Euchre

I love the acetylene test shot in the studio, that obliterated the tree. I laughed pretty damn hard at that one.

Well, yeah - they basically had to. However, the likes of this Equifax failure show that the world hasn't learned its lesson when it comes to deploying technology.

Dell doesn't actually operate the 'extended warranty' you purchase from them, that's 3rd party, and it had to be that way by law. It may have been an Assurion product, which wasn't famous for doing the best job at customer satisfaction. They love to provide the cheapest solution possible, and it is often worse the more expensive the product is. This means a lot of refurbs are offered in place of refunds or identical, new product, even when possible. They do tend to be a bit of a cluster. Oh, and they do 'outsource' most of their 'agents'. Everyone talking about Dell's warranty service being great are probably talking about their internal support for their included warranty. You pretty certainly wouldn't run into the trainwreck that we're hearing about here, The best you'd probably get from Dell would be a decent discount on a new laptop, which would be great. Assurion, on the other hand, will probably do nothing but drop you like a searing hot rock.

It was a contractor, but from what I can see the contractor was still working with them (this is common in retail - they don't service their own HVAC normally), and that contractor's systems were compromised via a malicious link in an email. The contractor stored the credentials on their systems in plain text apparently, although the vector would've been an easy one to get via word of mouth from any 3rd party contractor or vendor. So, an unhappy former vendor rep could've given credentials out just as easily, or been social engineered into giving them out. Any credential would do. If Target's systems had been configured properly, such 3rd parties would not have been able to compromise the POS systems, at least without another flaw like a zero day or other unaddressed exploit to allow elevation of privileges. And no, you couldn't use me for a recommendation, for several reasons, none so glamorous as having been involved with that hack, though.

Sure! Also, you should see about an IT job with Target! (For those that don't know, in 2013 Target suffered a major data breach because a 3rd party login allowed access to the ENTIRE internal network, including that for the POS [Point Of Sale] systems, including the card readers that the hackers were able to exploit to capture 41-70 million debit and credit cards. Everyone from the Pepsi vendor to the CEO had the same level of network access.)

For the matter of '5G' vs '5Ghz': the former can use the latter, but as implemented in the US, and most anywhere thus far, the latter is not used for the former. The 5G spec allows for the communication technology (the method of communication) to be used across a nearly insanely wide spectrum of frequencies. As of this point, the US is using the 2.5Ghz band for 5G cellular. On the whole here, "5G" is just being used as a marketing tool, nothing more. 4G wasn't even made an official spec before US carriers were going nuts referring to their technologies as such, and in the end don't really meet the standards set forth by the 3GPP to be true 4G. When you can't get 100mbps downloads on cellular, you aren't yet experiencing full 4G, so moving on to '5G' is like going to college on an elementary education. The whole '5G' branding is being used to encourage people to switch providers and get new devices, because carriers need cash flow. Verizon is sunsetting its 3G network at the end of this year, and bragging about '5G' helps push more people into newer devices, and allowing for the 'downcycling' of 4G devices to help migrate people off of 3G hardware. Many Verizon customers I've spoken to who are still using 3G devices complain that Verizon doesn't even have 5G yet (in their area, or in any practical sense), so they have 'no reason to force everyone onto 4G' (their perception). Since marketing is all about perception, you can see how this plays out. I sometimes get to explain to them how getting rid of 3G CDMA ('non-SIM' to the common user) is a good thing, as in theory we should be entering a time when all US carriers can roam on each others' networks. AT&T will be sunsetting their 3G network by 2022, despite the fact that there's no serious reason they can't continue to support 3G GSM devices on the network on their secondary bands, as LTE is nicely backward compatible, and 5G technologies appear to be right in the same line of compatibility as well. However, no carrier in the US wants to be seen as the 'backwards' carrier, nor are they fond of not selling more devices every year, so AT&T will push 3G out, ostensibly to give way for '5G'. So the marketing obfuscation will continue, and we'll see iterations of pointless 'newness' that aren't real improvements for years to come, because people don't understand what they're really getting. Anybody remember WiMAX? Yeah, that sucked for anything other than urban cheap internet.

