Dammit Jim!

Laptop Repair Guy points out that Toshiba has issued a warranty extension resulting from a class action lawsuit. As far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer so better check for yourself) I’m out of luck since I’m in Canada but definitely better to have Toshiba fix it for free than try yourself.

After I put up a post about repairing my laptop power connector, Laptop Freak left a informative comment:

As you see on the photo above, the positive connector oxidized and almost black. If you put a fresh solder on the connector like this, the power jack problem will reappear very soon. I usually remove the power jack from the system board (with iron gun and solder sucker), clean oxidized pins on the power jack and pads on the motherboard and only after that resolder the power jack.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that he was right. The power jack started coming loose again after about a month and a half. I was in the middle of a bunch of things so I didn’t really feel like messing with it so I just opened up the computer and threw some more solder on it. When the power jack started jiggling again a few weeks later, I knew I had to do something better to fix it. So I picked up a desoldering sucker and some desoldering wick.

I’ve been using LaTeX a lot recently and I thought I would write a quick post since I wish I would have found out about it earlier. LaTeX is a really powerful document (pdf and others) creation program. It’s sort of like HTML and CSS for paper publishing. As a first warning, LaTeX, like HTML, is not WYSIWYG. You have to code in things like \textbf{This will be bold}. This takes some getting used to after programs like MS Word but after using LaTeX, I really can’t stand working in Word for anything longer than a page or two.

I just found out about ClearType fonts thanks to Download Squad. I’m still debating whether I like them or not. They took me a few hours to get used to. Every time I looked away from my computer, I would come back and feel like my eyes were unfocused. But that blurry effect seems to have gone away and the fonts do look pretty and somehow thicker so I’m thinking I’ll stay with them. I guess they’re not all that hidden but funny how you can go years on a operating system and not know something so basic. Anyway, if you want to try on your computer go to the Display Control Panel. Click on the Appearance tab and click the Effects… button. Then select ClearType from the drop down under “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:”. You can also find out more about it and see examples at Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner.

This is pretty basic knowledge but I’ve helped a few people out recently that had been using Unix/Linux for a while and didn’t know and it sure helped me out when I figured it out. If you had asked me how many quotation marks were on a keyboard before I started doing Bash stuff I would have said two. But I, and it seems most non-programmers, often forget the little ` on the same key as the tilde ~ (to the left of the numbers on standard keyboards). So there are actually three types of quotation marks and each one means something different to Unix:

I’ve been running into math and programming related comics for a while now and always wondered where they were coming from. Today I finally ran across the source. From the topics, it appears the guy is some sort of computer networking mathy type. Some of them are beyond me and I’ve actually learned a bit by googling the ones I didn’t understand like the Alice and Bob one. Anyway, here’s a few samples: