A while ago I purchased an entire box of Indian Tabac’s “Fire” cigars. I bought
them having never had a cigar by Indian Tabac before, and of course
never having had the Fire line either. Based on what I’d been
reading in the forums, Indian Tabac makes some good cigars, so I figured
it wouldn’t be a huge risk. I just had my first one of them
tonight, and I’m pleased to say they were a good choice.
Back when I began doing OS X For instance, to automatically get all the latest required softwareupdate -q -i This works fine for most This is precisely the situation Apple placed me in as an
administration, I asked myself how I could automatically keep the OS X
systems updated without having to login to them remotely each day to run
Software Update and without giving end users administrator access to the
machines (which is a no-no in our corporate security policy). I found
out that Apple makes it pretty easy to do this with the command line,
which means it can be setup to run in a cron job.
updates from Apple installed on a machine without having to do it
manually, you can create a cron task to issue the following command as
root:
-r
users, most of the time. Unfortunately, what if you’re a QuickTime Pro
user and Apple puts out a QuickTime update marked as
“required”? That’s right, Software Update will dutifully
download the new version and install it over top of the version you’re
registered for. Unless you have the time and money to call them and buy
a new registration code for the new version of QuickTime, your
“Pro” features are all locked down again.
administrator a while ago. One of our artists’ machines was
automatically updated to Quicktime 7.0 from 6.5.2 Pro, rendering the
“Pro” functionality inactive. Because of the way things work
in our corporate environment, it’s not a quick or simple process for him
to just buy the new registration code. It means a lengthy purchase
process that can take weeks, sometimes even months. An artist can’t do
without QuickTime for that long. But as the Mac Administrator, I
couldn’t do without the systems getting their security updates for that
long. Apple had once again put me in a bind.
Note: I did not read the printed version of this novel, but
listened to the audiobook version, which was unabridged. However,
since it’s a complete re-creation of the novel, I think this qualifies
me for a review of the book and the audiobook since there’s not much
difference.
Having watched the previous Harry Potter movies
(except “Azkaban”), I had a pretty good picture of the world
and the characters depicted in them. Although the author does a
decent job of filling someone in if they have some understanding of the
books’ environment, if you were going to read this having never seen the
movies or the previous books, chances are you’d be a bit in the dark
about a lot of things. I believe this because I heard references made to
the “Prisoner of Azkaban” events in the book that I didn’t
quite understand.
The folks at CigarBid.com
periodically offer “Carmen’s Sampler”, which is a bundle of
cigars that they describe as being first-quality stuff but with
blemishes, rips, tears, or other problems that prevent them from being
sold as top-quality, new cigars. I was a little cautious about bidding
on these because you have no idea what you’re going to get, but I
finally “went for it”. Here’s a photo and description of
what I received for my bid (which I’d say was worth the price)…
The Pinar 1958 Series B Pre-Embargo
Cuban Rothschild cigar is frequently being sold on the CigarBid.com auctions lately. The forum
participants on the site have discussed this cigar a few times, and the
general consensus was pretty middle-of-the-road. Some liked it,
some didn’t, and some were indifferent. Having recently purchased
a 5-pack at auction, I decided to try one out. Since none of the
reviews I read on the forum covered the smoking experience in detail, I
decided to do that here. In fact, this review is probably going to be more detailed than any of my
earlier reviews.
It was last year that I first heard of Bowling for Soup (BFS). It
didn’t take long for their “1985″ song to get to me, being a
child of the 80’s. I now have all their albums. This one,
which I hadn’t heard, recently became available on the Rhapsody music
service. I decided to give it a spin. Here’s my review.
Panda Antivirus Platinum dutifully reminded me tonight that I have only
28 days to renew my subscription to their update service. Last
year, I blindly renewed because I didn’t want to take time out to look
at my other options. Panda’s product is a good one, though I had
some problems with its firewall and update procedures. The
firewall didn’t like MMORPGs very well, especially if they had updated
recently, which most do pretty often. Other network based games
had similar problems, where Panda’s attempt to bring up a warning about
a program trying to access the network would crash, slow down, or at the
very least interrupt a gaming session. The updates often had
trouble connecting to Panda’s servers, and frequently displayed messages
about it, even though they would connect a few minutes or hours later
successfully. So I decided it was time to look at
alternatives. And being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided to look
at open source (free) alternatives. This search brought me to the
open source “ClamWin” AntiVirus package. I’ll
review that package here.
Hard Disk Drive
Troubleshooting
The troubleshooting of hard disk drive
problems could probably fill an entire book. When it gets down to
the bottom line, however, there are three basic kinds of problems you
might have with a hard disk drive. Each requires very different
troubleshooting actions and different levels of risk.
I’ve been working in the computer industry for almost 20 years
now. During that time, I’ve heard a number of my less-technical
friends and co-workers tell me that they’re “running out of
memory” on their computer. After I ask a few questions about
what they mean, it’s clear to me that they don’t understand the
difference between “memory” and “disk space”.
If they were to ask a salesperson at a computer store to sell them some
“memory” for their computer, they might get some very
expensive hardware that wouldn’t solve the real problem. Just so
that this doesn’t happen to you, I thought I might give you a few
different explanations of what “memory” and “disk
space” really are, so that you know what to ask for and why.
Periodically, I take a look at the search results that led people to
my web site. In a recent examination, I saw that several people asked
the question “What is the importance of a
motherboard?” and sought an answer. For a seasoned
technical support person like myself, the answer to that question is
quite obvious, but to someone who isn’t that familiar with what is
inside his or her computer, it’s a mystery. Since a number of you
obviously want to know the answer to that question, here it is, as much
in layman’s terms as I can make it.