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links for 2010-10-25

  • Building a Hackintosh from scratch—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware—has never been easier, and the final product has never performed better. Here's how it works. Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second). This time, to make things really easy on you, we put together a video walkthrough of the entire process. You can watch the video in its entirety below, but we've also broken up the video next to the accompanying text in each step below.
  • The Dark Sun has risen again on the parched, magically devastated world of Athas, bringing with it the new rules and mindset of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. First introduced in the early 1990s during D&D 2nd Edition, Dark Sun was meant to be a brutal, unforgiving dark fantasy setting unlike anything the game had seen. Noble hobbits, wise wizards, and forthright knights gave way to a world devastated by an arcane apocalypse. Where once there had been a bright, green planet, there was now just sand and death. Civilization lived on in a handful of city-states dominated by all-powerful sorcerer-kings. Players took on the role of slaves, gladiators and other peons thrown to the bottom of society’s latter; the setting wasn’t about saving the world – it was about surviving it. It was also the first setting where psionics dominated the landscape, while magic was rare (and profane, as it caused the apocalypse that turned verdant Athas into a wasteland).
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    links for 2010-04-19

  • There's any number of great antivirus tools that help protect your PC from viruses, but what about when you encounter an already-infected PC? Your best bet is a boot CD, and the free AVG Rescue CD cleans viruses easily. The AVG Rescue CD comes in two flavors: an ISO image that can be easily burned to an optical disc, or a compressed version that can be installed to a bootable flash drive. Once you've done so, you can simply boot from the drive of choice directly to the AVG menu, where you can scan for viruses, edit files, test your drive, or even edit the registry. Since the bootable CD is based on a version of Linux, you can also access a number of common Linux tools to make changes to your system and hopefully make it bootable again.
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    links for 2010-03-31

  • Typical non-programmer question: Why are there so many programming languages? Why doesn’t everyone just pick the best one and use that? Fair enough. The definition of the term “computer language” can be really nebulous if you encounter someone who is in the mood to engage in social griefing through pedantry. Instructions for a machine to follow? Does that include 19th century player pianos? Machine code? Flipping switches and wiring on those first-gen electric computer-type contraptions? Considering over half the “language” consists of dragging and dropping icons, does Scratch count? Let’s just sweep that all aside and assume languages began with the idea of stuff like COBOL and FORTRAN and we don’t care to refine the definition further. Humor me.
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    links for 2010-01-30

  • It is a little hard to talk hard numbers here since this will vary wildly from agency to agency, firm to firm, freelancer to freelancer. But let’s just throw some out there just for fun. $75 / hour. That’s a fair rate, I think, for a reasonably skillful freelance web designer.
  • Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
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    links for 2010-01-15

  • Website security is an interesting topic and should be high on the radar of anyone who has a Web presence under their control. Ineffective Web security leads to all of the things that make us hate the Web: spam, viruses, identity theft, to name a few. The problem with Web security is that, as important as it is, it is also very complex. I am quite sure that some of you reading this are already part of an network of attack computers and that your servers are sending out spam messages without you even knowing it. Your emails and passwords have been harvested and resold to people who think you need either a new watch, a male enhancement product or a cheap mortgage. Fact is, you are part of the problem and don’t know what you did to cause it. The reason is that security experts don’t like to talk too much in public about what they do and where the issues lie; and sadly enough, they can also come across as arrogant in their views.
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