I was at my grandparents’ house, and they had a bunch of guests over for dinner.  They were discussing an electronic design project I was working on, and became convinced that I wasn’t dealing with a particular signal correctly under all conditions.  They were really getting on my case about it, even though I explained [...]

I visited a friend and her family living near Washington DC.  I ended up house-sitting for them while they went on vacation. I got to know some of the neighborhood kids.  One of them gave me a tour of the neighborhood and told me who lived in each house on the block.
Some kind of plumbing [...]

So if I buy the “Free 4X Life Printer” for which I’ve been getting spam lately, and print out my life at 4X, will it look any better than my life does at actual size?

I was in Colorado, so I decided to go visit Phil, an engineer at a Big Company in Broomfield (northwest of Denver, on the way to Boulder). At reception I asked to see him, and after a few minutes he showed me to his cube, and we started discussing things. He showed me [...]

Sorry for the short notice, but I just found out myself that there is an Assembly Elections Committee hearing tomorrow (April 18) for AB 2097, which would require that the specifications and technical details (including source code) for voting machines be available for public scrutiny. Without this, voters have no way to be confident [...]

On our lunch hour, a coworker and I stopped by the bank.  I just used an ATM, and then waited in the car while my coworker was inside.  Unbeknownst to me, he robbed them.  When he came back and got in the car, I drove away, not realizing that anything was amiss.
We were captured by [...]

Professor Ed Felten writes about how HDCP Could Have Been Better, primarily by using well-known but more secure cryptography rather than a homebrew algorithm. He points out that the reason the flawed HDCP algorithm is being used may be due to a requirement of a very small gate count for the silicon implementations.
We (the [...]

My apartment had gotten messy while my roommate was out of town, so I needed to clean it up before he returned.  But when I got home, the power was out.  I’d remembered to pay the phone bill, but I’d forgotten about the electric bill.  Without power, I couldn’t check the utility’s web site to [...]

I upgraded the dual Opteron server (Tyan S2892 motherboard) from 2GB of RAM to 4GB, but the BIOS only finds 3GB of it. I’d put the memory on the second CPU. At first I thought perhaps one of the DIMMs wasn’t seated properly, so I reseated both. Still no go. Then [...]

I have a server machine in a colo facility. The facility provides carts with monitors, keyboards, and mice. The monitors are CRTs. Last night I changed the hardware configuration of a machine, and since I was having problems I needed to see the BIOS startup screen. However, these “smart” power-saving monitors [...]