Computers

 Firefox has started to drag its feet as of late.  A buggy interface, slower than normal browsing, leaky memory, and abrupt failures have become the rule rather than the exception it seems...Chrome was a bit buggy at first but seems to have resolved that issue and is all over 7's new taskbar; IE8 is still somewhat harder to work with but doesn't crash anymore and is faster than previous IE's.  Firefox has dropped the ball, possibly for the last time...

So my fan on my laptop started making a horrific racket (possibly because my laptop has been on nearly half of its existence) so I found a way to clock the CPU down so the fan wouldn't need to be on. Here are the commands I used.

Performance Script:

powercfg /CHANGE PowerConfigName /processor-throttle-ac ADAPTIVE

powercfg /CHANGE PowerConfigName /processor-throttle-dc ADAPTIVE

Had this on my old site which I recently took down so I've attached it to this blog post.  Here's how to use it:
 

What I'm trying to say in this article is that Mac's for all their hype are just another FUCKING computer with a bigger price tag. All you're effectively paying for is branding and maybe a little extra engineering. However, this price discrepancy amounted to around $325 dollars when warranties weren't considered and you have to ask yourself if Mac's are $325 better engineered than a PC.

Here are a couple simple encryption programming examples.  Obviously these are full of exploits so you wouldn't want to use them seriously, but they are great for teaching students about the basic idea of encryption.

At any rate, after a good solid minute of beeps and at least 45 seconds of shocked/amazed/irritated looks from the other patrons, I managed to disable the system beep and got a light applause from someone in the back of the Cafe amongst a myriad of grumbling. In case you have not clicked on the link I'll describe the basic steps: