Frequently when troubleshooting or cleaning PCs (ah, the joys of small business IT) it’s useful to have a bundle of tools that you can use. I generally use multiboot antivirus CDs created with Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disc Utility (SARDU) with additional utilities put in the Extras directory, but sometimes it’s hard to beat the convenience of a USB flash drive. Unfortunately very few flash drives still have the hardware write protect switch that was common years ago.
Here’s a listing of drives that still include that hardware write protection, along with some other options that might work though not as well. This listing is based on reports from several discussion boards in 2009-2010 as well as a list prepared and maintained by c’t Magazine (German) (or via Google Translate). Where available I provide links to the manufacturers and possibly to stores where the drives are available. Please comment with any corrections or additional drives to be added to the list.
Continue reading List of USB Flash Drives with Hardware Write Protection Switch
While unrelated to most of the content of this site, I’d like to call your attention to David McCandless’ blog Information Is Beautiful (about graphics and data visualization) and in particular to a very nice piece on What Makes Good Information Design? – in particular the key dimensions of Interestingness, Integrity, Function and Form. [...]
An assortment of website color selection tools, including web-smart options. Web-smart color is a palette of 4096 colors that are likely to display well on almost all modern displays. It has largely supplanted the earlier “web-safe” colors, which were a set of 216 colors likely to display well on all displays running at 256 colors or higher.
This post will be revised as I go through my bookmarks and with future tools and may end up changed into a reference page. More useful items are likely to end up higher up within the content of this post, and suggestions are welcome in the comments.
Color Picker is a simple web application that lets you use web-safe or web-smart colors and see how they’ll look.
MoreCrayons Web-Smart Palette tools has both a color cube (view interior of cube by unchecking boxes to hide the “layers” of color on the blue/Z axis) and a slider tool that only operates in the web-safe color ranges.
Adobe has a very nifty color theme tool called Kuler.
Sharebrain has a nice collection of links to color resources.
Continue reading Obligatory Website Color Tools Post
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