Flutterby™! From 2014-01-01 to 2014-01-31

If you're in the area: Pot-luck, square dance and party, 4-7 at Wischemann Hall in Sebastopol this afternoon!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Upgrading my server: Really? Apache directives somehow changed so that my bare word sites aren't working? Where's my cluestick?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

Why we need a new network: Guy discovers that his own ISP is doing MitM and content injection into web pages. This isn't even wifi at the upscale hotel. Ouch.

[ related topics: Weblogs broadband Invention and Design Travel ]

Apache 2.2 to 2.4 upgrade. VirtualHost directives w/o "www." prefix not working. No help in upgrade guide. Argh.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Work, productivity and environment Douglas Adams ]

Charlene routed drip edges in a bunch of our cutting boards this morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

You have probably seen this around, and you should probably read it: Chris Kluwe: I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot.

As if you needed more evidence that the NFL was bad for society.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sports ]

Northern hemisphere summer night sky, painted with glow in the dark paint, on the bedroom ceiling.

Yeah, we really didn't want to let any light in for that glow in the dark paint project

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some notes on painting the summer night sky on our bedroom ceiling: http://www.flutterby.net/Toysmith_Nightscapes

Amazed at the markup of buying HDPE cutting boards over just buying raw StarBoard from Fred Fritz, my local marine & Festool dealer.

[ related topics: Woodworking Festool ]

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[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

Don't have a camera that captures the dimmer stars or the sheer expanse, but: small part of the new bedroom ceiling 2

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

Sorry, Facebook for Android, you don't get updated 'cause you don't actually need all those permissions you're asking for. Back to the web.

The moral is clear, for programmers out there: With the C lib for strings, you can hack with a flair.

the obfuscated C competition also produces some good geek poetry at:

http://ioccc.org/2013/robison/hint.html

[ related topics: Ethics ]

Now suspecting that the Der Spiegel NSA data was an inside leak to raise confusion over what Snowden leaked and make him more threatening.

Zip tied routers, hubs and cables into place on the home network cart; estimated time 'til one of those requires replacement is minutes.

[ related topics: broadband ]

To the "cloud computing is the future" folks, I counter with customer resistance to ISP modem rental. People like owning hardware.

The dichotomy is less communism vs capitalism than centrally planned economy vs organically formed one, though both can mis-serve humans.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Heat Out of Climate Change is a fun look at recent weatherish events, more funny because we are sitting on the gulf coast in freezing weather.

[ related topics: Current Events Global Warming ]

Foreign Policy: FBI drops "Law Enforcement" as its primary mission, in favor of "national security".

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Interesting thread in motion sensors built into modern high end machining tools, presumably there to prevent mills from being sold outside of export-controlled nations.

The thread mentions Mitutoyo selling devices that ended up in North Korea and Iran, and, of course, the tale of Toshiba selling milling machines to the Soviets which helped them build quieter submarine propellers.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Shadow forwarded this animaged GIF demonstrating an interesting take on a convertible full-height to coffee table height table.

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Okay, now it's just a matter of figuring out which event I'm going to bring these to... and what the most disturbing fortunes could be: individually wrapped custom fortune cookies. Minimum order of 50, and you can get that with 5 different fortunes on 'em, but getting those fortunes separately is an additional charge. So you have to have generically appropriate ones...

It just took 6 emails to get a root capable password to a production server "texted" to me, instead of replied in an email, because the IT admin's don't understand encryption, or why security/paranoia is important. We are doomed.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Cryptography ]

Dear Facebook: I'm willing to give you the click-throughs for ads I like, but you've gotta take me to something other than a blank page.

Among the things I loathe Microsoft for: The storm of winmail.dat attachment replies following an attempted list "Message Recall". #eyeroll

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

So the "obsolete" Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 is remaindered for >$700, where the ix500 that replaces it is $410. What do they know?

