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I’ve had it on my iPhone for a while and I just don’t get it. This is worth $1B? I’m in the wrong line of work (you know complaining about technology instead of developing it). I don’t mean to minimize the talents of the Instagram team, but I just don’t find it all that useful and here’s why. I feel like whenever I try to find a good filter for a picture I’ve taken that it just ends up looking too weird or distorted. I’m not entirely sure why I would want to completely wash out a picture as though it was taken decades ago with a low-def film camera. Our parents and grandparents weren’t trying to be artsy way back when; their equipment just stunk compared to the endless megapixels we now have at our disposal.

The cover article for the latest issue of Wired takes a look at the NSA’s fancy new cyber-spy facility being built in the Utah desert – The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say. I’m assuming that just posting about its existence will get me immediately thrown onto a watch list. If that’s the case, to whomever it may concern, I am available for hire and would love to work at the NSA! Now, some facts that I thought were kind of cool about this new facility.

- 10k construction workers are on the project
- $2 billion price tag
- Two football fields worth of servers
- Fence that can stop a 15k pound vehicle going 50mph (that’s the equivalent of 6.5 Smart cars!)
- Nearly eighteen football fields devoted to technical/administrative functions
- The electrical substation is estimated to use $40 million in electricity per year (the heat from their servers could definitely fry a lot of eggs)
- The government is dealing in yottabytes of data otherwise known as 1000000000000000000000000 bytes. Yeah, that’s a lot.

A year ago I wrapped up a build on a new desktop machine. At the time a Radeon 5830 made a lot of sense. I didn’t have the need for a CrossfireX setup at the time so I only bought one card. Heck, I still don’t even need a second card, but out of curiosity I set out to do some pricing only to find that the 5800 has basically disappeared from the market in all shapes and forms. The card I have now is an XFX and their website still shows 5400, 5500, 5600, and 5700 cards but nothing for the 5800 series. SLI and Crossfire are both a blessing and a curse. It’s a great way to boost performance, but in a sense it deincentivizes consumers from buying new cards since they can milk an old one for longer. Still, this situation seems odd to me given that there are plenty of other 5XXX series cards still out there for sale.

If anyone has insight on this I’d love to know what happened.

No, I did not get a 4G (yet). I did, however, upgrade my 3G with the new 4.0 IOS. I have to say it was a complete mess. The upgrade took forever and when it was done my phone was basically unusable. I’m not sure whether it was a problem with the IOS or one of the apps on my phone, but something was causing it to be unresponsive to the point where I couldn’t even receive a phone call. I tried powering off and rebooting multiple times with no luck. In the end I completely wiped the phone, reinstalled 4.0, and then added my apps and e-mail accounts. After all of that it seems to be working fine. Good luck to anyone else out there eyeballing the 4.0 IOS.

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This is the removal process I’ve used for this piece of malware. Since it hooks the .exe extension in the registry launching AV apps can be difficult. If you’re not careful with Autoruns and the registry you can brick your Windows install. I take no responsibility if that happens to you.

If you use Process Explorer while it is running on a machine you will find where it is.
C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data
- MSASCui.exe (XP Guardian 2010)
- AVE.EXE (XP AntiSpyware 2010)
- o7yIC10ETb (or some other randomly named file)

If you kill the process tree and move fast before it can restart you can delete the files. It also makes a few changes to the Registry, which Malwarebytes will find. Basically you want to export these keys from a good machine and import them into the bad machine.
- [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center
- HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe

- Run Autoruns and look for gibberish DLL files and delete them.
- Run a follow up scan with Malwarebytes to make sure everything is gone.
- Double check your Security Center/Firewall/Automatic Updates settings to make sure they’re where they need to be.

I can’t help but be slightly annoyed that the copy of MCE 2005 I bought two years ago has been completely dropped by Microsoft. I get it – MS wants people to buy Vista or Windows7. If my version of MCE had the same features as Windows7 MCE I’d have no reason to upgrade. For the most part I use my copy of MCE to record TV in SD and to stream online content. When I heard that Netflix was going to be integrated into MCE I thought that actually sounded pretty cool. Any chance to use the MCE remote over a mouse and keyboard is a good thing, right? No such luck for me. There were a few projects to get Netflix working inside of MCE 2005, but they are pretty much dead now (in addition to most other development for MCE 2005). It’s a shame, really. My HTPC isn’t my primary computer and I really could care less whether MCE is running on top of XP, 7, or Windows 95 for that matter, but alas, here I am stuck with the prospect of shelling out another $100 for another copy of Windows7 just so I can record/stream TV.

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There are still a few kinks to work out.

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This is so awesome and crazy at the same time. For IT geeks only.

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Oh, Microsoft. Just when you had me won over with Windows 7 you had to go and do this. A much used feature in XP for an IT guy like me was the offline repair installation. It was great for fixing a corrupt OS or upgrading a system’s hardware. I recently got stuck in a bit of a quandary where my Windows 7 install wouldn’t boot and Startup Repair couldn’t fix it. Trying to start an install off the boot media just resulted in being told that an upgrade install could not be performed from boot and that I should restart and log into Windows. Well, that would have been fine, but my problem was that I couldn’t boot into Windows in the first place.
Microsoft: Please add this feature into Windows 7.

Oh, the joys of older hardware.

I’ve been running Windows 7 since the beta came out and installed it without issue on a number of my work machines, but when it came time to do the install on my primary home computer things got a little dicey. It had nothing to do with Windows 7, mind you, but rather my aging Pentium 4 system. My machine didn’t even have a DVD drive. I know, that’s kind of crazy for 2009, but I just honestly never had a bona fide need for one in that particular machine. Windows 7 (on DVD) became the reason. With my DVD burner I was all ready to install Windows 7! I threw in the DVD and nothing happened. I hopped into the BIOS only to be presented with more puzzlement: my hard drive was the only listed boot device. It turns out that my motherboard doesn’t know how to boot from a SATA optical device although it works fine once Windows is loaded. Undeterred I grabbed a spare hard drive and a spare PATA DVD drive I had sitting around. I figured out I had another issue since Partition Logic and Gparted were both unable to interface with the SIS chipset on my ASUS motherboard leaving me unable to create a partition on which to install Windows 7. Are you following me? Ok, good. With the spare PATA hard drive and DVD I got to work getting Windows 7 installed. Once it was installed on the spare drive I was able to view my primary drive, the one I wanted to resize and repartition all along. I created a new partition alongside Windows XP, disconnected the spare hard drive, and ran a second install of Windows 7 on the newly created partition. Voila, I now had Windows 7 and Windows XP both running on my 500GB SATA drive. My goal is to eventually get almost everything off of my Windows XP partition so that I can shrink it down to something small like 20GB. This is going to take some time, though, since I have to keep shrinking and extending each respective partition as I move things from XP to 7. Hopefully your installation of Windows 7 was a little less painful than mine.