Just when I thought Wikipedia couldn’t be any more useful, I found more information that was not easily found elsewhere. One of the events I’ve been trying to stay informed about is the Sirius and XM merger. Thanks to the slowly grinding wheels of the needless and meddlesome government bureaucracy, the process has taken over a year so far. It’s not easy to find the latest news on a story that moves at the pace of our monolithic federal government. I would like to get a satellite radio, but I don’t want to do it before the merger… that is, assuming the government permits the merger. I can’t be sure the current radios will be able to receive the combined networks once the merger is complete.

Well, I had no good solution to the problem until a couple of months ago, I thought to check out Wikipedia to see if there was any information. Boy was there ever! There was an article dedicated to the merger that was being updated practically by the minute. It had information on the current status of the merger, the stated benefits, opposition arguments to the merger, technical details, and a table of milestones. It had everything I needed to keep track of the situation.

Reading this article made me realize that Wikipedia can be used as a news source in addition to using it as a traditional encyclopedia. Since the contributors are updating it as they learn of new information, it is only slightly less current than the news sources from which they are getting that information. The main benefit being that the contributors are doing the leg-work for you and consolidating all the sources to one location. The down-side is that you have to know specifically what you are looking for. With a normal news site, you can see the latest on all subjects. That is just a minor quibble, though.

Check out the article for yourself.

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One of the many annoyances in Windows that drives me crazy is the lack of a “No to All” button when performing file options on multiple files. The most common circumstance that I find myself needing to do that is when I am copying all files in a folder to another folder which has some of the same files already residing in that folder (that folder being the folder to which I am copying). I only want to copy the files that won’t be overwritten. The obvious answer is just click “No” over and over again. Thanks Microsoft. I don’t have anything else to do.

Whelp, this morning when checking out some new articles at LifeHacker, I found that Windows does have a way to say “No to All.” The full explanation can be found here, but to give you a short and sweet explanation, just hold down the Shift key when you click “No.” That’s it. You’ve just simulated a “No to All” button. What? You didn’t figure that one out on your own? It’s so intuitive. How could you have missed it?

I wonder why Microsoft felt the need to hide such a hugely useful action.