Ted Cruz: Still Canadian as immigration lawyers express confusion

"Unless there's a security issue that hasn't been disclosed, unless there's a mental health issue that hasn't been disclosed, there's no reason for anything other than a lickety-split process to occur," Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration attorney, said in an interview Friday.

So I assume that the birthers are readying their assault on the Ted Cruz candidacy, just as they did for John McCain (of Panamanian birth)?

[ related topics: Health Law Heinlein ]

NY Times: Burglars who FBI office in 1971 to expose spying on political groups come forward.

NY Times: Witness to 1994 murder recants:

Ms. Purser-Gennace said that although she told the police she could not properly identify the man, they proceeded to coach her with pictures, telling her whom to pick out of a lineup, and mapping out a script for her day in court.

threatening her with turning her over to immigration authorities if she refused to lie for them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Photography moron Law Enforcement Maps and Mapping ]

The McAfee brand is being replaced with "Intel Security". Say founder of the brand, John McAfee:

"I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users.

"My elation at Intel's decision is beyond words."

[ related topics: virus Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Current Events Monty Python ]

New Yorker: The Open-Office Trap. This. We've known for decades that giving people peace and quiet is good for the business, and yet we keep trying big open spaces.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Currency ]

Union Intermediate High School in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma student expelled for casting a spell:

“It’s hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft brought by her own school,” said Timothy Blackbear, Brandi’s father.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Eric's Life ]

I don't mind being A/B tested, but a big ol' "Oh hell no!" button would improve the experience for me.

Signs your home networking strategy has gone terrifyingly wrong: Watching ARP requests with tcpdump.

Damn it, Morpheus, you lied. I took the blue pill, and yet...

Got the email about Burning Man tickets yesterday, and in the process to get ready to get in line for tickets had to make a "profile" in the wordpress system at: http://profiles.burningman.com . I'm trying to keep an open mind, but I have a bad feeling about how much that world has changed.

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

On this A.M.'s coffee trek it was noted that with the breaking of trust in "the cloud", the interesting discussions are face-to-face again

Britain still at war over legacy of World War I:

In an article for the right-of-center Daily Mail newspaper, Education Secretary Michael Gove said "Blackadder" and other satires had created a public impression of the four-year war - in which more than 8 million troops and millions of civilians died - as "a misbegotten shambles - a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite."

Yeah, and?

Daisy Buchanan in The Guardian: Good on the Naked Rambler – more public nudity would be a good thing:

Stephen Gough. 'Why is it OK to hint at highly sexualised nudity all day long and then persecute a normal man for getting naked.'

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History Nudity Journalism and Media Education Flowers ]

Cory Doctorow: We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.

Want this ornament: https://twitter.com/_youhadone...tatus/421230742677749760/photo/1

[ related topics: Photography ]

Typo sent me to weather.com instead of weather.gov. Ow, my eyes! And my brain! Ouch ouch ouch.

Fish leaps out of water to catch and eat bird.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food Current Events Birds Video ]

I'm going to put http://www.slowgerman.com/ here so that I can get to it at home and put it on my phone and practice...

Just got a call for a poll on bond measures for school facilities. Need to educate myself on Petaluma's schools now. #morecognitiveload

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

http://radiationnetwork.com/

Welcome to RadiationNetwork.com, home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute.  This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

So I was listening to the latest episode of The Whorecast, the Baby Stripper Diary episode (some really neat vignettes of the life of a stripper working at the now defuct Lusty Lady in SF), and Siouxsie was using a backing track from The Reverend Peyton's Big Damned Band, specifically Devils Look Like Angels.

I'm going to have to acquire music from this organization.

[ related topics: Music Movies Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture Archival ]

Dish drying pan done right. 3/4" HDPE

[ related topics: Photography ]

Staying at http://www.flamingoresort.com for square dancing with Jet Roberts at Monroe Hall this evening.

