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Showing posts with the label security

Sock it to the banks: transfer money smartly!

Modern times call for crafty experimentation and careful observations to avoid getting ripped off at every turn by some "service provider" seeking to collect fees from their "renters."  Guided by personal experience and altruistic desires, I would like to share some simple hints for transferring money between bank accounts quickly and efficiently without incurring fees. Use your bank's mobile app Many banks offer applications for your mobile device that can facilitate bank transfers by easily scanning and quickly depositing checks.  My experiences with several institutions show that while some banks are hesitant to give you the full amount immediately when a check deposit is made in person or ATM, checks for hundreds or even thousands of dollars clear completely and instantly when using a bank's mobile app.  The only potential fee with this method is that you need to have checks from all your banks so you can transfer money between each bank as needed...

I'm a Loser... (of Data on Hard Drives!)

I started getting good at building computers in 9th grade, and throughout high school, I had lots of fun constantly upgrading and improving my "big rig" to have more hard drive space than anyone else in the neighborhood.  By 2005, I was well on my way to 2 terabytes of space, and I now have approximately 20 hard drives ranging from 100GB to 2TB in size, and with both SATA & PATA (IDE) interfaces.  (This doesn't count all the really old <5GB drives I used to play with while I was busting my chops.) Anyone who's taken a probability class with a focus on electrical engineering knows of a little statistic that works against me and anyone else who owns a large number of hard drives: this statistic is called " Mean Time Between Failure " (MTBF).  In short, the more hard drives you own, the more likely any one of them will fail on a given day.  Well, over the last 16 years, I've had a fair share of failures: 1997 - Laptop hard drive 2006 - Power su...