I'm sitting here reading this on a super basic 15" HP laptop with a Celeron dual core CPU, 4gb of RAM, and a 500gb hard drive. I got it on a lucky clearance deal for $69. If I was being picky, I would never have chosen it, but a brand new laptop when I didn't have anything newer than 8 years old, with a warranty, was too good of a deal to pass up. I always am one to 'tune' on my machines, and pare down everything I can to get the most out of them, so I uninstalled and removed the bloatware of free trials and extraneous things. It runs respectably, boots surprisingly fast, but I'm not playing even relatively modest Steam based games like Portal on it, even though I think theoretically it could. It chokes on 1080p60fps YouTube videos, after all. When you just need a system that isn't obsolete so you can log into things for work and paying bills, you don't get too worried about if your system can game or not. I later caught a deal on an HP display laptop, 17", AMD A8 CPU, other better specs, for just over $100. That's my machine for Steam and full HD video and such. So, I'm still less than $200 into 2 laptops, one that stays home mostly, and another that travels. I think dad is trying to teach OP a lesson in being an adult. As my finances improve, and if I can get ahead on some necessary projects, maybe I can afford to build another $650-$800 desktop that looks cool and can really grind out a workload like some serious video rendering and gaming. Meanwhile, the heat stays on and I don't have to live on ramen.

Yes, it is bad - because it is the default. They didn't exactly explain the whole nature of the setup, but this sounds like the default configuration of a lot of NAT devices, from home routers up to enterprise web servers. Chances are, the login was default, and the remote administration option was on by default, and left on. It takes literally seconds to change that configuration so you have a non-default password and remote administration is turned off. People commonly fail to do this on their home routers, but for an enterprise to do it is pathetic.

That means done by the lowest bidder who fulfilled the bid using the minimum specs required in the cheapest way possible. Remember that. Trusting a 3rd party for high level security you're selling to your customer means you vet your partners extremely carefully, to avoid such issues. They did not do enough of that, apparently.

Do your speakers have their own volume control independent of the Windows volume control? If so, and you've got both turned up anywhere past half way, it'll amplify small artifacts of noise like the sudden drop of signal from the PC. If you're leaving the speakers on, turn them off before you turn the PC off.

Cortana was not really designed to be uninstalled, so chances are, the 'debloater' can't stop all components and dependencies on the system without risking problems caused by hard coded behaviors of the OS. This was pretty true of IE back in the day, and why it has taken a while to weed IE out of Windows as a required component. It is very likely this service is running as a legacy of Cortana, and can't be disabled truly, nor is it able to truly listen and deliver output to anything, since the Cortana front end is gone.

The computer I use most at my work is a POS. I mean literally, a POS. OK, ok, so that means "point of sale". Not sure exactly what all software it runs. The second most commonly used 'computer' I deal with is a Symbol handheld scanner that runs Android. Lastly, I log into other company assets via a little 'dumb terminal' that looks like a Netgear router. I think the OS is a terminal services equivalent of either XP or Vista. Yeah, enterprise infrastructure in a non-tech company can be really out of date.

If there's a device anywhere on the same breaker panel that is creating new line noise, like a space heater, it'll have an impact on the effectiveness of the powerline adapter. This is one of the reasons they're far from an ideal solution. If you are literally directly above that router, and your wifi connects poorly, and the house isn't so ancient that it has metal hiding in the walls (like chicken wire to hold plaster on lathe), then look at how your antennas are oriented. The pictures show them with the 2 outer ones slightly splayed, which I think is done to make it look 'cool', but the position alters the propagation of the signal itself, quite a bit. Believe it or not, laying the center antenna flat, straight out from the back of the router, could actually massively increase your signal directly upstairs.

Dogs are companions, cats are roommates. Not every dog has a lot of character, most cats have quite a bit. Dogs are notoriously loyal and obedient. There are times I value the pros of each, and that's why I've had both cats and dogs at varying times all through my life. We have a dog and 2 cats right now. Love 'em all.

Over on the right, every new video shows up the moment it is up on YouTube. There's a thread for every one of them. They ask for input on videos on this very forum. They suggest you join in many of the videos. It is only as disconnected as you let yourself feel it is. LMG is a well organized enterprise, and produces respectable products.

How much did you pay to join the forum? They don't sell hardware. They sell branded merch. They sell your eyes and ears to advertisers. Leftover stuff that they used in projects are already paid for, one way or another. They could sell them, but that's not really the business they're in, and giving some things away to the people that make them their money is a good way to make them feel involved.