In-Q-Tel is the US CIA and "Intelligence Community") acting as Venture Capitalists. It has a public portfolio and I am sure a private one... You might want to be aware who the VC in your vendors are, and their vendors.. and...

Woman cruising the Whole Foods parking lot completely featured the image when she taps her cigarette ash out her car window.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

I have mixed feelings over some of the Weston Price Foundation's doings; I have found some of their conclusions and studies suspicious, but I've also recently had a number of read-throughs of some maligned papers that makes me question the axes of the maligners. So, yeah...

Anyway, Shadow sent along How Grassfed Beef Will Save the World, a talk by Chris Kerston, partner at Chaffin Orchards,at the Weston A. Price Wise Traditions Conference 2012 in Santa Clara (YouTube), and I need to find the 1:20 to listen to it...

I suspect that it will largely be reiterations of things I've heard from Joel Salatin and similar, about how grass fed beef can be part of a complete farming ecosystem that results in tremendous amounts of carbon sequestration, along with better water management and all the other awesome benefits we've come to know and love.

Not to mention be tastier than grain finished beef.

[ related topics: Movies Food Conferences ]

Blinksight has an indoor tracking system that works through walls to about 3cm:

The Blinksight solution is easy to install and use. A lot of effort went into minimizing power consumption, and we expect to have tags powered by energy harvesting available soon. We aim to bring a complete turnkey system to market and want to work with industry leaders to bring accurate indoor GPS capabilities to connected devices.

Via Mickey McManus.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Maps and Mapping Economics ]

Whoah: I've been super happy with our Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi access points.

But I didn't know that Ubiquiti also makes the mFi network of sensing and controllable power strips and other sensors that would be handy for home automation.

[ related topics: broadband ]

Nancy and I just put in the 2nd set of LED Retrofit Downlights in the kitchen. We replaced the 4 in the dining room last week as an experiment, liked the results and replaced 4 more in the kitchen. We already were using Lutron dimmers, which worked well. But for the dining room I used a Lutron Maestro dimmer, a newer dimmer specifically for CFL and LED lights, which seems to work better with the LED lights. It has a more linear dimming range. We were playing with the idea of adding more lights (pendants and/or track) to brighten up the kitchen, but now the whole area is covered in a brighter and more even light. They were easy to put in, although I cut off the 'Edison light bulb screw adapter' and wired them direct with wire nuts for a less kludgy installation. More and better light for a lot less power, and they look great in a contemporary house. Side note: They seal to the ceiling, no heat loss through the old light fixtures.

We plan on slowly replacing all of the lights in the house with these.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Real Estate unclicked links Energy Monitoring ]

BBC: The secret ingredient for a safer bike helmet: paper. About Anirudha Surabhi design for a cardboard bike helmet that seems to be better at energy absorption than the current polystyrene helmets.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Monty Python Graphic Design Bicycling ]

Kale on sale at Whole Foods. Filled the dehydrator, then our largest pot. then... we will have kale leftovers. Lots of them.

Recently revamped my home net to tightly control DNS and DHCP, but this current NTP attack makes me think I should have gone much further.

It's not that I'm against tax breaks and subsidies for alternative energy, but I could skip the resulting scammy telephone solicitors.

[ related topics: Politics Phreaking ]

RT Tim Bell ‏@timb07:

What if #Google’s purchase of #Nest was to enable it to sell a load-shedding service to electricity utilities by tweaking thermostats?

Oh whoah. Figure out who's got electric climate control by correlating to smart meters... You could probably do this so that the residents never even notice.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cool Science Consumerism and advertising Global Warming ]

Anyone else considering Twister? Anonymized distributed P2P chat: http://twister.net.co/

Every once in a great while, you get a warm fuzzy thank you email from a customer, and it makes your day, causing you to forget (for a moment) the insanity of the previous 24 hours with them. It feels good, and I am basking, even though I was up late last night cleaning up their disaster.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia: Argued September 9, 2013, Decided January 14, 2014: No. 11-1355: Verizon, appellant v Federal Communications Commission, appellee, Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, et al., intervenors.

