So, here we are. 5 years ago today, I sat down with a friend and registered the domain http://www.xadara.com. 5 years ago I made the decision to set up a top-level domain presence on the internet. I don’t honestly know how I came up with the name. I know I wanted something unique… something I …
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Author:Chris
Happy 5th Birthday to Xadara
Eeyup… 5 years is a long time on the internet… especially for a site that has been funded as a labor of love. I am already writing a small history of the site… one entry in which I just posted before this one, so I will leave you all with just the cake… 🙂
A little retrospective is a good thing…
Recently, I have been listening to music that I listened to back a decade ago, when I was in High School. Many of these bands I have not really listened to since then, so it was refreshing, in a way to go back to familiar tracks that I was not burnt out on listening to. …
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Display Scaling: The pain continues.
So, upon waking up today, I learned that Nvidia had released a new driver set (295.73). Cool, after waiting 2 months, I had another chance to get my video card scaling working again. Wrong. These drivers behave identical to the previous set, or indeed, ANY driver set I try to use: they simply refuse to …
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The Internet Blackout is Over
Yeap. The Xadara blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA has ended, along with that of apparantly a dozen or so “major” websites, many websites with cult followings, and indeed, possibly over 1000 smaller sites, and personal web pages. It actually seemed to have a good effect, as President Obama reportedly said he would refuse …
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SOPA Blackout
From 8Am to 8Pm tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, Xadara will be “on strike” as it were, in protest to the ProtectIP and SOPA laws trying to be passed through the United States governmental system. I’m not going to make some longwinded post about such, explaining what these things are, why these laws are so horrible …
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Software in Action: Microsoft Security Essentials
So, yesterday, I had to fix a friends laptop. The machine in question had your now classic situation of malware that behaved like normal antivirus software. This type of malware is beyond annoying for the simple fact that it tends to restore itself after a cleaning. Indeed, just being able to even gain access to …
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The Quest for Power
Power supplies are the most overlooked component on any computer. However, in many ways, it is the most critical part of the entire machine. Without enough power to the components, even the most capable system on Earth will behave poorly, if even boot. For me, my OEM 250 Watt power supply (a Lite-On 5251-08) just …
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Why do you like yourself so much?
If you use facebook, then you HAVE to have seen this happen more than you would like: Someone posts a status, and then, they like their own status. Now, if this is a post celebrating something major, or if the person has finally expressed something they have wanted to say for years, then it is …
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The Woes of Display Scaling
Why can’t video cards ever keep correct aspect ratio? It’s very simple: If you are playing a game on a widescreen monitor, and the game is in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, the game should display in that ratio, with black columns appearing on the side of the monitor. It should not be stretched …
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Video Cards, Dust, and Heat
It was bound to happen within the first 2 years: I thought my video card was dying. Well, more correctly, I though the fan on it was dying. The card, a PNY produced Nvidia GeForce 9800GT, was overheating, reaching temperatures of just over 100 degrees Celsius, in effect cooking itself to death. Even with the …
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Living With Microsoft Security Essentials: Day 4
Again, another uneventful day. Just the way I would like them to be, as far as antivirus software is concerned. I have preformed a quick scan on Lilith, which only took about 4 minutes, or less, with nice results: So, according to quick scan, my system is clean, and it took under 4 minutes to …
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Living With Microsoft Security Essentials: Day 3
Well, day 3 has gone well enough. Still no alerts or any odd behavours: MSE simply plays well with everything. I decided to preform a definition database upgrade: That took about 5 minutes to download. Nowhere near as long as the original database download, but still long considering the short time Avira took to do …
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Living With Microsoft Security Essentials: Day 2
Day two has been pretty uneventful. MSE has not detected any threats (Neither did Avira, as I avoid the nastier parts of the internet), and has been VERY unobtrusive. I have yet to have any virus definition updates, but will try an update tonight. I would imagine the definition update would be rather small in …
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Living With Microsoft Security Essentials: Day 1
Well, I decided to document a week living with MSE, after removing Avira from my systems. All 3 of my machines (2 Windows 7 machines, one Windows XP) used Avira, and all of them suffered the odd boot sequences caused by the software. Avira uninstalled smoothly on all 3 machines, and, after the absurd time …
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