commented out

It’s no wonder evil never wins! There are sword-weilding do-gooders running rampant and here we have Daedric minions slacking off. It’s pitiful, I tell you.

This is what happens when I’m between quests in Oblivion and a defeated enemy lands funny. The demon on the right landed that way, so I dragged another one over and propped him up. I recorded the bottle setup, but I didn’t hit the hotkey in time to catch the long run downhill to catch a runaway bottle of Tamika’s finest.

For roughly two decades computer users have been well-acquainted with the desktop user interface. Starting with Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows 1.0, the desktop has been a mouse-driven experience as opposed to the command prompt. While the desktop UI has evolved since then, the core concept remains unchanged.

Introducing BumpTop, a prototype desktop UI based on physics. Gone are the two-dimensional icons of yesterday. BumpTop presents you with a desktop area and three-dimensional icons that can be grouped and rearranged using the same old drag and drop combined with mouse-gestures and context menus. The theory behind this system is intuitive organization. In other words, you can arrange your computer desktop using groups and piles, much like you might do for documents on your real-world desktop.

I don’t use my desktop much for stashing documents, but this is an interesting concept nonetheless. Being able to stash things in organized and easily-searchable piles could make large projects easier to manage.

Podcasts are an addiction. Naturally, I listen to the obvious ones like PC Gamer and This Week in Tech. Recently, a friend of mine turned me on to Coverville, a podcast about cover songs. In each episode, host Brian Ibbot will play six selections, all covers of songs you’re probably familiar with. Sometimes he’ll take one artist and play six covers of their work; other times he’ll offer up a more interesting theme such as the episode featuring covers of video game music. Other themes include “Groundhog Day” (where he offers covers in a repetition that pays homage to the movie Groundhog Day), or the April Fool’s episode where he took covers and claimed them as original works (which had me second-guessing everything I thought I knew about the music I listen to until he came clean about the joke) .

Each episode is roughly between thirty-five and fifty minutes long, and there’s always something interesting.

“I Just Bought Your Hard Drive”

To sum up the article, Hank Gerbus went to Best Buy to have his hard drive replaced after a crash. They replaced the drive, but would not let him take the crashed drive home with him, citing a need to send it out to a repair center to fulfill warranty terms. From there, Mr. Gerbus was told that holes would be drilled into the drive to prevent its use in the future. Six months later, he got a call from a man named Ed who had bought his repaired drive at a flea market. The drive still contained important personal data, like the phone number for Mr. Gerbus’ Florida home.

This why you need to be careful about what you buy, and where you get it. I’ve seen plenty of repackaged merchandise on store shelves. It’s even harder to tell when buying online. Granted, you may get better prices in general, but the best prices are for OEM hardware. OEM merchandise typically arrives in nothing but an anti-static bag surrounded by packing material. You can’t tell what’s been restocked and what hasn’t.

The moral of the story is, always buy a freshly sealed retail box. If you buy at a store, feel free to ask plenty of questions about the warranty process (not the policy, the actual process), and always check your item for stickers that mark it as a restocked item, or wrapping that may not be factory sealed.