed correctly, it protects all the devices connected to your network. To start, you'll need a little background information: DNS DNS stands for Domain Name System - think of it as a phonebook for the internet. People understand web site addresses or URLs such as www.google.com. Computers understand IP addresses such as 74.125.224.33. DNS translates web site addresses (www.google.com) into IP addresses (74.125.224.33). I won't go into all the detail, but let me brief you on the process: When you type a URL into your browser, www.google.com, your computer sends a request to a DNS server (typically provided by your Internet Service Provider) to transla...

I've actually worked on a number of machines that will not boot to USB. Granted, this article may have a narrow use case by today's standards, but for that poor guy out there dealing with this problem, here you go. At one point, nearly all desktop computers had a bios system by either AMIBIOS (American Megatrends) or Phoenix BIOS (Phoenix Technologies). These two major icons in the field were adopting the ability to boot to USB about the same time motherboard manufacturers started branching out with their own flavors of BIOS. So there is a narrow period of time where it was really common to have USB ports on computers without the ability to boot to them. Plop Boot Manager I stumbled across Plop Boot Manager while dealing with just such a computer. This tool is incredibly small and I will even admit to having loaded it to a 3.5inch floppy in one specific case (chances are that'll never happen again). Most of the time however, I loaded this 544KB iso to a CD and ...

By today's standards, CDs and even DVDs are cumbersome to work with. They have to be handled with care, they are typically write once media (I'm not a fan of the re-writable variety), and I actually work on a number of machines that don't have disc drives. USB flash drives are popular and ever increasing in capacity. Best part is, it's relatively easy to find older ones that aren't big enough for some person's specific taste, but large enough for some powerful recovery and support tools. I have several I keep close at hand around the shop with the following tools in decreasing size: Knoppix Ultimate Boot CD DSL (DamnSmallLinux)  (a measly 50 MB image, fits on a 64MB flash drive!) DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) I'll go over why these specific tools at some point, but I use to keep these tools close at hand on CDs and DVDs (knoppix). I was constantly re-burning them to keep the images up to date and finding myself frustrated on a few machines with...