Preparing for possible retirement. (I love hardware). Planning to add another tower to replace an obviously slow and aging one. Dedicating my recently installed pc with enhanced graphics and large storage to video editing while using the prospective new one mostly for the print media. Will try the SSD at 1TB and enough RAM to ward off obsolescence. 1TB secondary storage. 16gb Ram. Use 27" monitor perched between the towers with a 14" monitor above. Remote drives with TB capacities for each pc. 2 printers (one high capacity), 500 WT stereo with speakers and large classical collection. External DVD writers. DVD copier and letter folder for tracts. Recently subscribed WiFi provider provides excellent service, finally, with download/upload almost equable to the old hardwire broadband in the big City. It all looks very formidable which is likely the point, but with remote controller I can kick back and command a universe from my recliner with surround sound and great visuals. Happy yet one more birthday to yours truly
Friend in California relapses - now in iron lung, while his wife improves at home. Don't know how he got access to the machine - hospital is inundated. They are near Sacramento and the area is hard hit.
Just got a few more struts measured, cut and screwed into place. I figured while I had my bags of drywall I might as well pull down another section of drywall and then figured that while I had my oscillating tool in hand I might as well cut the last exposed featherboards and get those pried off the wall. So now I have a sixth full bag of drywall scraps and am distinctly running out of space to put more bags. I'm debating whether to feed it out to the garbage company 40lb at a time or just take the whole lot to the landfill. My guess is that I have about 400lb of the stuff, maybe a little more, so it's just a matter of $20 at the landfill and the gas to get there (and loading all this junk into my car) or no cost but taking three months to see the back of it all.
Tonight I got my wife's laptop upgraded to her shiny new SSD. It was a little more convoluted than I had hoped. I copied the partitions only to find the disk wouldn't boot. It turned out the free version of the software I was using won't clone boot images. It's software I like so I upgraded to the full version. Cloning a 250GB drive from another 250GB drive with both connected to my laptop via USB took less than half an hour. Now her laptop runs really fast, so she's happy. It really makes me think more seriously about getting an upgrade for my laptop - migrating to SSD and also increasing the storage while I'm at it. I just need to know a little more about how encryption on SSDs work - a $30 drive is the sort of thing I'd just dump if it failed in a couple of years but if it's a $300 drive I'd want it replaced, and don't want to return a drive with all my data on it.
I checked some temperatures, given it's hanging around freezing outside. In the cupboard under the sink in the room I'm working on it used to drop to the low 30s. Tonight it was 43. So that tells me what I'm doing is achieving something. Hopefully that will be reflected in our heating bills.
Ironically it was thanks to the fuhrer shutting everything down that I started taking exercise more seriously. Now I think I'm about as fit as I've ever been in my life.
Speaking of SSD, my current laptop is 500GB with 16GB RAM. After a year, I am surprised at how this thing survives my rough, dusty use and at it's dazzling performance. I have a history of busting a few and my big thumbs inhibit most DYI servicing. No optical drive etc, makes for a thin, solid-state and durable device with zero noise. Progress!
I must admit I was hesitant to put the extra money in to the laptop. We only paid $50 for it, so the thought of spending $45 on a memory upgrade, $30 on an SSD, $12 on a cable so we could connect the SSD and clone her existing drive, and then $50 to upgrade my partition management software to enable cloning boot drives, seemed like quite a lot to put into it. But then the cable and software are useful going forward and even if we notionally assign the entire cost to her laptop upgrade the $140 or so is still a lot cheaper than buying a new laptop, even a very basic one. Since some of it (specifically the cable and software) have future uses, not least when it's time to put an SSD into my laptop, the effective cost of her upgrade really isn't all that much. She could still use a new battery but that's about as easy an upgrade as they come.
If you ever need help coming up with exc... reasons for buying cables, SSDs, etc., let me know and I'll think up a good half dozen for you. Do you know how much time I've saved by going to a hotkey-driven 60% keyboard layout, from a full layout, even though the full layout works just fine? The amount of time I've saved moving my hands off the keys and towards the arrows, or towards my mouse, is incredible. Seconds, each time. Lessened risk of RSI, etc.
I don't need excuses. I already have multiple boxes of cables, many of which are long obsolete. I think I still have a black box that once connected an Apple II to an HP-IB printer interface. I've got 25-pin serial gender changers, 9-to-25-pin connectors, adapters to go from PS-2 to full-size keyboard sockets and more USB cables of varying types than you could shake a stick at. It's a pretty standard development - a new cable comes out, every single device from there on comes with a new cable and by the time the next cable comes out you've got 493 of the old ones. I still only have two cables for charging a USB-C device, which is a bit of a drag. I just object to paying $14.99 for a cable and don't really feel like buying something from ebay with the full CE marking (that even the CE testers say stands for Chinese Emporium) and hope it doesn't catch fire while charging something.
It looks like data encryption on an SSD is achieved with a combination of a Drive Encryption Key (DEK) and Authentication Key (AK). The DEK is associated with the drive and the AK is associated with the machine. The bit I was missing was the AK. If a drive is encrypted there needs to be a key stored somewhere other than on the drive, to prevent someone who stole the drive from just plugging it into a different machine and letting it decrypt itself. Apparently the AK is something the BIOS asks for when starting up and if you get it wrong it doesn't mount the drive. I'd imagine that some drive locking software would do the same thing but for that to work you'd need to boot from a different drive. Now I just need to figure whether the BIOS in my laptop supports drive encryption. If not I'll need to figure some other way. I believe my laptop can boot from an mSATA device but only up to 128GB - that's enough for my boot volume so if needs be I can maybe boot from one physical device while keeping the other one locked. I have a DVD rewriter in the laptop that I never use. I think the only time I've opened the DVD drive in the last 4-5 years has been by accident. It would be nice to be able to get a caddy that would fit into the space and let me mount another SATA device, that way I could have a larger boot device than 128GB and then a nice big data drive. But if my BIOS will support an AK then it would be nice to know my primary boot drive was also encrypted.
It looks like my laptop's BIOS doesn't support authentication keys. Does anyone know of a way this can be done with software? The worst case scenario is that I can encrypt individual files and decrypt as needed, I'd just leave my photographic folders unlocked. I have hardware dongles that generate random numbers so it's easy enough to encrypt both the file contents and file names. I'd really prefer to keep the entire drive encrypted and not have to remember to encrypt everything sensitive.
On a non-computer related note, can someone explain to me this notion of 'insurrection' with respect to what happened in the capitol? - Where the military involved? - Was there a manifesto? - Was the place burned to the ground or significantly damaged? - Did people really just kind of occupy the space, troll around, take pictures, and have no plan, leadership, guidance, etc.? What about what happened was an 'insurrection'? Can someone also explain to me why it's a good idea for a private company to be banning a world leader from what is essentially the online public sphere? I'm going to assume that there are no good answers other than 'orange man bad'.