Willow: Yes. Hi. You must be Angel's handsome, yet androgynous, son. Connor: It's Connor. Willow: And the sneer's genetic. Who knew?

'A Hole in the World'


Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


omnis_audis - Jul 23, 2014 9:39:24 am PDT #23956 of 25496
omnis, pursue. That's an order from a shy woman who can use M-16. - Shir

I read on the interwebs, that one of the ways around Verizon FiOS throttling Netflix is to NOT use their DNS. Hence my aversion to using Verizon DNS and trying other things.

To be honest, this is a couple layers of network protocol over my head, so I'm chucking darts at the board with my eyes closed on this one.


§ ita § - Jul 24, 2014 4:42:21 pm PDT #23957 of 25496
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

My mother wants "a phone". She wants it for Jamaica, and to spend $100. Does a no-contract Moto E for $129 have any downsides I'm not thinking of? They'll do the unlocking in Jamaica.


Gris - Jul 25, 2014 3:17:32 am PDT #23958 of 25496
Hey. New board.

I have heard nothing but good things about it


-t - Jul 26, 2014 10:33:25 am PDT #23959 of 25496
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

So, my iPhone 5S (I think S) seems to have shut itself down. Is that a thing? It was just sitting idle on the arm of the sofa and now it is off and won't turn on. I don't think the battery was low but I plugged it in for a while just in case, that seems to have had no effect.

I guess I need to make an appointment at the Genius Bar, but does anyone have any idea what's going on?


Tom Scola - Jul 26, 2014 11:04:19 am PDT #23960 of 25496
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

Try holding down the two buttons for a few seconds.


-t - Jul 26, 2014 11:16:59 am PDT #23961 of 25496
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

Thank you! I thought I had tried that, but either I didn't or this time it magically worked.


tommyrot - Jul 30, 2014 8:28:55 am PDT #23962 of 25496
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

My iPhone 4S has been acting up with some weird memory issue. A month ago it reported that it had 0k free memory. I deleted a few gigs of apps and pictures but it still gave me error messages and reported 0k free when it should have over 9GB free. When I synced it with iTunes all the missing memory was reported as "other" or something like that. Restarting the phone had no effect so I wiped it and reinstalled everything, which freed up the memory.

It's still having the problem, though. Sometimes it'll lose a few GBs of memory every day until it's out. Sometimes it'll go a week without losing any memory at all, and occasionally it'll lose all 9GB of memory in about two hours.

Since I wiped it, restarting it now does free up the 9GB again. I deleted a an exercise app that tracks walking, and that slowed down the memory loss a lot. Playing music through iTunes music match seems to eat the memory pretty fast so I stopped doing that.

Any ideas? I've read that this can be due to having it back up to iCloud (which I'm doing) but I tried a fix for that (switching to a backup on the computer with iTunes, doing a back up and then switching back to an iCloud backup) and it didn't help.

Any ideas? At this point I'm thinking of getting the new iPhone when it comes out (if my current one lasts that long).


omnis_audis - Aug 01, 2014 3:29:09 pm PDT #23963 of 25496
omnis, pursue. That's an order from a shy woman who can use M-16. - Shir

Long shot, can't hurt to ask. Here at work, a co-worker in the music dept has upgraded her Mac mini. For whatever reason, IT didn't take the old one, and doesn't want to (??). And for what ever reason, she accidently disposed of the external power supply. I don't suppose anyone has a power supply for a late 2006 Mac mini that they don't need anymore? Not sure how well the computer works, and it looks like a replacement is $50-110, and budgets aren't that big.


Jesse - Aug 02, 2014 11:43:45 am PDT #23964 of 25496
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.

My parents' old, long-unused computer won't turn on. It's apparently plugged in fine, because there's a light in the back that is on. Googling suggests it needs a new CMOS battery. Does that sound right to you people? And is that actually something that is easy for me to do? My mother just wants to see if there are any files she wants to save before trashing it.


omnis_audis - Aug 02, 2014 12:56:07 pm PDT #23965 of 25496
omnis, pursue. That's an order from a shy woman who can use M-16. - Shir

remove the hard drive. Buy an enclosure for it. Connect it to your new computer. Transfer files. Save hard drive. E-waste recylce the old computer.