Hey, IT folks… how many times have you needed the service tag off a Dell computer but: a) the original image had been wiped, and the Dell Service Tag applet wasn’t re-installed; or b) you were remotely connected to a machine that didn’t have the applet for whatever reason; or c) there was a gigantic pile of papers, framed pictures, staplers, and other office paraphernalia that made moving the computer a big pain in the ass?
I used to use this trick on a regular basis a few years ago, but forgot about it until yesterday, when I needed the service tag off a Dell I was remotely connected to.
In Windows, open a command-prompt and type
wmic bios get serialnumber
In most flavors of Linux, you can type this at the command-line:
As an IT guy, I often have to deal with a group of folks I call “‘a little knowledge is dangerous’ users”. These folks usually know more than a typical user, but often don’t understand the complete picture. It’s common for them to have more than one anti-virus app on their system, or route their Internet connection through multiple firewalls “because security”. It’s common for these users to be set in their ways: they’ll jump through gigantic hoops to install WordPerfect 3.0 on their circa 2013 desktop because: a) they don’t like change; b) “I paid for this back in 1983, and don’t see any reason to pay again”; and\or c) they want to “stick it” to Bill Gates, even though Gates has little to do with Microsoft these days. They’re also the first to complain when the jiggery-pokery they did to install the ancient software – the registry edits, the hacked DLLs and Compatibility Mode tweaks – borks their system.
If you ask these folks to recommend a new computer, they’ll INSIST on one with 32GB of RAM for a long list of spurious reasons, like “you won’t need a pagefile!” or “you can make a RAM disk!” or, my personal favorite, “Windows memory management sucks” (because you, a real estate agent in Dallas, North Carolina, knows more about how memory works than Microsoft engineers. Sure.)
Well, the guys at TechSpot did a bunch of tests, and here are the results in black and white: for most people, in most circumstances, the optimal amount of RAM is 8GB. There are circumstances where 16GB is better, but they don’t come up often, not often enough to justify the expense of the additional 8GB of RAM. And, of course, virtualization is a different matter altogether: if you like running a bunch of virtual machines on your system, more RAM is absolutely better. But for most users, most of the time, 8GB is plenty. Click the link to find out why.
I own a cheap Android phone. Here’s why: I owned three Android phones before my current one. These phones cost between $179 and $299 each. And they were all pieces of junk. Random reboots, lock-ups, stock apps crashing… you name it. My carrier was nice enough to replace every single one of these phones at least once… they even replaced my third phone three times! But the phone kept locking up and rebooting several times a week.
I was nearly at my wit’s end. One day I noticed that my carrier had a $79.99 Android phone. I bought one out of sheer desperation, thinking I’d just use the crappy little phone until I could switch carriers or until my carrier updated their phone lineup, or something. But guess what? Aside from having a really subpar camera, this “crappy little phone” does almost everything I want an Android device to do, and it almost never locks up or reboots… and, unlike my previous three phones, this one easily lasts a whole day on a single charge!
Aside from the lackluster camera, my only other beef with the phone is that it comes with a meager 4GB of storage space total. And since Android itself takes up around 2GB of space, there’s only around 1.9GB of space to install my apps. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. I’m not one of those people who would have 600 apps on his phone, even if I had the space. Most everything I actually need fits on the phone.
Except for you, Facebook. Facebook is an unholy monster of an app, eating up as much storage as you can throw at it. There were times I’d get “insufficient storage space” errors when updating apps, and sure enough Facebook would be taking up over 250MB of space. Hell, the app itself takes up around 75MB, which is a ridiculous amount of space for a mobile app, and that’s not even taking into account any data or cache!
To its credit, Facebook realizes this. But instead of, ya know, working to make their app smaller and more efficient, they chose to create an all-new app for developing markets like India and China, places where my phone would be middle-of-the-pack rather than low-end.
It’s called Facebook Lite. I’ve had the app on my phone for a couple of weeks now, and the app itself takes up just 1.72MB. The entire install – including data and cache – takes up less than 5MB on my phone!
Photo shamelessly stolen from Cnet.
If you can get past the dated look of the app, there’s a lot to like here. It’s sleek. It’s fast. And – this is a huge plus for me – Facebook messaging is included in the app. Maybe you’re one of the people who likes Facebook and Messenger as two separate apps. I’m not. I don’t use it enough to care, so having it all as one unified app works better for me.