Or: The end of network neutrality, Internet startups and web site providers are going to get charged by AT&T and Verizon to deliver content to customers, and we're going to see far less peer-to-peer sorts of traffic on the net.

Which essentially means that the Internet as the innovation platform that it has been for the past 20 years is over.

[ related topics: broadband History Net Culture Phreaking ]

It makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other explanation of Washington DC than I've seen: Washington Post: Iranian news agency says the U.S. is secretly run by Nazi space aliens. Really..

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events ]

Via both the Rev. Hasty and Lyn: How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? Ask a trivial question, get a profound, heartbreaking answer..

Yes, it's about overpriced toast, and it mentions Petaluma's Acre Coffee (at which I have purchased a pour-over or two, but not toast), but it's also about building community and coconuts and why cinnamon raisin toast is hope.

[ related topics: Health Food Community ]

At Scott Borski's shop for the SCWA meeting

[ related topics: Photography ]

So the Sonoma County Woodworker's Association meeting last night was a presentation by Ian Agrell.

A couple of interesting observations: One is that for demonstration work he carves progressive pieces, from rough-out to finished, with only a few inches of a two or three foot piece actually finished. The reasons actually skip the obvious one, it's less work, and are about making sure that the client doesn't get enough sample to simply cast and reproduce, and showing the progression of the work and why the hand-carved look is different from what you might get from router carved.

He also mentioned that he's got a high end business, presences in four countries, and although he does much of the design and prototyping work himself he's got a staff in India that does the production carving. His business, jobs of a hundred thousand to a few million bucks a whack, has increased dramatically in the past few years as the super rich have become ultra rich, but many of his associates in the U.S. who had been working on jobs like a five thousand dollar mantelpiece, who used to have thriving businesses, have been scrounging for work recently.

So the practical effect of the loss of the middle class is that we're losing domestic craftspeople.

[ related topics: History Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Currency Woodworking ]

Time to build a faraday cage around the house: New York Times: N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers.

The claim is that the NSA has deployed about a hundred thousand USB input devices with transmitters in their cables that can be read from up to 8 miles away, although allegedly none of these have been deployed domestically.

Fairly consistent with what we know of keyloggers in the wild, what should be the wake-up call is the wireless bit: I'd kind of assumed many of these sorts of attacks were being done with a "log everything, but require physical access to get back to it". If the attack is "log everything, but do it off-site" that makes tracking down things like the perpetrators of credit card skimmer attacks much much harder.

And, of course, as potential jurors, and as citizens voting for politicians who should be the ones driving law enforcement policy, we can assume that "parallel reconstruction" for evidence gathering will become far far more prevalent.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless Invention and Design Law Enforcement Net Culture New York Real Estate ]

It's mock the audiophiles time: 2013 TAS Editors' Choice Awards: Digital Interconnects

AudioQuest Diamond

0.75m, $549; 1.5m, $695

audioquest.com

This über-expensive USB cable is simply revelatory in its combination of ease and refinement on one hand, and resolution and transparency on the other. Although capable of resolving the finest detail, Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.

By way of @qDot.

Exactly why I have trouble writing reviews, especially for authors I know: http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1778/

[ related topics: Writing ]

Elephant Magazine: Naked Women Changed My Life: 10 Unexpected Lessons I Learned From Strippers.

[ related topics: Nudity ]

New York Times: The Hunt for an Affordable Hearing Aid, on the tremendous markup and high pressure strategies used for hearing aids, which are increasing in price at 8% a year while all other electronics are getting cheaper, and why CostCo might be the break in the trend.

“The big discussion right now in the industry is about unbundling,” said Audicus’s founder, Patrick Freuler. “The consumer has absolutely no idea how much is the cost of the device, how much is the cost of the service that went into testing, advising, programming, your after-sales support. All the customer sees at the end of it is one big fat price tag that says, ‘$2,000.’ ”

And also why the markup might be worthwhile if your audiologist really is good.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design New York ]

Hey Charlene? We may have to install some UV LEDs in the bathroom: Nuclear Glow Soap Assortment (Via JWZ)

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Whoah! I knew about !! !-2 and !$, but how did I not know about !:1 (or !-2:3, etc) before today?

@EccentricFlower tweeted:

I could make your lives easier in so many ways if you would just tell me exactly, and in some lucid form, what it is you're trying to do.

and in response I snarked that

.@EccentricFlower if they could tell you exactly & in some lucid form what they're trying to do, they'd have written the code to begin with.

And we then had the usual unproductive back-and-forth that Twitter limits us to, but I'm going to try a little more in depth here.

Our job as coders isn't translating human into computer. Or, if it is, that's a very small part of it. Our job is to clarify what people think the problem is, and then once we can express it, to type that in in a language that the computer understands.

Disentangling people from their fuzzy thinking, drawing out of them what problem they're really trying to solve, that's what we do. Without us trying to draw out that clarity of thought, we get the exchange that we've all had:

"It's broken."

"Tell me exactly what the error message says."

"It says it didn't work."

You can talk all you want about great communicators, and I'll grant you that there are a lot of people who are very good at manipulating humans into outcomes that meet business needs and enhance shareholder value, but if people can think logically and clearly and procedurally enough to articulate to us what the problem really is, then... well... then programming is just typing.

Trying to understand what people are trying to tell us, trying to get them to clarify their thoughts so that they're actually telling us what the problem is? That's programming.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]

RT Visual Idiot (@idiot)

How many programmers does it take to fix a lightbulb?

-1; // TODO: fix

[ related topics: moron ]

There's a woodworking project: The Ban Hammer, for some Reddit folks: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/95669

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Pew Research Center: 13 data milestones for 2013. A bunch of obvious, marijuana legalization and same sex marriage have both reached the majority, but some are a little more surprising, like #5:

For the first time, a majority of the public (53%) says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

And... well... worth a click through.

[ related topics: Drugs Libertarian Erotic Sexual Culture moron Sociology Civil Liberties Marriage ]

Yeah, you've seen all of that stuff about exploited refrigerators sending SPAM. Here's the original press release: http://investors.proofpoint.co...leasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=819799

I recently saw a situation where a very popular DSL modem was accepting NTP reflection attacks on the outside port. Your DSL uplink was being used for DDOS attacks, and no one was the wiser unless you called your ISP to figure out why your HTTP requests were having trouble getting through.

The Internet of Things is in for some serious growing pains.

For the archives:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25780908
• http://www.proofpoint.com/about-us/press-releases/01162014.php

[ related topics: Spam broadband Monty Python Net Culture Woodworking ]

Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who hid out in the jungles in the Phillipines and continued World War II for 29 years after the formal end of it, dead at 91.

[ related topics: History Current Events ]

Spencer Chen: Booth Babes Don’t Work:

Well, I do: Booth babes do NOT convert.

How do I know? Well, I actually split-tested this a few years ago and the results were indisputable. If you have invested in a trade show to generate new business, using booth babes is a lead conversion boat anchor.

(By way of this IO9 article)

I've gotten to wonder just how much we're dragged around by the guys in sport jackets with stylish haircuts, how much of a drag they are on the economy, how much the current notions of marketing and sales are just screwing us as an economy.

Or maybe I'm seeing the fnords too damned much recently.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Marketing Boats Machinery Economics ]

As long as the pain of exploits is born largely by ISPs and web hosts, consumers will continue to bring net connected devices into homes.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Places mentioned in Tom Waits songs. Including Red's Recovery Room. http://tomwaitsmap.com/

wondering whether there are marketing advantages to partially open products, ie: keep firmware closed, but make it easy plug in an Arduino.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Bitcloud = A Decentralized Application for Cloud Services Based on Proof of Bandwidth

Using some of the thoughts behind bitcoin for a decentralized service infrastructure and economy. Might be a good use for a home GigE connection.

