Phone Counter-Measures

I was very interested to read “The gadgets police use to snarf cell phone data” over on ArsTechnica and wondered how long it would be before there were apps that blocked these gadgets, and/or apps which counter-attacked these gadgets with bad data or viruses.

 

Ask Ars: How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive?

This is an interesting issue, I had not really thought about it until I read about it, and I am always very careful to erase drives before I sell them or give them away.

Ask Ars: How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive?: “

How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive? I’ve seen a few pieces in recent days about how traditional ‘secure delete’ programs fail to work properly on SSD drives, so what tools are available and useful?

As pointed out in a recent research article, there isn’t a standard method for securely deleting data from a solid state drive. Hard disk drive”

I guess I will need to go to plan B when I have to dispose of SSDs in the future, which is what I do now with drives that die.

Mini DisplayPort D’oh Moment

I got myself a new Apple LED 27″ Cinema Display along with an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card for my aging MacPro. I took a look at the Dell UltraSharp U2711 display and decided that I did not want the anti-glare coating that comes with it.

I had a major D’oh moment when setting it up. For some reason I was not getting a picture after I plugged it in. I did a little research and found that you need to push the Mini DisplayPort plug firmly into its socket until you get a secure click and the plug is flush with the socket. Everything worked once that was done.

I noted a couple of things. Contrary to the answers on the Apple Store, this card will drive three monitors on an older MacPro (I have a 1,1 model). And the cord on display is on the short side, which is fine if you use this monitor with a laptop, but does not work so well if you use a deskside machine like I do and I had to get an extension cable.