Like all changes, not everything is roses and champagne. The UI is clunky (at best), and it might take a while to learn where everything is in the app. The app doesn’t seem to have a location feature, or if so, it’s badly broken. If you like “checking in” to places, you’ll have to make do with making a regular post then adding a location, which you have to search for manually. And I don’t know why this is, but Facebook Lite doesn’t seem to have any idea where I am. Sometimes I’ll check in at a local place, and Lite thinks I’m 10 miles away (no biggie), but other times it thinks I’m hundreds of miles away. If I search for the name of a place with my city’s name in it (say, “Charlotte Pub”), it’ll sometimes return hits for Charlotte, NC… but other times it’ll return Charlotte, Alaska or Charlotte, Virginia. There’s just no consistency there.
But the worst thing about Lite is that it’s unavailable in the United States. If you fire up Play on your phone and search for “Facebook Lite”, you’ll get zero results. You can find it on the desktop version of Play, but you’ll be told that it’s “not compatible with any of your devices”. That’s because you’re in the US or Europe. You’ll have to sideload the app. Which is fine for nerds, but if you don’t know what “sideloading” is, read this first. Then head over to APK Mirror and download the app to your device and install it.
I used to consider myself “cutting edge” when it came to IT stuff. I joined Microsoft’s beta program so I could always have the newest operating system and office suite. I’d repartition my hard drive in the blink of an eye to try out a new Linux distro. I’d obsessively check FedEx’s tracking page every 10 minutes to see if a new gadget I’d ordered had arrived. And, once it did, I’d often flash the gadget with some kind of “alternate firmware”… or tweak it in some other way the manufacturer hadn’t intended.
A few years ago, though, I stopped doing all that. I just wanted a computer that worked day-in and day-out. I got burned buying so many crappy first-generation gadgets that I decided to let someone else try the latest technology. Also, most of my clients are small businesses that don’t have the money to upgrade to the latest and greatest “just because”. And why would they? End of support issues aside, if your company has a Small Business 2003 server and a bunch of XP desktops and everything works… why mess with it?
The point is, I’m kind of stuck in yesterday’s technology. So when I see something and think “why are they still doing that?” you know it’s gotta be old technology. And one thing that really strikes me as “old technology” is the bootable optical disc. Yes, Windows and Linux often come as ISO files that need to be burned to disc before use, but so do many run-of-the-mill utilities, like DBAN, the NT Offline Password Editor, and most disk imaging apps. I know why software companies distribute files via ISO… I just don’t know why, in 2015, people still want to burn them to disc. More importantly, why isn’t there some kind of app that can take any ISO and put it on a flash drive?
It’s an app that can take almost any ISO and make a bootable flash drive out of it. Want to put the Windows 10 ISO on a flash drive? No problem. Need to put DBAN on a flash drive? No problem. Need to put Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image on a flash drive? No problem. Just insert a flash drive into your USB slot, start Rufus, and make sure the correct drive is listed under “Device”. In most cases, all you need to do next is check the “Create a bootable disk using” box, make sure “ISO image” is selected, then choose the ISO file. Then click Start and wait a few minutes… and you’re done!
I have yet to find an ISO file that Rufus can’t use, and while Microsoft offers a “ISO to USB tool”, Rufus is much faster, and is more platform-agnostic. Try it out and tell us what you think!
A la carte cable – where you pay only for the channels you want – sounds like a great idea. But, as I’ve been saying for years, it’ll never happen, because that’s not how cable TV works.
Right now, anything from 2¢ to $6 of your cable bill goes to each channel per month. Syfy, for instance, costs 27¢ per subscriber per month. But if people could drop Syfy, how many people would, and how much would Syfy need to charge remaining subscribers? Example: under the current system, if Time Warner Cable has 20m subscribers and Syfy’s carriage fee is 27¢/month, TWC pays Syfy $5,400,000 per month. But if TWC went a la carte and 90% of TWC households dropped Syfy, Syfy would only get $540,000/month at the current rate. Syfy would have to charge their remaining subscribers $2.70/month just to get the same amount of revenue from TWC as before. But every increase they make will surely drop the total number of overall viewers: how many people out there love Syfy so much that they’d pay $5.99/month for it? $8.99/month? $10.99/month? $15.99/month? So Syfy gets caught in a death spiral of needing more money per subscriber, but being unable to raise their subscription fee because they’ll lose subscribers. And while going from 27¢ to $2.70/month doesn’t sound like a big increase, keep in mind that it’s going to happen to EVERY CHANNEL ON YOUR CABLE LINEUP. This might not be a big deal for single people, or couples with very narrow interests. But for a family of four – where Dad wants ESPN and NBC Sports, Mom wants HGTV and Food Network, Teenage Daughter wants E! and MTV, and Junior wants Nick and Disney – it quickly adds up.