[ related topics: broadband Economics ]

Atlas Toked: http://metriestowork.com/2014/01/17/atlas-toked/

"The brand used by professionals since 1919" *cough*

[ related topics: Photography ]

This weekend's cabinetry productivity was brought to me by Abigail Hilton's Guild of the Cowry Catchers podcast.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Shadow forwarded along The Mirror article highlighting a Daniel Dhers BMX ramp video.

As the first commenter suggests, there isn't a whole lot of moving truck, thought it's still some cool ramp work.

Also note that it's in the "World News" section.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Machinery Video ]

David Steinberg sends around news of a calendar with photos that explore sex and disability: http://www.sexability.org/

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

MLK, Victim of the Surveillance State: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/p.../dr-king-and-surveillance-012014

[ related topics: Politics ]

This one's making the Facebook rounds, on what sports interviews and discussions of sporting events sound like to me:

http://vectorbelly.com/electrical177.html

OH: "... in the lion's den." "Do lions have dens? I'm picturing leather chairs..." "Yeah, lions don't really have dens, just rec rooms."

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Torn between passing on New York Times article, and realizing that Bill Keller is still trolling there and not wanting to promote that.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Is it a sign of success or failure, when you are getting tech support requests for the other vendors systems? We had this problem at Chattanooga Online, people would call with support issues far outside our scope, and when asked why, the answer was "but you always seem to know the answer". Now I'm getting it for "smart grid" stuff we aren't even connected to.

If we had capacity, I'd consider it a "revenue creation opportunity".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Chattanooga ]

Wow. That was fast. It's the year of wearables. On the remainder web sites. #IoTBubble

University of Berkeley Cool Climate Network Carbon Footprint Maps.

[ related topics: broadband Bay Area Education Maps and Mapping Global Warming ]

RT Nobilis Reed ‏@Nobilis:

If reading erotica creates unreasonable expectations of our relationships, then reading SF creates unreasonable expectations of our society.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Bay Area ]

Alabama State University will soon have its first female president:

Dr. Gwendolyn Boyd will become the president of her alma mater next month. Her contract requires the 58-year-old engineer to move into the president's home on the Alabama State University campus in Montgomery.

Another clause states "for so long as Dr. Boyd is President and a single person, she shall not be allowed to cohabitate in the President's residence with any person with whom she has a romantic relation."

Alabama: Still a century behind.

[ related topics: Education ]

Radley Balko has a hilarious rundown of teen/kid panics and media warnings about them, from huffing "Smarties" to vodka soaked tampons...

[ related topics: Current Events Wines and Spirits Journalism and Media Pop Culture Douglas Adams ]

Whoah: called for jury duty Feb 17. Just a year and ten months since my previous service.

Given the news of targeted cell phone messages from the Ukraine protests, it's clear that we need to build an alternative wireless network.

[ related topics: Wireless broadband Current Events ]

Hi! I'm Aella! (aellagirl on Reddit), in which an attractive woman gets naked with gnomes... Keep scrolling down. NSFW.

[ related topics: Nudity Sociology ]

Backblaze Blog: What hard drive should I buy?

Fascinating data. Looks like: Buy the Hitachi or Western Digital.

[ related topics: Weblogs Gambling ]

Trying to find a status update from yesterday. Really wish infinite scroll (rather than pagination) would die in a fire.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics ]

https://github.com/fre5h/DoctrineEnumBundle/pull/12 asks that the tool

support SQLite for functional testing purposes

Assigned to developer fre5h, who replied:

I will take a look later. Much much later. Because I'm Ukrainian and we have revolution right now. Sorry

Interesting article on both hardware hackery and Bluetooth security: Sniffing and decoding NRF24L01+ and Bluetooth LE packets for under $30.

