Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Disabling Nvidia

I have a MacBook Pro made in 2010 which is among the models which received faulty Nvidia chips. After this was discovered, Apple decided to extend the warrantee for the chips to 3 years. Instead of proactively replacing the faulty chips, they required that the machine exhibit the problem before they would consider replacement.

So, like clockwork, my computer’s Nvidia chip fails after the 3 years. It results in kernel panics in the GPU driver about once a week. Searching for this yields numerous similar results all stemming from the graphics card asserting its manufacturing flaw. Finally, since my computer is now more than 3 years old, Apple will not fix it without payment of several hundred dollars.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, November 23, 2013

Mobile Passwords

Lately there have been several Ars articles discussing passwords and online security. In today’s world, people generally use passwords which are completely inadequate for securing anything, much less private or financial data. Additionally, the “tricks” people are taught on securing their passwords are the wrong lessons (cue obligatory xkcd). So, one of the best solutions is to use a password management system, such as 1Password or LastPass. This solves the problem of weak passwords and the memorization factor, but that still leaves the creation of a strong password for the password manager. A great deal of attention has been given toward creating a strong password, but it is geared toward a computer and not a mobile device. So, how does one create a secure password on a mobile device, particularly in the context of an encryption key.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, June 12, 2013

A Month with AppCode

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 29, 2013

Using Single Vendor Credit Card Numbers with Amazon

I often use single vendor credit card numbers for my online transactions because in the event of a breach or theft, the numbers cannot be used elsewhere. Many credit card companies offer these under other names, such as Discover who calls these “Secure Online Account Numbers.” These work really well, except for the fact that these do not work well with Amazon purchases. There are a few other cases they fail, but Amazon is the biggest nuisance for me.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Sunday, March 10, 2013

Suddenlink's Speed

Suddenlink seems to think that this is 15Mbps: 2520933228

I’ve called them at 5-10 times in the past few weeks, and this is still the speed that I get. I have tried changing modems and three separate technicians have said that my connection is good and yet it is no better. This is consistent across nearly every evening. Using these numbers, if I were to extrapolate the speed to the 50Mbps plan, I’d still not get achieve 15Mbps in the evenings.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Engineer @ Plex, Open Source Developer, and Science/Technology Enthusiast.

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