So you, the consumer, will get screwed over in the end, ‘cos you’ll end up paying almost as much for a la carte as you do now, only now you’d get 17 channels instead of 200+ channels. Don’t believe me? CNBC ran the numbers; and found that a 17 channel bundle of cable networks could cost anywhere from $16 to $248 per month. And that’s not including broadcast networks, which are a double-whammy for cable providers: providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are required by law to carry local networks, but since 1992’s Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, networks can require payment to rebroadcast that programming. In most a la carte scenarios I’ve seen, cable customers would have to buy a basic “network package” for $25 to $35 a month, then pay anywhere from $2 to $25 per month for each additional cable channel. So a package with just your local broadcast networks and ESPN could cost around $60/month. That’s about the base fee most people pay for their cable now (not including taxes, fees, and equipment charges). And that’s just ESPN – it doesn’t include all of its related networks like ESPN 2 or ESPN U or ESPN Classic. If you included all those, your cable bill would be $112.52/month… just in channel fees. Of course, none of this includes taxes, fees, equipment rental fees, program guide fees, Internet service or home phone service.
And that, my friends, is why a la carte cable simply won’t work.
The “at sign” – often called “at symbol” or just “at” – is sometimes called an “atpersand” by pedants or, very rarely, a “strudel”. People who actually care about such things often call it the “commercial at”, from its use in commerce and accounting. This is because the symbol was used to mean “at a rate of”, such as “client says to sell 5,000 bushels of corn @ $6/bushel”.
Once you get away from English, things start to get interesting.
In Swedish, the symbol is called “snabel-a”, which means “elephant trunk-a”. Less commonly it’s called a “kanelbulle”, which means “cinnamon bun”. Which is just about the cutest thing ever! I think I’ll start calling them “cinnamon buns” myself! Disappointingly, Sweden’s IT people generally just call it “at” for brevity’s sake.
In French it’s called “arobase”, which comes from “a rond bas” (literally “lowercase round a”), a typographical term. In Quebec French, it’s often called a “commercial”, from its original use in commerce in English-speaking Canada and the United States. Although the “official” term in Quebec French is “arobas”, you often hear TV announcers and commercials use the Metropolitan French term.
Other languages seem to enjoy naming the symbol after animals. In Dutch (and related languages, like Afrikaans) it’s called a “apenstaartje”, which means “monkey tail”. Polish calls it a “malpa”, which means “monkey”. The Greeks call it a “papaki”, which means “duckling”, because the symbol is said to resemble a cartoon duck. In Finnish, the symbol seems to resemble cats: “kissanhäntä” (cat’s tail”) and “miukumauku” (“meow-meow”). And the Russians call it a “sobaka”, which means “dog”. And in Welsh it’s often called a malwen or malwoden, or “snail”.
But the relentless expansion of the English Empire continues. In Thailand, India, Latvia, Indonesia, Georgia (the country), Lithuania, Germany, Iceland, Croatia, Estonia, Hong Kong and Macau and the Irish-speaking parts of Ireland it’s just called “at”, or some local variation, like “et” or “ett” or “ag”.
There’s still room for fun, though: in Greenlandic and Inuit, the sign is called “aajusaq” which means “something that looks like an A”.
When big companies duke it out, it’s supposed to be consumers who win through lower prices and better products. But it doesn’t always work that way.
Consider the “Google vs. Microsoft” fight. Google makes Android, a popular operating system for smartphones. Microsoft traditionally made desktop software, like operating systems and office suites. But Google wants you to use their email service, Gmail, with Android devices. This is great if you’re starting from scratch, but what about people who have decades of information stored in Outlook? Couldn’t Google make some kind of free app that would sync calendar data between Outlook and Gmail? Well, they did, but they killed it on August 1, 2014.
Since then, people like me who use non-Gmail email accounts with Outlook have been scrambling to find a good replacement. It ain’t easy. Some of these apps are expensive: $49.95 for something that used to be free? Really? And some of them just plain suck: I tried one sync app that worked as an Outlook plug-in, and it added 37.7 seconds to Outlook’s start time, and often slowed the app to a crawl. There are a few webapps for this, but I’ve found them to be unreliable (either the software doesn’t work, or the whole dang company shuts down). And the webapps are often more expensive than desktop apps: instead of a one-time $49.95 fee, these jokers want me to pay $5.99/month for the rest of my life! Sure, most offer a discount for annual payments, but whatever.