[ related topics: Wireless Weblogs ]

Autocar: Mini should have UK design studio reports from MINI's Peter Schwarzenbauer talking at the Detroit Auto Show:

More radically, he says BMW is also considering downloadable apps that would allow the car to be upgraded, and downgraded too if the next owner didn’t want to pay for the feature. As an example he cites seat heater elements, which would be built into all Minis and activated by buying an app that the next owner could decline if they didn’t want it. In effect, it would be like renting certain options.

(Via /. which also references Will You Rent Options & Upgrades On Your Next Car?)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Automobiles Graphic Design Gambling ]

Literal LOL: W3C politics as meme pictures http://w3cmemes.tumblr.com/

[ related topics: Politics Photography Marketing ]

Not my usual cup of tea, but a former Pixar cow-orker is working on the sound for this, and I like the idea of doing practical effects because they have a very different feel from CG: HARBINGER DOWN : A Practical Creature FX Film by Alec Gillis/ADI

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

XXE in OpenID: one bug to rule them all, or how I found a Remote Code Execution flaw affecting Facebook's servers.

That's right, the response contained Facebook's /etc/passwd. Now we were going somewhere. By then I knew I had found the keys to the kingdom. After all, having the ability to read (almost) any file and open arbitrary network connections through the point of view of the Facebook server, and which doesn't go through any kind of proxy was surely something Facebook wanted to avoid at any cost. But I wanted more. I wanted to escalate this to a full Remote Execution.

Facebook's side of the story.

We recently awarded our biggest bug bounty payout ever, and since it's a great validation of the program we've been building and running since 2011, we thought we'd take a few minutes to describe the issue and our response.

Relatedly: Why using an actual XML parser for XML data exchange is a really really bad idea. Seriously, if you're using XML and aren't already using regular expressions to parse it, you should be. Or you should at least be turning off almost every possible feature of the parser.

XML is great for discovering that you have character set issues, but you already knew that. For every other purpose, use something else.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management broadband Software Engineering Sports Typography ]

Hey, my hiking buddy Geoffrey Irving solved Pentago: http://perfect-pentago.net/

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Eric Schossler in The New Yorker: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Mapbox - Your neighborhood as a woodcut, a set of map tiles with a woodcut-like look.

[ related topics: Weblogs Maps and Mapping ]

The Army says that the tethered surveillance blimps to be deployed over Maryland won't have cameras, like the ones in Afghanistan, just radar to track motion of surface vehicles, like trains, boats and cars.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Boats Machinery Trains ]

Interesting claim: Chrome Bugs Allow Sites to Listen to Your Private Conversations

By exploiting bugs in Google Chrome, malicious sites can activate your microphone, and listen in on anything said around your computer, even after you’ve left those sites.

Even while not using your computer - conversations, meetings and phone calls next to your computer may be recorded and compromised.

Apparently there's some voice recognition system in Chrome that can be subverted...

Via BBC News.

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python ]

The real question about the California drought: what are car ads going to use for scenery instead of Ridgecrest Blvd and west Marin?

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Automobiles ]

Want to get together with your friends and play a game that involves building and trading rosters of people whose contributions to society are questionable and negative impacts on the economy are outrageously large?

The IDEAS fantasy league

... allows you to pretend you are at the helm of an economics department. Your goal is to improve its ranking relative to other departments in the league. You can do this by trading economists and by choosing which ones to activate in your roster.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's any objective ranking, so rather than being able to play based on how hilariously wrong their models are, you're just playing based on the popularity contest among other academics.

But now "fantasy economics" is no longer a truism in merely one meaning.

[ related topics: Erotic Games Economics ]

You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the meat space data race. On Disney's "MagicBands" RFID wrist band technology, and how we're willing to trade our privacy for the experiences that that data gives us.