If he seriously only plays Freecell, you could just dig up another old ancient PC that can run Windows 95, and install it with pretty much everything else left out of the installation. 95 will fit on 35mb of space, or even less (forget how small I pared it down to, back in the day). Once installed, you can edit the system.ini file so the "shell=" ends with freecell.exe instead of explorer.exe - so it'll literally boot straight into Freecell. I actually used to do this kind of edit to the shell line to screw with people, notably my own father, when he wouldn't share the supposed 'house' computer with anyone else because he had 'important work to do', and yet only sat there playing Solitaire. Well, I made sure that's all he could do. Got the point across for a while. Then I built my mother, myself, and helped my brother build systems, to end the domination games.

When you say 'tea', do you mean unsweetened tea, sweet tea, hot, or cold? Believe it or not, this all matters. Sugar makes things a lot worse. If it was hot tea with milk or cream and sugar, you're even worse off. Any tea has tannic acid in it - well, that's basically what tea is - and that can cause a slight corrosion shortly after contact. Besides being conductive (due to the high water content), that can cause issues with fine solder leads like you'll find attaching chips to boards. Sugar leaves a nasty coating, and will cause heat issues, as well as helping to attract and retain moisture. Milk or cream would leave fats and particulate crud behind, adding to heat insulation, as the sugar does too. Generally, if you get a sugary liquid on your electronics, you need to remove power right away, if possible, and if it doesn't immediately short itself out anyway. If no immediately evident damage or failure happened, you need to disassemble the device (still turned off and removed from any power source, of course) and clean it thoroughly and completely before attempting to reassemble and power back up. Use distilled water on a very damp paper towel or microfiber cloth to wash away the sugary residue. Clean, distilled water is surprisingly safe for cleaning electronics, so long as you aren't leaving it in a bath of the stuff or while it has any power available. If you are concerned about getting it dry enough, chase with alcohol, like 90% isopropyl, and use gentle warming to help evaporate it quickly. Do not use a full power heat gun, or hair dryer - the latter being a good way to both melt and static charge your electronics. Your other friend in being sure the electronics are dry after cleaning is time, so you can leave your parts out overnight to dry. Even if you seem to have cleaned everything and avoided initial or subsequent damage, once you've exposed an electronic component to substantial moisture, especially other than pure water, you can never really trust it again. Any 'mission critical' tasks should not be considered reliable on such electronics. If you don't mind your game being interrupted by your GPU suddenly smoking itself, and possibly taking other components of your system with it, then don't worry too much. However, if that system is your main or only system, and your important schoolwork or banking info is on it, plan on getting a new GPU sooner than later. If the system has onboard graphics, you'd be better to pull the card and go back to that, if the system is a critical machine.

I think all of you missed something here.... The external power supply brick, the charger, isn't like one of the swappable modules inside. You aren't going to suddenly lose one of those easily. Those modules aren't completely outside of the hardened chassis of the laptop. Just as easily as you could damage or lose a set of headphones you use to listen to your laptop audio, you can lose the charger. The external power supply on most laptops that aren't even hardened, just common, commodity laptops, are easily replaced with a universal charger available off the shelf in many kinds of retail stores all over the place. I also think many of you are thinking in terms of an IT department dealing with a campus of a company. The IT department's spares aren't going to be closer than the nearest town's retail stores, in the kind of applications I'm talking about. These are workers in a company truck or rental car, staying in a hotel that's 20 miles away from their worksite, hundreds of miles away from the nearest company facilities. Even if the IT dept. has a spare power supply to send you, it'll take just as long as an overnight shipment from Amazon. FedEx, UPS, the postal services - it is going to take the same time to ship 'hotshot' from Amazon as it would from IT. Even if the company runs a 'hotshot' delivery of its own, that's crazy expensive of a solution for something that could be solved in a few hours at most, for under $100. All because they didn't use the most common input voltage. 19v and the problem is fixed.

I've actually suggested to iPhone users buying replacement Lightning to 3.5mm dongles to hot glue the dongle to the cord. More than one said that was a great idea.