But if you’re looking for alternatives to the old Google Calendar Sync, you should know that there are options out there.
One is Calendar Sync Free. As the name suggests, it’s a free program that comes either as a standalone app (with installer) or portable app (unzip and run). The app is not an Outlook plug-in, so it shouldn’t slow Outlook down when you’re not using it. It works, and works well for the few weeks I’ve used it. The downside is that the free version only syncs up to 30 days in the future. A $9.99 “Pro” version is available which can sync a customizable date range and can delete appointments with 2-way sync.
Calendar Sync Free
There’s also an app called Outlook Google Calendar Sync. This app is totally free, and aims to have all the great (non-crippled) features commercial apps have, like two-way sync, customizable date ranges, and automatic sync. It’s a little more difficult to set up – you have to authorize the app in Gmail, then enter a key Google gives you into the setup wizard. There are more options generally, and certain debugging features are turned on by default. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it works (the current version is a fork of an abandoned app, so there’s a lot of “housecleaning” going on at the moment). I like it, and hope to see big things from it in the future!
For some time now, Google Chrome has had a nifty feature: a little speaker icon appears on any tab that’s playing sound. That way you can easily figure out which tab is playing music, or an auto-play video, and kill the noise.
But it’s like Google didn’t think that feature all the way through. What would be really cool would be the ability to click on that little speaker icon and mute the tab completely. Well guess what? It’s now a hidden feature in Chrome!
Just open a browser tab and paste the following into the address bar:
chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting
Click the Enable checkbox and restart Chrome. Now you’ll be able to click on the speaker icon to mute a tab:
I’ve been with Virgin Mobile for almost 4 years now. They have decent coverage and nice data speeds, but what actually keeps me coming back is their $25/month plan: 300 minutes, unlimited texts and “unlimited” data (2.5GB) for the low, low price of $25/month.
What I don’t like about Virgin is the phones. My folks got me a Samsung Intercept for Christmas one year, and the phone locked up and required battery pulls several times a week. Virgin sent me a new Intercept, which locked up just as much. I kept a log of all my issues, and when I contacted them again a couple months later, they offered to replace the Intercept with the Motorola Triumph.
On paper, the Triumph was a nice phone for its time. It had a decent processor and nice large screen. But while it didn’t have major issues, like the Intercept, it had dozens of minor issues, most notably the GPS taking up to 10 minutes to get a lock. Time passed, and I got tired of all these issues. I also tired of having a phone with Gingerbread when the release of Kit Kat was imminent.
About that time, Virgin released a new phone, the Reef, which was a water-resistant version of the Triumph running a newer version of Jelly Bean. There were Internet rumors that this phone was made by Foxconn, not Huawei, and that several of the hardware issues had been fixed. It was (supposedly) everything great about the Triumph with none of the bad stuff!
So I went looking for one locally. But I couldn’t find one. What I did find was the Samsung Galaxy Ring. It looked just like an S3 or S4, only smaller. It ran Jelly Bean. And Walmart had it for $50 off: $129! I went to some other stores, but they didn’t have the Reef, and their Galaxy Rings were still $179. So I went back to WM and bought the Ring.
This is why impulse purchases can be a bad thing. When I got home, I went to Virgin’s site and read the reviews for the Ring, which talked about constant spontaneous reboots, and stock apps crashing. I ignored this at first, since my phone seemed to be OK. But within a few weeks… reboots happened. 3-4 a week. Sometimes I’d be in the middle of using the phone and it would reboot. But sometimes I’d wake up, check my email on it, then put it down on my desk and not touch it for two hours… and BOOM! Reboot out of the blue.
Oh, Android… you’re the operating system I love to hate. Android could be SO AWESOME, if only carriers would allow Google to update ALL handsets… and if Google would just fix some of the tiny annoyances that make Android so frustrating:
– I’ve owned four Android devices, The first ran Froyo, which was upgraded to Gingerbread. The second was a Gingerbread phone. The last two are a phone and tablet, each running Jellybean. Every single one of those devices had this “bug” where, after anywhere from two to six months, they’d stop being able to get a DHCP address from Wi-Fi. No combination of toggling airport mode on or off, or “forgetting” the network and adding it back, or rebooting and\or pulling the battery will fix it. Seems to me that there are only two ways to fix it: one is to switch to a static IP; this works great for home networks, but is absolutely useless for public Wi-Fi connections, since you don’t know what subnet the public router is on, or what addresses are available. Which is why the second fix – resetting the device – is the only real fix, and that means starting over from scratch. Hooray.
