(Part 2) Best products from r/talesfromtechsupport

A 3.5" floppy is, on the high side, approximately 3.3mm thick.

A stack of 5,970 3.5" floppies is therefore roughly 19.7 meters - over 64 feet - high, until it inevitably tips over.

Now, you might be thinking that it'd be easiest to make a bunch of smaller stacks, and you'd be right. A hundred sixty-floppy stacks would fit neatly on a pallet; each stack would be a quite safe ~198mm in height - 7.8" - and the whole operation would be less than a meter across each way (~90cm by ~94cm). All of these dimensions are rounded up, if anything, to allow for a bit of pallet wrap, paper dividers, whatever.

"The pallet is overkill, Val!" Perhaps so, for a cuboid that small, but at a weight of ~19 grams per diskette, we're looking at over 113 kg - 250 lbs - of floppy.

Hmm. Let's divide this up so that it can be carried up the stairs by hand.

A standard case of paper, here in the States - 10 reams of 8.5x11" writing paper (like A4 sheets but shorter), has roughly 11x17" usable footprint and 8.5" height - about 28x43x21cm. This lets us put twelve stacks of up to 65 floppies in each box before we consider how many we can stuff down the half-floppy-width gap in the side - may as well not bother with that, honestly, if it only saves one person one trip up the stairs and disrupts the order of the disks. These 780 floppies weigh about 14.8 kg, or under 33 lbs - light enough for an out-of-shape PFY to handle.

Now we're only looking at eight boxes of floppies, with the last box being only two-thirds full. This is a totally reasonable backup solution!

Okay, there are a few missing details here - reliability issues (with both disks and drives!), the number of man-hours required to have someone swap and label the disks, and, of course, the $2,500-plus-shipping cost of the disks themselves, even from the suspiciously-cheap brigade - if by some miracle the disks all work out of the box.

Now you know!

Typically jacking up a car isn't a hard thing to figure out :).

We will use the driver (left side) of the car and the front tire for this example. Along the side of the car where you open your door there is typically a piece of metal that is extremely hard, it is typically directly under the sideskirt - on my car there is an arrow on the sideskirt that indicates where the metal is.

If you get down and look under almost any car nowadays you will see this protruding piece of metal, it will ALWAYS be behind the front tires and infront of the rear tires). That is where you place the jack and jackup the car. The metal piece itself is about 3 inches long and about a 1/2 inch thick.

Example can be seen here - the jack that is being used is what most cars will have in it - they are halfjacks, aka they are not full sized jacks.

To jackup a car to say... fix the rear brake pads (replacing them) you'd want a full size jack (which CAN fit in a cars trunk...just takes up a good bit of space haha). Full size jack can be seen here.

Now as for jacking up a car with a full size jack? Also easy! You just look under the car again (front or rear of the car whichever end you are jacking up) and find the metal point on the car designed for it, every car can be different but most are very similar. For my Scion? it is a metal hook under the rear of the car and the front is just a piece of metal like the sides of the car have. Your cars owner manual MAY tell you were the jack location is, or it may not. Youtube and Google have the answers in this case :)

Rear of my car jacked up while I replace the rear brake pads as they seized up on me completely and need replacing, they are also 10 years old haha.

Jacking up a car is something no one wants to do, but it is quite easy to do :) just make sure you don't jackup on something that isn't designed for it...like the oil pan D: that would be bad. I recommend getting someone who has done it before to show you the proper placement of the jack OR google it :) tons of videos and the like for this type of stuff out there.

I'd go read books about the A+ cert (you don't need to certify but it's great material).

For other technical things I recommend a lot of books that are amazing:

• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  
  
• Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (6th Edition)
  
  
• Introduction to Java Programming, Comprehensive Version (9th Edition)
  
  
• Scripting with Objects: A Comparative Presentation of Object-Oriented Scripting with Perl and Python
  
  
• Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd Edition) WARNING: GOD TIER
  
  Use technology books to learn processes, not end results. To be a better IT person, you should know how computers work as a system, not how to do say "Map network Drive in Windows", learn how those drives are mapped, what are the underlying fundamentals?
  
