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Microsoft has put together a downright painful lesson in online communication under the guise of "child safety". This is both funny and scary at the same time:

Numbers are often used as letters. The term "leet" could be written as "1337," with "1" replacing the letter L, "3" posing as a backwards letter E, and "7" resembling the letter T. "0" (zero) will typically replace the letter "O."

Characters of similar appearance can be used to replace the letters they resemble. For example, "5" or even "$" can replace the letter S. Applying this style, the word "leetspeek" can be written as "133t5p33k" or even "!337$p34k," with "4" replacing the letter A.

So rule one says numbers for letters. Check. No difference there from the early typewriter my dad learned on that didn't have a 1(one) and really did expect you to use lowercase l. When I used to teach keyboarding to my highschool teachers many of them really did make this mistake.

And rule 2 says that kids might use 5 for S, and 4 for A. What? Isn't that rule 1? Did this person have an editor?

Their list of words indicating possible illegal activity is funny since the only activity it deals with is what Microsoft might care about -- piracy. How about explaining to parents the concept of a/s/l? (Age/Sex/Location check)?

I'm kinda digging this Lifehacker site. The stories they post aren't heavily geek oriented or any other really small slice of life, which means there's always some variety in there (whereas many of my other geeky blogs often repeat each other, or themselves, into the ground). I especially enjoy the "round up" posts where you basically get 6 for the price of one. I usually only find 1 link of interest to me, but it's better than none. And you never know what you're gonna get.

I even dig the name, as I too have been heard to utter "hack life" on occasion.

Only downside thus far is that it's sponsored by Sony and thus they have gone way overboard on the sony advertisements. Right now on the screen I see 4 blocks (2 banners and 2 squares) dedicated to Sony, all for the exact same product. That's not really a good idea in my opinion.

Just the the other day the story went around that Tivo's TivoToGo upgrade actually caused machines to slow down and experience some garbage when switching channels. I was one of the unlucky ones experiencing the problem.

This morning sure enough I had a message that my machine had been updated! Of course the actual text told me that now I was enabled for TivoToGo (I already was, I've used it), but maybe this upgrade will address the bug in question. I don't do much channel surfing at 6am, so we'll have to see tonight. My version is still 7.1a, but the build number after it has probably changed (I wouldn't remember).

One thing that stood out like a sore thumb was that even when booting from a Windows CD, it would still hang. "Uh oh", said co-worker Matt, "That pretty much means its hardware, not Windows itself. Why not try booting with Knoppix?"

Great idea. Knoppix is a self containable bootable Linux image on a single CD. Because of its very nature it is heavy on the automatic hardware detection, and packed with drivers. If Knoppix fails to boot, then I can truly rule Windows completely out of the equation.

Well, Knoppix does indeed fail to boot - hangs on scanning /dev/scd0. One of the options to boot knoppix is "failsafe', which does basically no hardware detection, so I run that -- and it boots. After whittling down my options I discover that "no dma" option by itself lets me boot. Must be a DMA problem!

I make the necessary BIOS settings to turn off DMA for my drives and try booting windows. Nothing. Damnit.

I google around and I see that the whole /dev/scd0 nodma relationship is a common thing with knoppix auto detection and that this is not necessarily my problem. Shoot.

What I *do* notice, however, is that my bios has something called "Load failsafe defaults" which is something I totally would not have noticed if not for Knoppix's option. I tell bios to load failsafe defaults. It works!

I realize that I'm running in a non-optimized state right now. But really, this machine exists for only a couple of reasons - for Kerry to check her mail, for me to run iTunes, and for the random case where there's a piece of software that will only run on Windows (the looming TurboTax comes to mind).

So I can't say I fully understand the answer, but I don't care. It's up and running, it's off the kitchen table, Kerry can have her email back, and I can go back to spending my evenings hacking the blog like I used to.

Update: Well my USB ports still don't work under windows. Back to Knoppix, which gives me a USB_HCRESET time out error (or something like that) on all 3 hubs. In this case I think it really is safe not to blame windows.