PXE booting is not difficult to set up and Clonezilla is dead simple to automate after that. DBAN also has instructions to PXE boot, but I've never used it that way. Extra points for setting it up to do both in 1 pass. Clonezilla also has the nice feature of verifying that you have a good backup.

I just looked into wifi tethering and got it working on my Samsung Fascinate last night in about 20 minutes. Open Garden is what I went with. I had already rooted my phone quite a while back to get a newer version of Android so that requirement was no problem for me. It was interesting to find that some wifi tether apps require you also to use a modified kernel. Neither Barnacle (mentioned above) nor Open Garden require a different kernel.

I passed 25MB down / 6 MB up over the course of a couple hours on the road browsing the web and reading email. No overheat issues, the phone was plugged in at the time. Overall the connection was far snappier than my experience trying to browse using the phone. The laptop I used runs Linux and I was using the latest Firefox and Thunderbird.

If they really mean something to you, offer them nice terms on a transition contract. Make sure the contract doesn't F you tho.

"Since filling out even a simple return can be rather game-like, maybe they're just doing what they do best."

So is this the new real-time strategy game you want to sell to our future accountants? Personally I tend toward games with the fewest rules, they're more entertaining.

Small spaces make quiet cooling difficult. Bigger fans are quieter at moving the same amount of air. The more air you move over a given heat sink the better the cooling (with diminishing returns, see various HSF reviews). So go for something larger with good airflow and some very quiet fans.

My HTPC has a PSU with a fan that I've never heard since it's temperature controlled and I'm not abusing it. The HSF is a Scythe Ninja something or other with a Panasonic D12SL 120mm fan, can't hear it. Graphics card is an MSI N460GTZ Cyclone. Sounds like a loud card, right? Well it's dead silent on movies (good for those quiet scenes) and none of the games I play have "quiet" atmosphere so when it does get cranking I still can't hear it over the audio of the game. You can always get aftermarket coolers for real silence if that's where you want to spend your money. All that packed into an Antec Solo with a cheap 64GB SSD, although when I had the 320GB single platter spindle in there you couldn't hear it at all.

I want my free encryption because I don't trust some 3rd party to tell me whether I should trust the web site that I am visiting. Encryption and identity should never have been tied together in the first place. It's unfortunate that this business method has succeeded as long as it has.

The unsupported processors all have virtually indexed caches. This isn't in the new processors or x86 and due to the architecture of a new virtual memory subsystem due to land in Solaris 11 it would be a bitch to write a workaround. The old procs are all EOL anyway!

This begins to explain the idea behind bottle caps as currency I suppose....

Ditched cable when we bought a house. We've had Netflix the whole time, wife does the CNN dance on her laptop. Netflix is mostly DVD, not much streaming. There's nothing on cable worth watching that I'd pay 1 month's price for the entire year.

This is too cool. Haven't googled myself in a while, I'm so damned special that the first 3 pages are just me and a couple references to my dead grandfather.

The special part is that the only ads that come up are for leather products! $1000 minimum order... ouch

IT (me and the dba) reported to the VP of development. His job (and his underlings) was to develop algorithms to deal with the data produce by the DNA analysis systems run by the research group. Since they were the primary "real" server users it was a reasonable match. Back office and desktop support were my problem as well, but I reported those issues directly to the Pres/CEO since that's where my budget came from and the VP of dev didn't care if the secretary at the front desk couldn't get her email.

"real" in this case meaning the DB and data crunching systems, the stuff used for product development. As with a much larger organization that side of IT got a completely separate budget from standard services and DT support.

Yes it costs money, but it does a ton of things. It keeps a database for your tags/whatever but you can have it apply any and all info it knows about your pictures to the EXIF/IPTC fields. There's a ton of scriptability and you can export the DB to tons of formats (and define your own format). Hey just looked at the website and it supports XMP as well (another metadata in the file thing).

http://www.photools.com/

No I get nothing for this (haven't even looked to see if I could). Satisfied customer.

The business I work for goes through tapes like they're used to make coffee. Primary use: legal escrow of source code.

I have posted a few bugs to the gentoo bug tracker over the last year and have not gotten any more spam because of it. My wife gets far more spam, presumably since she's joined a number of yahoo groups for random special interests of hers.