  

You can still buy old hubs, but they were deprecated with gigabit Ethernet so I doubt you'll find one that doesn't nuke your network speed.

My first reaction to your mention of using a hub as a repeater was that surely an actual Ethernet repeater would be better than using a hub, but apparently those are really hard to get too. Then I realised that unless you're changing to a different medium for longer distance, you might as well just use a basic switch as a repeater. It's a little overkill functionality-wise, but it's easily the cheapest option now.

I did find one actual repeater: POE Ethernet Repeater. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a switch chipset inside though!

As for sniffing, I can see how a hub would be the most undetectable way, but I bet there's specialist hardware that would do a better job and still be pretty undetectable - something based on a managed switch with the ability to disguise its mac address to look like the devices on either end of the link? A switch based solution also wouldn't risk causing packet collisions if you wanted to inject data.

Yeah man, no problem.

Before I find some specific books, I wanna mention one series that you've definitely heard of: Blank for Dummies. From my experience, if you want to start from no knowledge and work up to an intermediate level of understanding, For Dummies books are great. A lot of experts beg to differ.

But, to be frank, people who are experts in their field are just that: experts in their field. I have friends who are excellent in their fields, but they are terrible teachers. They expect people to pick things up as quicky as they did. We're not all wired that way, and For Dummies books get that.

So, for my first two recommendations, here ya go:

Networking for Dummies

Building Your Own PC for Dummies

Both of those are less than 20 bucks on Amazon, and I'm sure you can find them at a library.

Now, if you really want to get into networking, and you want to get in to the IT field, you should read the A+ and Network+ certification books from Comptia. These will be harder to find in a library, but there will probably be some older editions lying around somewhere. If you know someone who works in the field, they probably have a copy, or can get you a copy, for free or cheap.

These books are more expensive, and more difficult, but they are peerless if you want to jumpstart a career in IT. I'm not going to claim that getting an A+ and/or a Network+ (or a Security+) certification is going to guarantee you a job. However it will definitely help you get your foot in the door.

Other books that you'll want to eventually check out if you want to check out things from O'Reilly. Most of their books are not meant for beginners, but they are the quintessential reference books in the IT field, including computer science, networking, and security. To give you an idea of just how many books they have, check out this picture of the programming section at the Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco.

That band of colorful books in the middle? Those are (some of) the programming books they have available. They have just as many on every topic of IT. Here's their networking section. 19 pages. Of just networking books.

I hope that gives you a good idea of where to start.

...you wanna talk about crappy/repeated customer support? (Inhales)

So, ah, I bought a $300 laptop, an Inspiron 3543 with an i3-5005U and a glorious 1T.B. of storage for all the games I couldn't play, because the graphics on the 5005U had been nerfed into oblivion in the name of power conservation. I received mine in the later days of July, (2015) because why not. My first month with it was tolerable, if not relatively sluggish. Then, in early September, the hard drive fails. I went to the somewhat-nearby Microsoft store, (we bought it online) to hear our options. They were:

1.) Replace the hard drive.
2.) Try and copy the data off the hard drive for a fee greater than that of the laptop, itself.
3.) F.U. (Lightly paraphrasing)

I decided to replace the hard drive. They said that it would take 1-2 business weeks to repair the laptop, with shipping included as a factor. That seemed fair enough. It was a month before Dell sent me an email saying: We have received your laptop in the mail. Would you like to replace the faulty hard drive? Please call our Technical Repairs department, and give them this code: *** to provide input. Thank you for choosing Dell. (Paraphrasing to reduce length.) I was rather irked, but there was nothing I could do. I called, and told them that yes, I would like them to do their job. It was another two weeks before Dell called, and said something along the lines of "We're done." I know that Dell is a massive corporation, and they have a lot of customers with busted products, but really? Two weeks?

Dell called a week after, saying that they had received my laptop, and were ready to ship my laptop back. Microsoft sent an email to me saying that my laptop was in their shop a month later.

Do you want to know the best part of the story? This process occurred more than six times with the same (I believe it to be) cursed laptop. (Obviously their timing has improved moderately,

Only a few weeks ago did Microsoft tell me that, (while my laptop was under repairs) they needed me to go to their physical store to find a replacement to the old one. While I was at the store, I realized, *"They only told me to replace it because they must have ran out of the old model!***

Conclusion: Never allow this Toshiba hard drive under your roof.

