The party double-standard

I think I reference Maher too much, but I was pleased with someone drawing from a wide history of American politics to make a case against the current political climate.

Buying a laptop off Craigslist

I was looking for a used machine and couldn't find anything online until I saw a great deal on Craigslist.  As I was having a really intense week, I wrote up a breakdown on stuff to do so I didn't skip any steps.  There's no question there are scams and I didn't want to get caught holding the bag.

Arrival.  Before you get out of the car, leave cash in the car.  Do not take it out without holding the laptop.

• Remember: this isn't nice, this is a business transaction.  Unexpected weirdness may mean a real negotiation.
• Ask: did this come with anything?  Cables, CDs, cards, data, box, anything?  Ask a few questions and see if you feel comfortable proceeding.  The owner's behavior may tell you the history of the device.
• Exit strategy: if you don't feel comfortable with the sale, just say so.  Offer to buy him some coffee for the drive up or pay his gas money and walk away.

If you see anything wrong, stop and walk away to check your cell phone or something.  Come back with a number in your mind that you think is fair.  Tell him or her that they should have listed any problems right up front and that this is a waste of time.  Don't be afraid to walk away.  If the person complains, say that this isn't a small purchase and he should have listed it the product description.

Things to check

• External
• Check for scratches, obvious problems.
• Press the battery button and see how high the green lights go.
• Look at the power supply plug and make sure it's good.  If it's an off-brand thing, ask for a lower price since from experience those things fail after about a year.

• Open the device
• On Mac, check either the "About This Mac" menu or the "Control Panel – System" tool on Windows to verify the processor and RAM
• Open device manager and look for anything out of the ordinary
• Test all keyboard keys
  
• Look for dead pixels (open a window of one color and move it around the screen)
• Look at the disk health (SMART) in config window
• If present, try the multi-touch functions on the mouse pad
• Push all the buttons on the keyboard and make sure they work.
• Insert a keydrive and play a movie
• Get it to go online
• Download and run a CPU test.  The main thing to test here is the fan that should kick on to deal with the higher temperature.
• Set it to sleep

• Plug in:
• A tested USB device to any available ports
• Your earphones and play audio with and without sound
• A disk in the DVD drive (if present) and make sure it functions (erase something)

 

Crop your images

Maye it's just me, but a huge percentage of screenshots I see have some amount of space around them.  Here are a few programs available that do intelligent autocrop:

• GIMP
• Irfanview
• Greenshot (and of course ShareX which contains Greenshot)

I have no idea what I'm doing

It's a comedy show take on really embarrassing politics but part of me is horrified by the clownishness implied by this analysis.  There's not being diplomatic, there's being uninformed, there's being kind of a dick and then there's this.  Just astonishing.

Something else I watched did make me feel a bit better, if only a little.

Fixing MS Office 2013

I've been really surprised with some of the frustrating updates to Microsoft Office 2013.  I've already had issues with Microsoft Word going way back but this was several additional stages of unpleasant.

PCWorld put out a breakdown on the problems and available cures but one one not mentioned in this list was setting up to auto-save to .doc rather than deal with checking "compatibility mode" on every single save.

Microsoft's insistence on adding pointless additional format updates that don't work with earlier programs helps sell software but doesn't help users.  While Excel and PowerPoint keep getting better, Word hasn't seen any dramatic feature updates (that I've seen) since 2003.  On average I use Word at least an hour a day so I feel like I would have seen something in the past 8 years.  Here's a breakdown on all the compatibility oddities.