There are several possible reasons for wanting to boot from a USB drive, I suppose, but mine came from this thought experiment: I’ve been diligently making regular system backups of my Dell XPS 12 for a while and today I wondered if I would be able to recover from, say, a crashed hard drive or – a much better scenario – from upgrading the hard drive to a higher capacity one. In fact, this latter scenario is the one that interests me: I’m contemplating a 480GB drive (currently the Crucial M500 is $280 from newegg.com) to replace the 240GB drive that I bought a year ago for my Dell XPS 12. […]
READ MOREBack in November 2012, I ordered the first series of DCI Banks on DVD from amazon.co.uk, an ITV crime drama series starring Stephen Tompkinson as, well, DCI Alan Banks and Andrea Lowe as Annie Cabbot. For one reason and another, I really enjoy the traditional British police procedural: there’s some bizarre murder, after which proceeds a nicely drawn and perhaps drawn-out investigation of the crime, with lots of character development along the way. The epitome of this type of drama was undoubtedly Inspector Morse, with Endeavour following in those footsteps. DCI Banks was possibly not quite as well done as those, but it was nevertheless interesting to me because of the setting: somewhere in Yorkshire. Never really properly positioned unlike Morse’s Oxford, just assumed to be up there somewhere. Although I’ve never lived in Yorkshire, my parents have, and I consider myself a proto-Yorkshireman, having explored pretty much all of the Dales and most of the Moors. All in all, I enjoyed the episodes a great deal. […]
READ MOREThere I was, minding my own business, when I came across this article in ArsTechnica: “Dear Asus router user: You’ve been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw”. I read on avidly, because, well, I have an Asus router, an RT-N66U to be precise and the subject of this article. […]
READ MOREWhen I was younger my parents used to regale me with stories of Dad’s first car, a Flying Standard Twelve saloon. It was from the late 30s, so I would guess it was 15 years old or so by the time Dad bought it. Here is the car in pre-marriage days, Dad sitting in the driver’s seat (the “suicide door” open) with Dad’s best friend Derrick Hill leaning on the front mudguard. I think they were off on a camping trip to Wales somewhere. […]
READ MOREEvery couple of weeks (on payday essentially, so I remember to do it), I go searching through my photo collection for a new Facebook cover image. There’s a couple of reasons for this I suppose: one, I like having cover images that change periodically since it allows me to show off some photos that I’m proud of; and, two, it forces me to continue to learn how to take what you might call good photos. I do not pretend to be a great photographer, but I continually try and cultivate an “eye” for a well-composed image. Some days that “eye” is there, and then some days I’m just glad I don’t use film anymore because I’d be broke. […]
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