If you have some old hard disks lying around and are considering selling them, it is important that you wipe them before passing them along - otherwise your data can very easily fall in to the wrong hands. There are a billion ways to wipe a disk - this article is not a tutorial. It is a reminder of something you might not be aware of. It definitely applies to using the unix command "dd" to perform a disk wipe, possibly to other tools as well.

A naive approach might be to issue this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX bs=4m 

I have just received some unsolicited communications from a company trying to sell their software - nothing unusual there. However the two videos that were linked were kind of hilarious. The first one made me want to commit suicide. The second one wanted me to regret that decision. See for yourself:

Marketing Video 1 - Yawn

Marketing Video 2 - Wtf?*

Spot the not in the recent screen grab from a TV broadcast in South Africa for the recent elections:

If you are a bit slow, here is how that graph should have looked like (to be a fair, accurate mathematical representation of the data). Why? Because the y-axis of a chart must be constant for all data items on the x-axis so that they can be compared - which is the whole point of a graph. Otherwise it is not a graph but a story. Like the one you tell your kids just before an atomic bomb is being detonated - "Everything will be OK, I promise".

Amidst global warming, pollution, world hunger, cyberwarfare, real wars, droughts, economic crisis, antibiotic resistance, genocide (wtf - we have classifications of genocide?!) and Justin Bieber - we have this to worry about too:

Analysts had been worried that without standardisation between platforms, intent for violent emoji could be misunderstood. For instance, if someone sent an acquaintance a message using their iPhone offering to come around with some friends and some waterguns, that acquaintance might well misunderstand the thrust of the message if they were using an Android phone and saw a series of pistols.

Source

We live in a day and age where information is available at the touch of a button. When I recently decided to research which thermal compound is best and how to best apply it to the CPU in my new workstation, I naturally turned to Google.

Usually within the first 2-4 pages one get all the relevant results provided your keywords are good. This was not a hard search to perform:

thermal compound cpu compared

thermal compound cpu reviewed

how to best apply thermal compounds cpu