Everyone else has already told you what you did wrong 20 years ago. Here's my take: If you were actually rsync'ing all of the user data, then the developer wouldn't have known the difference and would never have had the inkling to turn the old machine back on.

I was speaking more of the head/debris/platter interaction, Bernouli effect, et al: I was raised to understand that a single speck of dust would destroy a hard disk within seconds, that after removing the top cover of a hard drive in other than a clean room environment I might as well toss the entire contraption into the scrap heap because it is surely ruined, forever.

Apparently, it doesn't always work that way.

I've done my share of freezer-tricks, oven-tricks, and spin-on-the-table tricks. I've even done a trick involving a hard drive that was immersed in 6 feet of river water for a few days. It came around just fine after being opened up (!) and left on a shelf (!!) for a day: There were visible traces of silt on the platters, but I got the information off of it just fine with standard copying tools.

I've done controller-board swaps, too, but I've never had to go as far as swapping the controller board and keeping the old SMD EEPROM.

Hard drives are fun to recover, and I've had excellent luck at it given the most rudimentary techniques. It is unfortunate that my own failed hard drives have always been impossible: When mine fail, they invariably grind grooves into the platters, stuff the filter with filings, and never work again.

In the early 90's, I was tasked with looking at a 286 in a warehouse that wouldn't run for more than a few minutes before crashing angrily.

I turned it on, observed that the PSU fan was caked with dust and not spinning, unplugged the hard drive, and gave the PSU some brisk percussive maintenance. It belched a thick cloud of brown crud, and the fan worked again.

Reassembled, and it worked for years.

Crying baby monitor ? Really ? :|

Deaf people have babies, too.

Rooting isn't so bad on an S5, either: Downgrade the phone to a version that towelroot works on (using odin). Install towelroot, safestrap (in that order). Flash a rooted Lollipop ROM of your choosing using Safestrap.

Being able to understand and complete the rooting process for a given device is something that I do before I even consider buying it.

Agreed at the poor state of the TFS, and TFA.

It appears to be a Google Earth for stars. And there is an HTML5 web client, which amused me for a few minutes.

AFAICT, the hardware encryption thing was solved eons ago.

Or at least, none of my routers suffer from high CPU utilization when doing Wifi things.

Doesn't mean systemd should be default across all dists

It isn't, but it's really not your choice if you aren't the one making and maintaining the distro, no?

Two words: Fork it.

Just because you can't quickly and easily remove it yourself doesn't mean that it's not removable. It is removable, you just need some time and tools to do it.

Remove the battery on an iPhone 6 in 27 easy steps. After that, reassembly is simply the opposite of disassembly!*

You just need some time and tools to do it!

*: You hope.

Indeed.

And the only licensees I'm aware of for the 2.4GHZ Part 15 ISM band are HAMs.

Which are about the friendliest bunch around when it comes to talking about RF, even if they are licensed for tens-of-Watts and you are an unlicensed, must-accept-interference consumer.

> hurricane hugo

That was a disaster. The insurance companies, like Allstate, couldn't afford to pay all of the claims so they lied and cheated their way out of the vast majority of them. When Hugo hit, I lived between Florence and Conway. All of the homes in our neighborhood had damage. About a fourth were so damaged they were later torn down. The head of our HOA worked for Allstate, so most of us in the neighborhood had Allstate since he was a great guy. After Allstate refused to pay a single valid claim, he ended-up leaving town. The town him and his wife were from, where both sets of his children's grandparents live, and where he had a business he had grown for over thirty-five years. While we all hated how Allstate screwed nearly the entire neighborhood out of our houses, Allstate screwed his family out of their lives.

You're in good hands, with Allstate.

Well, you're on the right path: Pale Moon doesn't have pdf functionality OOTB. Look for and destroy a pdf.js in your profile directory, perhaps? Because whatever you have isn't getting updated, and according to TFS, that can be a problem from time to time.....

And yes, again: Firefox's pdf viewer is disgusting. Gmail's JS-based viewer actually provides presentable documents, and they seem to even print OK, but Firefox's interpretation of pdf (IN THE SAME BROWSER!) reminds me of the early days of Ghostscript, or maybe even Freetype -- a million years ago, before they got the kerning right. Or even close. At all.

I have three access points at my house: One on the second floor, one in the basement, and one in the garage. (The AP in the garage is a repeater, with a hacked router doing bridged client mode (not wasteful WDS) wired to another hacked router being a simple access point.)

I didn't always have to do this: Back before the neighbors all had Wifi and a million Wifi widgets all streaming Netflix and Youtube, I had reasonable coverage all over my house and yard with a single WRT54G with a parabolic beer can on one of its antennas.

But now I have to do this just to get a simple Pandora stream running reliably in the garage (20 feet from the house), much less the garden at the back of the lot.

I try to use it efficiently, with the radios only putting out enough power to do an effective job. I manage channels carefully, so that the most-used channel in the neighborhood is the one that is in the basement (where it radiates least), and the least-used channel is used in the garage (where it radiates most), to help mitigate co-channel interference. I always hard-wire my devices if they allow me to do so, to keep wireless spectrum available -- even though I rent (old houses can be ridiculously easy to non-permanently cable).

But when I can sit in my living room and see 17 access points that don't belong to me, with manufacturer-default SSIDs, I know I'm amidst hordes of folks who are using the spectrum for fixed devices: The streaming box by the TV, the old desktop in the kid's bedroom that does Youtube livestreams 8 hours a day -- that sort of thing.

And that's just inefficient use of the spectrum. Fixed devices should be wired if at all possible: Period.

If pre-terminated cat5 cables were cheaper (and I know that quality cables can be very cheap indeed, but they're pretty bloody expensive at Wal-Mart), I think I'd see a bit less of this problem. When it comes to buying a $20 wire to hook up the Fire TV to the 75Mbps modem, or buy a pizza to go with that streaming movie: It seems that most buy the pizza.

I can't say that I blame them. But I roll my own wires, or buy the $2 Chinese imports from deepsurplus.com which seem to be as good as anything else, so I get pizza -and- high-quality streaming -and- improve spectral efficiency of the neighborhood.

The biggest guidelines that I have for myself is if it's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time, it's not designed to be consumed

But then you miss out on an entire world of lacto-fermented foods which are absolutely lovely, and also very good for you.

Sauerkraut, for instance. It's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time (sitting on a shelf is part of the production process, FFS), is ridiculously nutritious and requires only two ingredients: Cabbage and salt.

What did you do to Pale Moon to allow it to grok PDFs, and why haven't you undone it yet?