CALL US
Saturday 9 am – 11 am Pacific
Sunday 7 pm – 9 pm Pacific
775-241-3571
Click for More Info
- udm14.org
- Publisher Demise
- LibreOffice
- Stargate
- Data Center Survey article
- Data Center Survey
no published close date; respond soon. - NV Energy Plan
- Microsoft & NV Energy
- Water Damage Study
- Rice for eating iFixit
- Apple liquid detection
- Cleaning Circuit Board
- QR Parking Stickers
- Brave Browser
- bbtl.ink/datacenterpower
- bbtl.ink/recovery
- bbtl.ink/stats for more links
Breakmaster Cylinder composed and performs our theme music.
Carson City Linux User Group – Meeting third Saturdays at ComputerCorps in Carson City – carsoncitylinux.org
One on One Tech Help at the Carson City Library Wednesdays 3-4 pm Techbusters
Email Ain’t Working, Money for Nothing, and PDFs Are Free
Data center power bills, a laptop that went swimming, too-private email, and what to do before Publisher retires
This week on Battle Born Tech, Joe and Christy welcome callers, Lee, Brian, and Kathryn.
If you make flyers, church bulletins, or newsletters in Microsoft Publisher, open each file you want to keep and save a copy as a PDF now. Subscribers lose the ability to open .pub files on October 1. Perpetual-license owners keep working, but without support after October 13.
Lee wants to know who’s paying for the data centers going up across the country, and he’s asking the same question as Wall Street. Christy follows the money back to Nevada, where there’s something you can do about it right now. More links at the left.
Oh, the third way for data center to get money is co-location. Companies rent the rack space (a fancy closet), along with the power, internet connection and security to house their computer equipment.
Others have trouble with competing lists
Brian’s friend spilled water on a running laptop, then did the one thing you’re not supposed to do next. Christy reveals which household drying trick lost out to doing nothing at all. Most important get the data out. If you have the recovery key for Bitlocker (or if the data isn’t encrypted) removing the storage device and copying the data is probably better than any recovery attempt with a dying laptop.
Every so often, Kathryn’s email decides it has never met her and wants proof she isn’t a robot. The struggle is choosing between privacy and convenience. And whoops, Christy tells her she can use Windows Explorer browser but shouldn’t! It was replaced by Microsoft by Windows EDGE! Sorry about that Kathryn.
We are often in the studio Saturdays 9 am to 11 am and Sundays 7 pm to 9 pm Pacific. Have your smart phone or speaker remind you to call! Call direct to studio then or anytime at 775-241-3571 and set up a time to battle your tech!
“That ship has sailed”
“The foresight to spill distilled water on it.”
“Entering hospice wing not the rehab wing”
“Pretty much sum up: sadness.”
“Corrosion doesn’t stop…its a slow death.”
“Sorry I don’t have any magic rice to throw your way.”
“Absolutely private and absolutely secure and nothing works.”
“You’re so private, Google doesn’t know who you are.”
AI assisted to make us sound more human.
Battle Born Tech,
where the Wi-Fi is strong,
the fonts are good-looking, and the passwords are above average.
BATTLE PLANS
Some info on this page
from Claude.ai
&udm=14
These are extra characters you add to the end of a Google search address. They make Google show a plain list of web links, without AI Overviews and other clutter. The shortcut sites udm14.com and udm14.org do it for you.
UTC
The world’s reference clock, which never changes for daylight saving time. UTC does not correspond to the word order of English Coordinated Universal Time or of the French temps universel coordonné. Instead, UTC was adopted as a compromise, matching the pattern of UT0, UT1, UT2 and serving as a standardised and linguistically neutral abbreviation for international use
Cloud
This means renting space and computing power on someone else’s computers, in their data centers, instead of running things on your own machine. When you save a file to OneDrive or use an AI chatbot, you’re using the cloud.
Recovery Key
When a drive is encrypted using Bitlocker (sometimes automatically!) this is a 48-digit number that unlocks an encrypted Windows drive if the normal unlock fails. Stored in your Microsoft account.
Liquid Metal
A metal compound in some high-end laptops as heat paste that moves heat off the processor; it’s tricky and expensive to service. Blobs can escape and short out components on the motherboard.
Theft of Labor
In a January 2023 internal memo, Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, called scraping the web to train AI “possibly the largest theft of labor in human history.” The memo became public in September 2026 in the New York Times’ copyright suit against Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft calls it one employee’s personal view, and maintains that training AI is protected fair use.
Silica gel packet
A material that pulls moisture out of the air, like those “do not eat” packets.
You Are the Product
“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” That’s Andrew Lewis, posting as “blue_beetle” on MetaFilter in 2010. The idea goes back to a 1973 video, “Television Delivers People,” by artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, which made the same point about TV viewers and advertisers.
Wealthy vs Skill
“The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” This is credited to Joseph Browning, in a July 2024 Facebook post that spread widely online.
FingerPrinting
This is a way for websites to recognize your computer without leaving anything on it. They combine small details, like your screen size, graphics hardware, and installed fonts, into an ID that’s nearly unique to you. Unlike a cookie, there’s nothing to delete.
Farbling
This is Brave’s name for scrambling your fingerprint. Brave feeds websites tiny random changes that people can’t notice but that throw off tracking. That’s why a site that relies on recognizing your fingerprint, like Gmail, can suddenly treat you as a stranger.
We are often in the studio Saturdays 9 am to 11 am and Sundays 7 pm to 9 pm Pacific. Have your smart phone or speaker remind you to call! Call direct to studio then or anytime at 775-241-3571 and set up a time to battle your tech!
Tuesdays 8 PM Pacific 95.1 FM Carson City, Nevada
Streaming LIVE on at KNVC.ORG
Battle Born Tech is a
Registered Service Mark of Christy Ramsey
775-241-3571 or [email protected]