Stuff I’ve been collecting for you while having the living room flooring done, ripping siding off the house, and extracting rusted bicycles from the foliage.* Oh, and deadlining, too. “Neighbors confront alcoholic child abuser about his lawn.” (Don’t worry, it’s only The Onion this time.) Not that you actually needed proof that government is filled with idiots … An ISP that puts privacy first? Did you know there was a U.S. holiday called Loyalty Day? I didn’t. But it’s coming right up. Clearly we need to celebrate! “Born this way.” This article would be fascinating if it admitted the existence…
Category: Computers & Technology
Drones over NYC. If you thought SOPA was bad … Rutherford institute tells the Census Bureau to back the heck off. Ominous? Interesting? Ominously interesting. Ditto this: Punching holes in firewalls. How long would it take to break your password? You remember the good old random name generator, don’t you? This may be the best test I’ve seen of Internet invisibility. When I visited with JavaScript turned off (standard practice with unknown sites), it told me I was “very visible” in these days when most sites require JavaScript. But it didn’t tell me anything else. When I temporarily enabled JavaScript,…
… don’t worry. I’m just mucking around, changing operating systems again. My old laptop (running Linux Mint 11) headed toward slow death a month or two ago. I eBayed myself a newer ThinkPad and upgraded (or so I thought) to Mint 12. I’ve been loving Linux Mint since version 8 or so, and I guess I’m not alone in that since it’s risen from nowhere to become one of the top Linuxes, if not the top Linux, for real people. Love its media friendliness! But 11 had problems. Not the Mint team’s fault, but there were some new Ubuntu features…
Been collecting again … Your awwwwww story for the day: An unlikely mother. But this is pretty awww-some, too. Especially if you consider what would have happened had the government gotten to the money before an honest man did. The 10 jobs with the happiest workers. (And I’m in two of those jobs; I should be delirious with joy.) The dogs of Cat Island. This is in some ways a horrible story. Yet so weird it’s funny. BTW, this is from the Paladin Press blog, and if you poke around a bit you’ll find a few entries by somebody you…
Trust him or not? That’s a good question. Me, I think Stephen Glass has more than earned a “trust, but verify” status. But not honest enough to be a lawyer???. Please tell me you’re joking. Well That was predictable. A black market in Cheetos. I nearly tossed my Christmas cookies yesterday when, at the local general store, I ran across tree ornaments that said, “Police officers: Angels on earth.” Among other things, I had no idea angels were prone to this kind of blatant cronyism. (Of course, I’m sure those little tags, just like these, will be used only for…
Many hat tips today. To S, C^2 and Matt, another. Have you noticed that companies you deal with online increasingly force you to place symbols, capitals, and numbers in your passwords — under the illusion that their nannying guarantees a password stronger than any you could possibly invent for yourself? In its own inimitable style XKCD notes the folly of that. Another bank closes. But not for the usual post-crash reason. Nope. Just the usual governmental reason. “A right to be forgotten”? There’s an interesting concept. Could it really interfere with the right to free speech? More village self-defense. But…
Three new chapters this week in Jake MacGregor’s novel The Advisor. Chapter 19 and 20 on Tuesday. Chapter 21 last night. Good news from the lemonade wars. Well, if anything can be considered good news in this business of cops and code authoritah shutting down kids’ front-yard ventures. Can you imagine the kind of person who would — with “official” blessing — go out of his way to yell at little girls for selling lemonade? The mind boggles. But then, I suppose we’re supposed to be grateful that the criminal little lemonade pushers weren’t beaten and tasered to death. (NOTE:…
Radley Balko, who posts a lot of photos on his blog, has just posted the best two ever, bar none, no possible comparison: Cory Maye as a free man. How come Al Quaeda is always responsible, even when Al Quaeda isn’t responsible? “Playing to Your Strengths.” For some, this might be a no-brainer. But for others (e.g. who were forced or simply fell into their career paths), not so. Charles Hugh Smith is a wonderful thinker. He’s just come up with the best analysis of what the Euro really is and what the current goings on in European finances really…
To those of a certain age, “Telex” may evoke memories of large, unwieldy, chattering ancestors of the fax machine. Today Telex is something else: a potentially revolutionary way to route around Internet censorship. S., who found the information, comments (this will make more sense if you’ve read a bit on the above links): I suspect there will be a number of interesting variations on this technology. For example, the The Mental Militia forum is almost certainly monitored by one or more Three-Letter Aacronyms. The Telex approach requires many different machines in the network to run a Telex server, and is…
I installed Linux Mint 11 last night. And this morning. And again this morning. I think I’m done now. I’ve been using Linux Mint for several years and just loving it. It’s the most stable, most newbie-friendly, most media friendly Linux I know. Release 7 was terrific, 8 even better — and there I happily stayed until I began having browser woes. I knew there could be hassles jumping three versions forward, but Mint is so friendly I wasn’t worried. Ha! First time I tried to install, it insisted on a username and password long before any had been set.…