– Speaking of resetting a device… can anyone explain exactly how Android’s built-in “backup and restore” feature is supposed to work? I said that I’ve “owned four Android devices”, but It would actually be more accurate to say that I’ve owned 9 devices: 2 Samsung Intercept phones, 2 Motorola Triumph phones, 3 Samsung Galaxy Ring phones and 2 Asus MeMo tablets. The tablet had a bad pixel and was swapped out a few days after purchase. The Intercept was a piece of crap that constantly locked up and required battery pulls several times a week; Virgin Mobile replaced it once, then sent me the Triumph. The Triumph was much more stable, but not without issues of its own, including odd vertical lines developing on the screen, which is why VM replaced that phone. I bought the Galaxy Ring on impulse, not knowing that reviews on VM’s own website talk about spontaneous reboots and lock-ups. They’ve already replaced it twice, and I’m **this close** to sending in the third one as well.
Anyway, the point is… I’ve owned many Android phones, and have had to restore my stuff at least 7 times just for hardware swaps. That’s not counting the 15-20 additional resets I’ve done just to fix stuff (like the Wi-Fi issue), or when I’d upgrade the Triumph to the latest build of CM. But I’ve never been able to get the restore feature to work consistently.
On Ring #2, I went through setup and logged in to my Google account… and the phone immediately started downloading all the apps I’d had on Ring #1. All I had to do was wait 45 minutes or so for everything to download and install, then log in to any app that required it. Everything was just like it was before. Smooth! But when I moved to Ring #3 I did the exact same thing… and 45 minutes later, the only thing the phone had done was prompt me to update the pre-installed apps. It was the same when I reset the MeMo a few days ago: I checked the “Do you want to restore this device?” and… 20 minutes later… nothing. No sign whatsoever that anything had been updated or restored… just the prompt to update all the pre-installed apps. I’m assuming that iPhones have a similar restore feature. Does the iPhone version have some sort of progress indicator? Because that would be a nifty thing to have, knowing that the Android restore was somehow stuck at 0%, or was 23% done or whatever. Just “putting the phone down and hoping for the best” doesn’t seem like it works very well for me.
– But hey, at least with ICS Google finally allowed you to set up a Wi-Fi connection before it asked if you wanted to restore your files and settings. Nothing’s more fun than wasting 200MB of your 2.5GB data plan restoring your apps because Google can’t figure out the proper sequence of steps in a setup routine!
– In Jellybean (or maybe ICS, which I leapfrogged) Android introduced this SUPER ANNOYING warning message that comes up when you turn the volume past a certain point: “Listening to music at loud volumes for extended periods can damage your hearing” I have four problems with this: one, the warning comes up no matter what audio device you’re using, even Bluetooth; two, the threshold for the dialog is set way too low, if you turn the volume up past 33% – as most people would – it comes up every single time; three, the dialog is modeless, not modal… which means that instead of retaining focus, the message can “fall behind” your music or video player, so you have to exit the player, press “OK” on the message, then restart the player; four, there is no “don’t show this again” check box. You can say what you will about Microsoft, but I can’t think of a similar warning message in Windows that DOESN’T come with a “don’t show this again” option.
– And hey – the Android API is up to version 19, and there’s STILL no option to mute notification sounds when listening to music. Sure, you can go to settings and manually mute the sounds… but then you’d have to go back and un-mute them when you’re done. Would it be SO HARD for Android to have an API that allows music players to add a “when music’s playing, don’t play notification sounds” option? This is one of the most common questions asked of third-party media player creators, and their unanimous answer is: “great idea, tell Google to add it to the OS”.
– “Insufficient Storage Available”. This is annoying as shit. I picked up my phone last night after several hours of not using it, only to find that the battery was much lower than I’d expected. Why? Because Android was fruitlessly and repeatedly trying to update the Facebook app. I had 507 MB of free space in main storage, yet somehow that wasn’t enough to update a 20.1 MB app. Thus: “Insufficient Storage Available”. But WHY Android needs free space in excess of 25 times the app it’s installing is a mystery.
