I tend to like comparing working with computers to working with cars. I’m not sure why. I think it probably has to do with the fact that everyone has a vague idea of what mechanics do, but computers are often seen as a black magic.

So here’s a list of things that I’ve found handy to have in my “garage,” because you never know when you’re going to need them:

• Extra power cables. USB, power, and Ethernet, at least.
• Extra USB peripherals, especially a keyboard.
• A USB CD drive.
• A USB-to-ATA and USB-to-SATA adapter. You use it once and it’s instantly worth it. I have a bunch of old hard drives, and I can just throw this little adapter into the back of the bare drive, use the included power adapter, and I’ve got a “USB” hard drive made out of an internal drive. Don’t consider buying one without SATA support or it’ll be obsolete.
• A copy of the Ultimate Boot CD. It’s ancient (mostly DOS-based), so it sometimes has a hard time seeing a 2TB SATA disk connected off of USB or going through an SAS controller, but kind of like the USB-to-(S)ATA adapter, if you use it once you’ll sing its praises forever. It’s bailed me out repeatedly, and does everything from testing drives to checking RAM to doing CPU load-testing… Oh, and I recovered (!) a totally-destroyed boot sector after a botched OS upgrade once. I was flipping out trying to figure out if I’d managed to screw things up for good, and I ran one little tool that just fixed everything. I believe it has some nifty utilities for things like resetting Windows passwords, too, though it’s been ages since I used them and I’d be surprised if they worked on modern systems.
• A Linux live CD. I like Ubuntu, just because it’s easy and works on most everything. (Knoppix is an old favorite too.) It’s not for installing over things (although that’s cool too…); it’s for rescuing data. An Ubuntu Live CD will speak many more file formats than Windows. Boot a messed-up machine from this, and use your USB-to-(S)ATA adapter to copy files over to an external disk… And since it boots to a full OS and not just a rescue shell, you can do things let get it to use your wireless NIC so you can use Firefox to look up information while you’re working. (And an added bonus: use it to verify whether your NIC is bad or it’s just your OS install that won’t see it… Unless, of course, Ubuntu’s Live CD doesn’t support it, but it’s 3 for 3 right now.)
• A set of screwdrivers. Big and small. Mostly small.
• Some Torx screwdrivers. I held out for a long time, and eventually bought a cheap set at Radio Shack. I wish I’d done it much sooner. It turns out a lot of things use Torx screwdrivers.
• A whole, unformatted hard drive with huge capacity. Back everything up if things get scary, whether it’s because a drive is clicking or because you’re doing a major OS upgrade. It’s really worth the money to keep a 1TB+ drive that you never use. (And with the USB-to-(S)ATA adapter, you can get a cheaper internal drive, even.)

I used to keep a thumb drive with handy Windows utilities, too, but I haven’t done much with Windows lately. It had things like a bunch of SysInternals tools, CCleaner, Defraggler, and Recuva… Portable Firefox, and trial installers for anti-virus software. Revo Uninstaller. Back in the day I had Ad-Aware, too; not sure if it’s useful these days or not. Ninite is cool but not really meant for a thumb-drive. Actually, pretty much everything in Lifehacker’s How to Fix Your Relatives’ Terrible Computer is really good. Photorec is super-obscure and not easy to use for non-geeks, but it does its job amazingly well.

I just realized something that kind of blows my mind.

1990 was twenty years ago.

I feel old.

One thing that always drove me crazy in school was when teachers stressed that we had to take what we read on the Internet with a grain of salt. This was, of course, excellent advice: the Internet is filled with blatantly misleading information, and those are just the nice parts of the Internet.

But what always got under my skin was the unspoken implication: if it’s printed on paper and in a library, it must be true. Sure, there are higher barriers to entry in publishing, and most books go through lots of proofreading, so it’s not like some unhinged lunatic can turn out books of misinformation and hoaxes. Except that this happens all the time.

In the context of a research paper about Alfred Nobel or something, it probably doesn’t matter. Information you find on books in the library is probably accurate, but who knows about the Internet? I’m sure you could find some information. But this is really the wrong message. Shouldn’t the message just be “Always verify your sources because people get stuff wrong all the time”?

Awesome discovery of the weekend: bacon-jalapeño pizza. I want to try to create this, possibly with chipotle instead.

Bacon and jalapeños are an amazing combination in general, I think.

I’m still uneasy about the “all black people leave the store” announcement, but for two very separate reasons.