I get the idea -Alienware! Lots of Monitors! Yeah! but I'd have to agree...

For something like this a standard desktop with some great graphics cards will do just as well and cost less. You're paying a lot just for brand there.

Eyefinities come to mind, but I've never had to seriously look into building a system like that. A quick search on amazon shows you can get a 6 monitor card for $250:
http://www.amazon.com/VisionTek-Products-Express-Graphics-900614/dp/B00C7EPSVS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1405672601&sr=8-2&keywords=eyefinity


for 18 monitors, you'd need 3 cards. $750 worth of card. Another $1,000 max for the rest of the system since it's not doing anything heavy in terms of computation, and you could build 3 machines for the cost of that alienware.

I worked as a warranty field service technician for Dell for half a year, and probably the best tool purchase I made was my DeWalt gyroscopic screwdriver (https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DCF680N2-Gyroscopic-Screwdriver-Battery/dp/B00DL7QDS2). A lot of people are (rightly) wary of using an electric screwdriver on electronics, but that electric screwdriver in particular is actually really well suited for the task — the gyroscopic control scheme makes it super easy to control precisely and gives plenty of feedback, plus the clutch actually goes down far enough to be useful.

Here's something that HELPS ... won't protect 100%, but helps.

https://smile.amazon.com/Leviton-41081-4WP-Angled-QuickPort-Wallplate/dp/B003ATOCDO

When they do spill, it runs down the cable, but not into the jack itself.

Next is to put it tab up, which helps the ones with cables in.

Tab down helps the ones WITHOUT cables, so that's a 50/50 if you have unused drops.

If you're paranoid enough, there's outdoor faceplates such as https://smile.amazon.com/MM510C-Weatherproof-Outdoor-Receptacle-Protector/dp/B001JEPX4Y/

Note: Both linkes are to smile.amazon.com because I do one of the charities that, well, smile.amazon.com supports. Swap "www" for "smile" if you are concerned about that at all.

RwP

Anti-static mats are cheaper than that. https://www.amazon.com/ModRight-Anti-Static-Mod-Mat-Assembly-Surface/dp/B00CPP6QUG is a dedicated computer building/rebuild mat, https://www.antistaticmat.net/default.php has blank ones and parts for them.

As for tools, buy something like a Wera Precision set. Ifixit is alright, but Wera and Wiha just plain feel better in the hand. I would not buy craftsman/husky tools for computer repair. They are too large for most computer work, and if you break the bit, you should not have been doing the thing.

I also heavily recommend investing in a good multimeter. Something like the Fluke 12E+/15E/15B, at ~75$. Fluke is the typical preferred brand for industrial stuff, Uni-T is an alright brand as well. Avoid the really cheap ones for computer work, as they may have a low enough input impedance to mess up the circuits you're probing.

Another set of stuff to look at buying are network/cable tools. Cheap RJ45 tester, crimper, and a radial stripper. less than 100$ even if you get decent ones (40$ for a feed through crimper, 20$ for a radial stripper, 30$ for a cheap tester). Means you can do a whole host of work for yourself and friends/clients.

Awesome.

I remember playing the 2nd game in the series and yes, it's really awesome: great construction, awesome management, pretty good graphics. Only problem is that the planes didn't line up with time acceleration. One plane took 4 years to land when I tested it years back XD

It's not on Steam, but there's a free download here: http://airport-tycoon.en.softonic.com/ (untested by me) and it's available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Airport-Tycoon-PC/dp/B00004TBC0.

There are also two sequels, but you might want to check those out first before dropping money on them in case they have any game-breaking things wrong with them.

The device was a simple modem with one Ethernet port. He bought this which is the exact same model I have.

It has only one Ethernet out port, which you can attach a device to get the internet, but if you need more than one device and/or wireless you need a router too.

I have this router at home attached to my modem and we bought him a similar model. It may be the exact same, I forget off the top of my head.

Also your other posts posted like 14 times.