AskWoody

Try to fix one thing, break another

Long story short we were trying to fix an issue with a duplicating post and ended up causing issues with the replies. You may not see any replies, or you’ll see some of them. <sigh> It’s an indexing issue.

We have someone looking at it overnight (pacific time) so bear with us.

As always thank you for your understanding.

Update, just to assure everyone your posts are all still here it’s just an issue with the indexing which then causes the view to not be correct especially if you are an anonymous viewer. We’ve tested the solution and are just coordinating a time for when the fix will be done on the live site.  (Probably Saturday as that’s when the bbpress expert has time set aside).  At that time we’ll put the site in maintenance mode so you can’t post to it.

Once again thank you for your understanding and patience.

Frys electronics is closing

(USA centric post)

Well the news has it that Frys Electronics, a place that before Amazon came into our lives, was THE place where us geeks on the West Coast would go to check out computer equipment that we really didn’t need, but positively HAD to have. In my various geek conference travels, if there was a Frys in the close vicinity of where I was at, we’d organize a trip to the location. I’ve been to one in Las Vegas, several in the bay area, several in the Los Angeles area and one that was close to Redmond Washington. Yes, I was up in Redmond for a Microsoft conference and we just HAD to go to the local Frys. Imagine a group of geeks from around the world being let loose in what we all considered a near candy store. And unique about the locations, each one had a “theme”.

The smell of the store as you walked in the doors had a…. it’s hard to explain it…… similar to how the Pep Boys had a distinctive rubber smell throughout the store, Frys had a smell of electronics and cardboard boxes.  You’d stop in the doorway and breathe in that geek computer smell.  The smell would make us geeks giddy.

Rumor had it that the stores still listed itself in the Standard Industrial Classification code as a grocery store even though it long got out of the business of groceries. Reportedly that’s how it started out – as a grocery store. We’d always call the checkout line as running the “gauntlet” as there was all sorts of snacks, geek things you just had to have and all sorts of things to entice you as you checked out. And never go into the store wearing black slacks and a white shirt – shoppers would think you worked for the store. Many a fellow geek would talk about how they’d go into Fry’s and help their fellow shoppers out by advising them on what to buy.

I’m positive there are still hard drives, memory chips, and old dvds I have around my house that came from Frys.

Ah, good memories, good times.

How to create a bootable macOS installer

APPLE

By Nathan Parker

Once included with macOS, installers are now available only for download.

In the past, macOS X installers were available on a DVD. This changed with OS X Lion in 2011. The only way to get the installers today is to download them (at no charge) from the Mac App Store.

Despite this minor inconvenience, the process to create an installer is quite simple.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).
This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.7.F (2021-02-22).

Amazon’s new ‘same-day nodes’ will displace postal deliveries

PUBLIC DEFENDER

By Brian Livingston

The market dominance of Amazon in online retail is well known. But what’s less understood is the effect the corporate giant’s expansion into superfast delivery services will have on the US Postal Service and private parcel companies.

Marc Wulfraat has extensively studied Amazon’s plans in the United States and 22 other countries in his role as president of MWPVL International, a logistics consulting service based in Montréal, Québec.

In the past year, Amazon has built eight new “same-day fulfillment centers” in the US.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).

Glacially slow, 10-minute boot times!

LANGALIST

By Fred Langa

When a PC bogs down to the point where it takes a full 10 minutes just to fully wake up, you know something’s seriously wrong!

The PC’s owner thinks his startup apps are to blame, and asks how to analyze the PC’s boot process.

Win10’s free, built-in startup analyzer is part of the answer — but only after trying several other approaches first!

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).

The latest vulnerabilities in the network stack

PATCH WATCH

By Susan Bradley

For this week’s security focus, I’m going to home in on the impact of three security vulnerabilities considered by Microsoft the most critical security issues of the month and on their impact on businesses. Microsoft even released a specific blog post to focus on these risks; it urges installation as soon as possible. But I disagree with that assessment. I urge you to test first, ensure there are no issues with your systems, then patch as normal. I’m not yet ready to give the go-ahead for consumers to patch just yet.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).

Freeware Spotlight — FastCopy

Best Utilities

By Deanna McElveen

When you need that massive amount of data copied and you don’t have all day.

When moving large amounts of data from one location to another, Windows can be a bit of a turtle. Sure, you can spend part of your day doing things like setting Optimize Drives to auto, disabling autotuning, disabling Remote Differential Compression, enabling write caching — or you can just use FastCopy by developer Shirouzu Hiroaki.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).

Changes to policies

“We are trying to build a gentler, kinder society, and if we all pitch in just a little bit, we are going to get there.”

Alex Trebek said that in his final episode and it’s encouraged me to ask everyone here to make a slight change in the Lounge/Forum.

I wanted to update you on a slight change in the policies on the venue.

Posts and Privacy

I’ve made a change to item number 3:

3.  No politics and religion.

So why are we changing this policy?  As a person in business for many years, the topics of politics and religion have been always considered to be something personal and not suited to be discussed on a site intended to be more technical than social.  Because these topics tend to cause topic drift I feel that at least for the foreseeable future I would prefer that this is a “free zone” where we all can come together and know that these topics won’t be causing a lack of civility.

Sometimes we will have articles that deal with real-life issues that affect us all, such as the intersection of law and technology. Such topics can easily slip into a political discussion but we ask that your commentary remains polite, respectful, unbiased, and factual.  That sort of commentary is to be encouraged

Anyone violating the terms of the Posts and Privacy rules will be dealt with accordingly.

I want to thank everyone participating on the site for encouraging, embracing and enhancing our educational and technical topics on this site.  Rants (complaints) forum about technology will still allow you to complain about technology.  However I will suggest that taking a hammer to your old hard drive not only to ensure that it’s properly destroyed for security purposes, will also make you feel better than ranting.  Seriously, I can confirm this after many years working with computers.  The Fun Stuff venues are still available for your use to also relax after dealing with annoying technology.

Also be aware in regards to 8. Before posting a link or question, search the site first

There are two new boxes on the side of the site. One searches the postings on the site. I called it searching the “newsletters” as it will let you search for past newsletter stubs as well as the blog posts.  I’m going to be working on getting a more advanced search that will allow you to target *just* the posts or *just* the newsletters, but this is a short term workaround that I hope you’ll accept until I get a long term solution in place. The second search box allows you to search the forums/lounge. Because the site is in reality three parts – the “blog posts”, the newsletter posts and the forum/lounge we have to have multiple search tools. I’m hoping long term to get a unified search but again, hopefully this is a good compromise for now?

Thank you to everyone and thank you all for your expertise and sharing of information.