Someone probably watches too much NCIS and Criminal Minds. Law Enforcement and government agents in anything less than 'dark' agencies don't hack into anything without a warrant, most especially other agencies of the government. That'd lead to a trail of bureaucratic headaches for miles before getting into the criminal issues and liabilities. I see people here questioning knowing what hacking is, or saying they know, but nobody offers to define it. The most commonly used legal standard of "hacking" is gaining unauthorized access to a computer (broadly applied as anything from a desktop to a cell phone) or network (broadly applied as anything from a web server to voicemail systems). So, if you look under a mouse pad or trick someone into telling you their password to log into a system they have authorized access to, you're a hacker. We in the tech enthusiast and IT professional worlds tend to think of it as much more elaborate than that, setting the bar at a much higher level - but if you look at some of the most famous hackers in the world, accepted and acknowledged by the community itself, you'll see many don't get much more elaborate than that for their biggest exploits. Adrian Lamo (RIP), Kevin Mitnick, Johnny Long, and many others have great examples of this. To the tech community, being a hacker is more about a state of mind and level of ability, regardless of the exact nature of that ability, than a specific set of skills or actions. I say this because when speaking to less tech oriented people, I've had people say "So you're a hacker." and I had been saying no, that I am not. Then I remember that in my most fondly remembered adventure with tinkering with computer access, what I achieved is by that general legal standard, hacking. Now when posed with the accusation or attribution that I am a hacker, I'll say "Technically, yes - but in reality, I'm just an enthusiast." From a community point of view, I'm always looking for those things that make it possible to gain more access or modify the behavior of technology, so even then I sort of qualify. However, I don't run around boldly declaring "I'm a hacker.", because neither the layman nor the enthusiast would find it credible vs their grand expectations. My bet is OP's friend is one of those layman types who believes when someone makes the bold claim, because they don't know any better.

I ran into a problem (which I mentioned in a comment to the video itself) with these Panasonic ToughBooks that is a big, giant, glaring one when used by the market that is prime: availability of replacement charging power supplies. These are used by telecommunications techs a fair bit, and by specialty techs who work in tough environs or on very heavy, specialized equipment (think oil fields, large factories, mines). They are often in places far from easy access to retail or fast delivery of freight. If they lose or break a charger, they can't really wait 1-2 days of shipping time for replacement, at least without a seriously costly downtime for whatever they're working on. I had a guy come looking for a replacement for his ToughBook, and found out they don't use the very common, nearly ubiquitous 19v input; they use 15.6-16v. They also appear to often have a peculiar connector, which doesn't help things. So, your chances of finding a replacement charger in the field on short notice are pretty close to zero. Maybe this is why Panasonic offers 40-80 hrs of battery capability, so hopefully you've got 2 charged batteries to get you through the long wait of ordering a replacement shipped to your current location in the ass end of nowhere. Of course, how likely are you to find out your brick is dead or maybe even damaged until you find the battery is dead and you're needing to plug in to get your work done? Maybe Linus could whisper in the ears at Panasonic and suggest a more common input voltage be used.

Check your various settings in your BIOS for what to do in case of power loss (some default to boot up), or if you have wake on LAN (WOL) enabled. This is assuming you are shutting down Windows itself, not just logging off or putting it to 'sleep'. Things like Bluetooth devices might even wake a sleeping system.

Every form of security, even those of low robustness, is a useful layer in a total security approach. Sounds like not an unpopular opinion, right? Try suggesting that turning off SSID broadcast represents a useful layer of security in your wireless network. Many, many times have I been chided for suggesting it as part of the most secure wireless network setup you can have. Security through obscurity isn't a robust tactic by itself, for absolutely sure, but it is a valid layer in a deeply layered security defense plan. If you are where there are many visible APs, someone looking for an opportunity will go for ones they can immediately see first, unless you are already their specific target. Even if you are isolated in a rural place like I am now, if the SSID doesn't show up until someone communicates with it (the easiest way to overcome a lack of SSID broadcast is promiscuous packet inspection), someone is likely to assume you simply have no wireless network at all. Since availability of access is already low, it is easier to assume there is none and move on. Attacking a wireless network requires physical proximity, and a person or vehicle in a rural area that doesn't normally exist there stands out to everyone who is normally there. This is just one example. There are others. Working retail, I have coworkers who won't use some security devices in their departments because 'they'll just cut them off anyway'. I remind them that they aren't there to be absolute security, but raise the bar of who will attempt to steal something, and slow even skilled and determined people enough that wary workers should be more likely to catch and interrupt attempts at theft. Relying on only one layer that is supposedly most robust, or giving up and applying none at all, is a worse solution than using every layer you can.

How's this for clean? That's pretty much how both my laptops look. Thanks to the icon biased nature of Android, my tablets and old phone turned media player have some icons crapped around on my ubiquitous wallpaper. My old BrewOS slider phone even sports a suitably sized variation of this wallpaper, and the main screen has no icons. I despise icons/shortcuts/files crapped on the desktop. I also customize my Start Menu/main menu on devices to streamline them.