So I discover a shiny Mac with apparently no central unit:
“- Mkay, where’s your central unit?
- My what?
- Well, nevermind. What’s that small thing, is this the [ISP-issued modem-router]?
- That is the computer.
- Oh” (Macs, eh…)

Then my summoner demonstrated the broken internet problem: open “Internet” (Safari + Google as start page), type a search, click any result => crash:
“- Look, Internet is broken
- Actually, it’s not Internet, it’s your browser.
- My what?
- Mkay, nervermind. I’m going to install a piece of software which should fix this.”

Then I went to getfirefox and got a weird page with no download link. After a bit of searching around, I finally find a useful message: “Your OS is too old to install Firefox 3.6″. (NB: that’s not a mistake, it was a few weeks ago, the current version of Fx was 9.0, still the website was telling me “too old for Fx 3.6″). Jeez, I didn’t know Fx had such high version requirements. Tried Chrome: same problem.

“- How old is your computer?
- I don’t know…”
(of course, why did I even ask)
I browsed around a bit, finally found the OS version: Mac OS 10.3.9. (c) Apple 19??-2004. It’s amazing how a Mac is able to _look_ recent while actually being an ancestor.
“- I guess you bought it like in 2004-2005?
- Sounds about right”

That looked like a dead-end: no way to upgrade the browser without first upgrading the system. Not sure how far that old Mac (512 MiB of RAM, if I remember well…) could even be upgraded, not to mention how much it would cost.

“- Maybe… you should get a new computer?
- What? Oh noes, it’s so recent!”
(come on, it’s 8 years old, finish it already!)
“- Okay, maybe I’ve got a workaround: I can replace Google with Scroogle.
- What?
- I can replace Google with another, plainer version. It gives the same results, but without the fancy look.
- Alright!”
(yeah, usually I don’t manage to convert people to Scroogle because “yuck, it’s ugly”, but suddenly when it can save a few hundred bucks, look doesn’t matter so much anymore)

So, I replaced Google with Scroogle SSL search French in the bookmarks and start page, explain that “yes the page – title and search button – is in English but the results will favor French pages”. I then offered my summoner to try for themselves: open “Internet” (Safari + Scroogle as start page), type a search, click any result =>
“- Google works, it’s a miracle!
- Actually, it’s not really Google, it’s Scroogle.
- It’s what?
- Nvm…”

They then tried a few other searches, and at some point went to Wikipedia:
“- Wait a minute, does it look normal to you?
- What do you mean? Yeah it works great!”
Honestly, the page was a wreck. To give you an idea, if you have the technical knowledge (if you don’t, just imagine): try loading Wikipedia without the stylesheets. No wonder eventually some AJAX-intensive site managed to crash that middle-age Safari…

Anyway, the official version is I “fixed Internet”, and as a bonus I withdrew someone from BigBrother’s reach. Half an hour well spent

I’m currently using Netvibes, and, well, here’s how my PubMed feed looks:

Seems like PubMed isn’t really tagging article times properly. At first I thought this was because sometimes some articles are published online before the actual print date, so my query could most likely contain a few articles published online but due to appear later (maybe even next year) in the corresponding printed issues. However, checking out the feed source code I realized that it just lacks any date and time indication. So Netvibes register them as “right now”, and for some reason it causes them to appear as being from the future.

So, thanks to such people, Today I Learned that you need a 600 Watts PSU to run a Radeon HD 5570 (NB: not a typo, I really mean a 5570). It even says that this card eats up 153 watts on idle, wow… the day AMD starts releasing such electricity eaters is the day they go bankrupt, if you ask me! It is to be noted that this reply, as it contains a link, was validated by their highly competent team of moderators.
In case you have no clue either about GPU power consumption, at the moment (July 2011), 150 W is the full-load power consumption of more than decent gaming GPUs, for instance the specified max power of the Radeon HD 5850 is 151W. Idle power consumption of GPUs are usually at most around a few tens of watts for the most power-hungry ones. As far as the HD 5570 goes, its specified max power is 39W and I don’t know about idle but I’d guess somewhere around 5-10W.

As a conclusion, when asking technical advice online, make sure the person who answers uses Opera (NB: I know, it was a hoax, but the reason why it succeeded as a hoax is because it brought scientific proof of something everyone already knew).

doctor who curses of the black spots: it’s The Curse of the Black Spot, only one curse and no acne involved.

does web installer use less disk space than standalone installer: the installer does. The program once installed doesn’t.

download windows sdk iso compressed: sure, with all the trouble it is to find that ISO you think they’ll provide a compressed version of it? Good one (plus, actually, what’s inside the ISO is fairly properly compressed already, you can’t really expect more than a few percents if you compress the ISO itself I think)

jdownloader won’t open a dlc: jDownloader is a naughty boy ^^

huge notepad: haha, I can’t believe my post about Piwik’s huge database is first on this. But you’ll probably want to try TopGun or TheGun. Those are 2 tiny text editors written in assembler (MASM) and which are able to deal with fairly large text files.

what does facebook consider threatening comments?: uh… why are you asking me?

chrome browser beating everyone else: did I say that? Mkay, maybe I did, but you have to see it in context though.

mass decryption jdownloader: massive pirate, arr!

pngout source: I guess this was “search like a pirate” day.

is there suppossed to be a difference between copyright and patent law: yup: you copyright the software, you patent what it does.

how to add someone as a bit on the side on facebook: …

hide mediawiki version: it’s actually possible but a bit tedious (needs to be done manually every time you upgrade MediaWiki – maybe there’s a better way though, but I didn’t find it yet), basically you need to sabotage the Special:Version page.

why visual c++ 2010 so expensive?: because it’s Microsoft. Troll aside, actually, non-free development products are usually quite expensive indeed. They’re a pain to develop and don’t really get a lot of customers, so high costs supported by few sales = big price. You should see the price of Intel Compilers!

why is xp refusing to install safari setup saying it is not a legitimate 32 application: interesting one… never had such an issue…

imagej captcha: Hi there, trying to develop a spambot?

steve dernoncourt: that’s not me. Nor an alias. Nor my second or third first name.

how to reply to a fake account request: grow a brain… for instance you can just ignore it, it usually works fine. Or you can accept it, for fun. That’s what the “Limited profile” category is for.

jaymod filezilla: what the heck are you trying to do… ?

why firefox slow in peacekeeper: because it’s Firefox. Abbreviated Fx and NOT FF, for the record.

And a nice finish: “are you sure you know this person”

Well, that’s all I found after browser about 2 weeks of queries, time to call it a post I guess…