Site Tweakage...

...has happened.

That is all.

Ain't technology great?

Lost my phone in one of the cars I drove yesterday at work.

Discovered something interesting just now - I can track, lock, erase, and ping it from Google.

It is currently southbound on I-81, near Mt Crawford, Va (+/- 5 meters), locked and ringing.

I put a message on the screen that says: "I was lost  at MAA on Monday".

There's also a call button on the lock screen, with a friend's phone number. I want it back because it contains the last pictures I took of Baxter.

Sheldon Leonard

...think about it.

Meanwhile, Earlier Last Week...

The Jeff Bezos side of the Musk/Bezos Space Race

Mr. Musk's contribution:


McDonnell Douglas and NASA were futzing with this sort of thing back in the 90s, in the form of the Delta Clipper:


Sadly, it never really got off the ground.

(Bezos' and Musk's efforts found at SondraKistan)

 If you want to get an idea of the technologies involved in this kind of project, check out the job listings at Blue Origin!

DVD Archiving

If you are like me, and want to make back-up copies of your DVDs, but find that they are stubbornly encrypted, here is a free (for the rest of the month) tool to help you:

Passkey can run in the background, so when you insert a DVD into your computer, it will make it ready to be backed up. Once it's ready, you can use something like ImageBurn to either burn a new DVD, or write a DVD (.iso) image to your hard drive.

From the folks at DVDFab.

Star Trek vs Star Wars - The Final Frontier

I believe this says it all:

Questions??

Happy Birthday...

...James Tiberius Kirk!

 

  Live long and prosper!

How Fast Do You Read??

I'm still above 400 words per minute (455-ish on this test).  Guess I wasn't really cut out to be a college prof!

Source: Staples eReader Department

Via @The Anchoress

Juxtapositions du Jour...

First this...


...from the daily Caller


Then this...

Going Boldly

December 5th, 2013 - 7:25 am

Faster-than-light travel — made real?

And explained in layman’s terms for those of us (especially me) who struggled through these things in high school and college.

...from the ever-suave Mr. Green!

Mmmmmm, Could Be...!! (Updated)

This is probably not exactly true (he is speculating, after all), but it sure sounds plausible!

Head fake! Is Healthcare.gov only an

empty shell MOCKUP of a working

Obamacare exchange?

Wednesday, October 09, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: Obamacare exchanges, programming failure, mockup

(NaturalNews) As the days of glitches, snafus, down-time and critical errors mount up, evidence is mounting that the Healthcare.gov Obamacare exchange is not actually a fully-formed online application. More and more, it appears to be a mockup of a health care exchange enrollment system.

Go.  RTWT!!

(Via Mr. Taranto)

Update:  Added the "giggle du jour" tag so you all know that I'm not taking this article seriously.  You'll understand if you read the first few comments.  And, "The Health Ranger"?  Too cute...

Feeling Gerard's Pain

When I got the "bad ware" alert from Firefox/Google about the comments section on one of the posts are Gerard's site, I sent him a e-mail by way of a heads up, and we had a little conversation  (bottom-up post order):

Condolences.

 

On September 1, 2013 at 11:37 PM Gerard Van der Leun wrote:

I'm working to fix it and eradicate the code the bastards snuck in.

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 3:17 PM, leelu <lawebber@cwassociates.net> wrote:

Got this on my Firefox browser when I clicked the comments ;ink on the Michelle's shower curtain dress comment link:

 

https://www.stopbadware.org/firefox?hl=en-US&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americandigest.org%2Fmt%2Fmt-comments.cgi

 

Maybe Bill got miffed about something?? 

But, when I saw this post this morning:

For those who have come through the deadly warning barrier!

My apologies. This is a very annoying time. Fixing this issue takes, I have found, lots of digging with the superb staff at Hosting Matters, a good deal of digging out of code that came in from Croatia, a resetting of all security params, a restore from a backup and then a review from Google.
It is indeed a royal pain.

I felt I should condole him some more.  (Read from the bottom up...)

...sorta sounds like my last divorce. 

On September 4, 2013 at 2:16 PM Gerard Van der Leun wrote:

It takes, I have found, lots of digging with the staff at Hosting Matters, a good deal of digging out of code that came in from Croatia, a resetting of all security params, a restore from a backup and then a review from Google.

 

It is indeed a royal pain.

 

Sigh.

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 11:14 AM, leelu <lawebber@cwassociates.net> wrote:

STILL at it!?  Wow... that shit is nasty.

 

Have you tried re-generating the dilithium crystals??

 

"When is leelu not in trouble?"
Korben Dallas

 I suspect he would appreciate prayer in any denomination at this point.  It does sound as if he's getting good support at Hosting Matters, tho.  Big plus in his favor.

Look Out! It's A Trap!!

Richard Stallman, the man who wrote the GNU half of "GNU/Linux" and started the Free Software movement (which has forked into the Open Source movement) was interviewed a while back by The Guardian.  He cautions against "cloud computing" because he sees that as yet another way to suck people into closed-source, "...proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time."

More importantly, he says that computer users should be reluctant to hand over their data to a third party.

Which got me to thinking... in light of the whole U.S. Government stomp on privacy, and given the apparent size to the government data centers in Ft Meade and Nevada Utah, it's probably safer to assume that the "top" of the cloud is there, and Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, et. al . are just renting space.

It's just cheaper and easier for everyone!

Pronunciation (Tweaked)

This might be considered, oh, I don't know, challenging.

Or, brutal.

(Best when read out loud!)

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

 

Entire text below the fold:

A Day Without...

Found at the NeatoShop

How Long Until...

...a transporter??

NASA is funding a prototype food synthesizer.

They're working on pizza!

Via Ars Technica

Obscure Reference??

Chris Muir has an good roundup of just how incestuous the relationship between the White House and the MSM is.  He also has a possibly obscure geek reference:

From http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/

I refer you to the Oracle of Bacon for understanding.  The default will tell you how many actors separate Kevin Bacon from any given actor.  For example, if you put in "Elvis Presley" you will find that they both worked with John Wheeler of different movies (a Bocon Number of 2).  If you want to know, click the "How It Works" tab on the left.  Mark Ruffalo worked with him on the same movie, for a Bacon number of 1.

Warning:  Can be a serious Time Waster!