Safety question. I'm replacing an old wired doorbell with a wireless one. I can snip the old live wires (with rubber handled snips, one at a time) so I have foreshortened live wires in the hold, then cover with the plate of the new doorbell (which uses a battery). Is this safe? The unconnected live wires are basically what a socket is yes?

Safety question. I'm replacing an old wired doorbell with a wireless one. I can snip the old live wires (with rubber handled snips, one at a time) so I have foreshortened live wires in the hold, then cover with the plate of the new doorbell (which uses a battery). Is this safe? The unconnected live wires are basically what a socket is yes?

My boss (who used to be an electronics engineer) says that this is fine, except that you should cap off the live wires.

Doorbells are low-voltage wiring, so there shouldn't be a problem. You might want to tape the ends or put on those wire end things. To be perfectly safe, you can always take the wires off the transformer.

eta: inevitable crosspost

So, I've got an interesting problem. For putting grades into the Board of Ed computer system, the software we use creates some Excel spreadsheets for us to fill out. The first several columns are unchangeable things like student name, course name, room number, and so forth. These columns are, sensibly, protected - can't be edited without a password.

For some reason, though, on my Excel: Mac 2004 (and the same version on a friend's Mac), the protection extends to the cells we should be able to edit. Like, the ones where we're supposed to enter the grades.

Any idea what could be causing that? I have no idea what the password is.

Both yesterday and today I've been having problems actually using the 'net.

I've been able to log on but everything runs extremely slowly. I ran my McAfee and it found nothing.

Sumi, if you're running Windows, I would recommend downloading Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy and have them check for spyware on your PC. I know McAfee has some anti-spyware capability these days, but IME those two programs in conjunction do a pretty good job of catching 99% of what's out there. Plus Spybot has some immunization ability. (Don't install the tea-timer function, though, as it's annoying and doesn't help all that much.)

With Ad-Aware, after it's finished scanning, click on the Critical Objects tab and only remove those. Otherwise it will wipe out your Most Recent Documents list and your most recently viewed web page URLs, which is annoying if you make use of either of those functions.

Flying toasters! Funny--my little brother worked for them, back when people would actually pay money for screensavers.

Okay. Lavasoft ad-aware. That sounds good. I will say that I was more patient tonight and did not have the same problem.

I'm looking for a copy of the original Opus and Bill screensaver where they shot down the flying toasters (Before Broderbund sued them and won).

Daniel, I have it somewhere. I'll look around for it tomorrow. If I can find it, I'll zip the files and upload it somewhere.

I loved the flying toasters back in the day. that's so awesome.