The first, of course, is the appalling racism. We’ve all known that racism is still alive and well, but it’s really quite scary to see it going on.

But the other thing that leaves me uneasy is the massive police investigation and the arrest — and possible one-year jail term — of the 16-year-old boy who made the heinous announcement.

I really don’t think a crime was committed. Was it disgusting, appalling, and hateful? Absolutely. But I could say the same about some talk radio shows. Should this person be ashamed? Totally. Ridiculed? Yes. But what crime was committed? Patently hateful organizations like the the KKK have enjoyed First Amendment protections for a long time. And by showing the absolute worst of America, they indirectly also bring out the absolute best of America: they show that even the nutcases enjoy Constitutional protections of their bigoted speech. Instead of trying to legislatively muffle their voices, we as citizens expose their intolerance and often upstage them with a much bigger counter-protest. It means that the system still works as intended.

I really don’t want to live in a nation of racists. But even more so, I really don’t want to live in a nation where people who make bigoted and uninformed announcements serve time in jail.

It’s really interesting to me how there are no Walmart locations in or around Boston or the Waltham area. See for yourself.

I think that someday I’m going to travel to Madagascar with the primary intention of seeing (and, of course, photographing) the Boabab Trees.

With photos like this one or this one, how can you not want to hop on a plane right now and go?

You could also see some Lemurs, an African penguin (!), and even aardvarks.

It’s rained for several days in a row now, and it’s getting really annoying. Between torrential downpours and high winds, driving was really hard.

I had the scanner on, and it turns out that my problems (getting soaked when outside and having to drive slowly on the highway) were nothing. This is just across town, and listening to the scanner Sunday night, I heard car after car getting stuck. The police had shut the road down, but people kept going by and getting stuck. They stationed an officer to use his cruiser to block the road in addition to the barricade, but someone still got stuck. The always-professional fire dispatchers eventually resorted to putting out calls like “You’re not going to believe this… But we’ve got another one on Linden Street,” until the road was blocked off so as to make it impossible to get around the barriers. (Aside: how do you squeeze by a barricade and a cruiser parked to make the road impassible?!)

I took an earlier-than-usual train home today (read: I left work shortly after 5pm for once), and had a window seat. The train started to slow as we entered Waltham, and the conductor made an announcement that we might move very slowly through some areas due to the weather. As the conductor came by, his radio squawked, “Reduce your speed due to water levels at rail height” As we inched along apparently-submerged tracks, the train got unusually silent as everyone stared out the window. We passed an industrial road, and passed several lots of cars with water up to their tires. (That is probably sufficient to let water creep into the floor of your car, and do some damage to your engine / underbody.) Then a dumpster that had been washed away into a ditch and completely submerged. And then a landscaping company with all of their trucks sitting in several feet of water. Their garage bay was open, revealing that the garage was flooded, too. (Something that looked like smoke was inexplicably pouring out.) And then a few more lots of cars, some with engines completely submerged.

I guess I can’t complain too badly about the weather, given how some in my town have fared. But still, sleet on my walk from the train to my apartment? Was that really necessary?

From one of my favorite sites, You Suck at Craigslist:

Commercial Swing Set and Slide – $850

My First thought: What a creepy location for a playground.

My Second thought: $850 for that? It’s rusted and dilapidated!

My Third thought: Wait… Is that a dead deer hanging from the swing set?

I’m perhaps not typical, but I’m picky about my desktop wallpaper. It has to look clean and professional; photos of friends or family are horrible backgrounds. It has to be a native size, not stretched. It has to be non-distracting, because I don’t keep windows maximized. But after a couple weeks of sitting behind all my apps and never really being appreciated, I lose interest and want something nice.

Here are a handful of great wallpaper sites. Note that, although I’m not linking to anything racy, wallpaper sites tend to have NSFW images added a lot. Most of the links are good at keeping them walled off, but you perhaps shouldn’t browse these if you’re at a place where you could get in trouble for an image that slipped by a filter somewhere.

• DeviantArt’s Wallpaper section. They vary greatly in quality.
• WallCoo. This is the English version of a Chinese site. If you’re okay with not understanding anything — of if you’re fluent in Chinese — the Chinese version seems to have different content.
• Stock photography site Crestock sometimes posts free wallpapers that are high in quality.
• There’s a Flickr group called Wallpaper and Backgrounds. (Protip: search for something like “hdr,” “macro,” or “bokeh”)