If you're handy, you can get amazing deals on full size business machines. I currently use a Ricoh Afficio 2238c for my heavy use work. It was $1000 and only needed about $200 in parts. It is 38ppm, color, duplexing, and can handle 11x17. It has an ADF and 11x17 flatbed which would be nice for the sheet music. I pair that with an HP4100 dtn that is better for short runs and turns on faster. I have a 4600dn too, but don't really use it anymore. The older HPs are really a steal and have cheap aftermarket consumables.

Nevermind on the downside... Just found that there is a plugin to fix that.

I switched to tt-rss and couldn't be happier. It works almost exactly like Google Reader and even includes plugins to allow you to use the same navigation keys. It can import OPML for your feeds list and has a plugin to import your starred posts. The only downside is not being able to play flash video (youtube, et al) in the reader pane.

I had some fun with trying to mount some Crucial M4 drives in USB external enclosures. They kept getting unmounted and the SMART block remap count kept running up, and up, and up. One of the drives outright failed and the other was at 55% spare sectors remaining when I figured out the issue. When there was a write, the current consumption from programming the FLASH chip would cause a voltage sag and the write would fail but it wasn't usually enough of a drop to make the drive reset. Once I bought the "Y"-style USB cords (the kind with an extra power plug) and then modded that to run on a wall-wart, everything was fine. (Just for the record, this was a hack to add some faster storage to an aging server that only had SCA-hotswap bays).

I agree. The first time one of our engineer's laptops HD's did this, it was rather uncomfortable to say the least. I think a good compromise solution would be to have it enumerate with a "useful" drive textual model identifier like "M4 ERROR CHECKING, LEAVE ON 30 MIN" or some such. I'm sure it violates some standard, too, but it would at least give the user some indication of what is happening.

Overall, it is a good thing. The data isn't organized linearly for wear leveling purposes, so a power outage can leave the metadata in an inconsistent state. Also, make sure you have the latest firmware on the drive. They had a fun one earlier that caused a drive lockup hourly after the power on counter hit about 35k hrs (or some such). I've got about 2 dz M4 drives in service, so I've seen a lot of the bugs.

There is a protection mechanism that I know exists in Crucial SSDs which makes the drive appear dead after some unclean shutdowns of the drive while it performs a firmware-level integrity check of the drive. It may exist in other brands as well. Sometimes it takes 2 runs of 30-60 minutes to get the drive to re-enumerate via SATA. I'd be curious to know if the "dead" drive was affected by this bug.

With a spinning disk, the non-sequential access pattern will make the moving heads (and rotation rate) the limiting factor in throughput.

I would recommend watching your SMART sector reallocation totals as an indication of drive health. As the drive starts aging, it will start needing to reallocate the weakest cells first, so you should get some warning.

I usually explain version control as working just like a library with a small twist. Imagine that this library holds paper notebooks that are partially used. You can go to the library, checkout a notebook, and write and erase parts of it while it is in your possession. Just like a library, if you have the original notebook, no one else can check it out -- you have exclusive rights to the notebook.

There is a bit of a twist that you can think of as working like an attentive librarian: every time the notebook is checked in, the librarian makes a complete copy and stores it in the reference section of the library. At any time, regardless of whether the original notebook is checked out, anyone can go to the reference section and read the reference copies of old versions. And, just like a regular library reference section, you cannot check those old copies out; they are read-only.

Word 2003 compare-and-merge
Word 2007/2010 compare-and-merge multiple docs

That's a lie. At least since Word 2003, there is a compare documents feature that you can use to make diffs of Word documents. Works fairly well unless someone really rototills a document with a ton of moves and rewriting.

The strychnine special! My favori *(&#SNHUED8&(6Iaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

My money is on it scraping your entire phone book so they can cold-call... Maybe someone should add normal-looking phonebook entries connected to some Google Voice numbers and record the hilarity?

Stupid typos. The G and C are literally right next to each other*. Obviously this should be SourceForge.net.

*only applies to us Dvorak users.