So someone’s claiming I poached their photos. It’s a phishing scam. Don’t fall for it.

Here’s the deal. I am extremely scrupulous when it comes to any photos on my blog. They were either taken by me, or … well, there is no “or.” I made a mistake about eight years ago when I used someone’s flickr photo, thinking it was available through Creative Commons, the photographer contacted me, I…

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Click Click Click Click Click Click….

That sound you just heard was my external hard drive – a six-terabyte storage unit that carries nearly my entire photo archive – making strange noises. This is not good. This is very not good. Over the years, I’ve dealt with hard drive and disc drive failures before.ย  I’ve had friends and companies reconstitute the…

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The monitor “sparked” at 2:00 A.M.

I can’t sleep.ย  I just can’t sleep. Okay, maybe I can get up, write my blog post, putter around on social media, all that. I check my desktop computer.ย  Monitor’s dark. No problem, I’ll wiggle my mouse, the screen saver should activate in three … two … two … two … Well, that’s not good.…

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A final trip to Altamont for 2019 …

So I did my Sunday trip to the Altamont Fair – ostensibly to see if my picture had claimed the People’s Choice award (it didn’t, a photo of a snowy squirrel did)… And I also made a pilgrimage to the Arts and Crafts building, which I did not do on Tuesday, to see if there…

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Computer Answers really does have the answers!

Ten years ago, I cobbled together a desktop computer tower.ย  Rather than go to the local CompUSA and buy a tower off the shelf, I ordered all the component parts and jiggered them together. The tower survived a couple of hard drive crashes – one in 2010, another in 2015 – as well as an…

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What I did with my World Tavern Trivia winnings

Last week at this time, I was celebrating with my friends from the Stir Crazy trivia team.ย  We had just won the 2017 World Tavern Trivia championships, and each of us received a share of the $5,000 grand prize. Now I don’t know of any bank that still takes these gigantic checks … you know,…

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“Lazarus, it is time to boot up.”

A few months ago, I had a computer crash that crippled my custom-built computer tower- and in the resulting crash, one of my hard drives froze up.ย  Thousands of photographs and music were trapped on that hard drive as well. I tried a few different techniques to resurrect the data, including swapping out the motherboards,…

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