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Posts Tagged ‘computers’

I spent the last week at war.

In the wee hours, late last week, I awoke to email alerts regarding my personal Facebook account. It had been disabled.

My first thought was that one of my more political posts had rubbed someone the wrong way and they’d reported me, but as I investigated, I learned that, no, someone had gained access to my account and had done something that violated Community Standards.

I’d been hacked.

I tried to recover control, but Facebook’s algorithms denied me and summarily deactivated my account. This also deactivated the “author” page I ran on Facebook, where I echo posts from here. As far as Facebook was concerned, I was a non-entity. (more…)

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My father was an analog man.

Etched Limestone Lithography Block

The grandson of a charcoal burner (yes, that was a thing), the son of a cement truck driver, my father was an artist by passion and a lithographer by trade, back in the day when his trade was not far removed from actual litho-graphy, i.e., etching graphics on hunks of limestone (like the one I still have, pictured, right).

As his life progressed, the world moved from Ford’s Model T to Tesla’s Model 3, from The Great Depression to The Great Recession, from flying across the Atlantic to flying to the Moon and Mars, and from the wireless and talkies to smart phones and streaming video. Yet through it all, he managed to never use a computer, even when his industry embraced the technology of digital scanning, imagery, and on-demand printing. The closest he got to the digital world was a DVD player (which he rarely employed, preferring broadcast television) and his little clamshell phone (which he used only in emergencies, and often not even then). (more…)

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Blue SunThis is your bi-annual reminder about regular diagnostics and backup procedures.

“Jeez, Unca Kurt! That’s boring!”

Sorry, chirren. This is Important Stuff.

This past weekend, I was thankful I had taken my own advice.

About 2 weeks ago, during my regularly scheduled diagnostics run, the program (the HP-supplied Hardware Diagnostics Tool, powered by PC-Doctor), the tests reported errors on my main hard drive. Specifically, it was an HD521-2W error code which meant (I learned, after a quick search) that IO errors were occurring on the main partition.

Translation: my C: drive was dying. (more…)

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