I was reminded this morning by how little things, like Kaiser Permanente sending me a reminder that flu shots are still available when they know that I've already had one, subtly negatively impact my relationship with an organization. And my long-held assertion that I'd gladly offer up my medical records to credit card companies if they'd not send me any more "courtesy checks" until after I had a lobotomy.

But I really think that there are many collaborative models of CRM that we consumers/customers will gladly embrace, as long as we're actually getting something out of it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising RFID ]

Drove to work today. Time to acknowledge that the few bucks extra it costs me isn't worth the random schedule hassle and ride discomfort.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

http://downworthy.snipe.net/ - a browser plug-in to turn those "Upworthy" and Huffington Post style headlines into something more honest.

• "Literally" becomes "Figuratively"
• "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment"
• "One Weird Trick" becomes "One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit"

...

Trolling TC about the bandwidth bet: http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/leisure.htm

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture broadband Television Archival ]

Stony Point Road sunset

[ related topics: Photography ]

Via Shadow: The World’s “First” 3D-Printed House Begins Construction, though I'm sure I've seen articles with pictures of walls being 3d printed with concrete before.

The project's web site, at http://3dprintcanalhouse.com , looks like they're trying to use some sort of plastic and do a lot of the interior detail:

Each room is printed separately on site before being assembled into one house. This way the rooms can be carefully tested in a safe and easy accessible manner. Each room is different and consists of complex and tailormade architecture and unique design features. The structure is scripted and this creates its proper strength but also generates ornament, and allows for new types of smart features, such as angled shading scripted to the exact solar angle. Each printed room consists of several parts, which are joined together as large Lego-like blocks. Both the outside façade as the interior are printed at once, in one element. Within the 3D printed walls are spares for connecting construction, cables, pipes, communication technique, wiring etc.

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Bay Area Graphics Lego Mindstorms Graphic Design Machinery Fabrication Architecture Real Estate Model Building Photovoltaics ]

Photographers awaiting Golden Gate sunrise

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Sunrise

[ related topics: Photography ]

Looking out the Golden Gate

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Error message OTD: "Failed to mount "172 GB Filesystem". Daemon is inhibited."

Shadow forwarded along "So I decided to hack my coffee machine...", in which a $10 garage sale espresso machine is upgraded. The thing that amazes me most about this sort of hack is how basic upgrades of the chassis dramatically improve the overall product. Making the device quieter, and improving the user interface, can't cost all that much, and yet...

[ related topics: User Interface ]

Another from Shadow: Imgur: Me and my brother's treehouse we built during 5 summers. Terrifying and inspiring.

SF losing ground in race to host America's Cup:

Russell Coutts, the CEO of America's Cup champion Oracle Team USA, told the Associated Press on Saturday that sailing officials are talking with other venues about hosting the 35th America's Cup in August 2017 because San Francisco officials haven't offered the same terms that they did for last summer's regatta, which ended with the American syndicate staging one of the greatest comebacks in sports.

Emphasis mine. Uh. Yeah: This is probably because San Francisco wisened up and isn't wanting to subsidize a bunch of billionaires playing with their toys (and courtroom squabbles) to the tune of millions of dollars again.

Dear Mr. Couts: Something something screen door something your ass something the way out.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Boats Databases ]

Gnome and the Evolution mail client have done more to set back Linux as an end-user operating system than any other flaws. Even CUPS.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

So pot has the inertia to become legal and accepted as a mainstream vice. Can this happen for Porn?? Personally I'd like to see more HBO style porn but realize the "Debby Does" variety has it's niche too. So education and normalization here we go.....

http://apac-usa.com/education

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Education ]

Amazing MeFi entry on the invention of "jaywalking" http://www.metafilter.com/1360...king-and-the-Rise-of-Car-Culture

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Automobiles ]

FBI has seized the entire email database of the "TorMail" anonymous webmail service and is now using that database to pursue investigations unrelated to the original warrant.

Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau’s own copy of “data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts,” according to the complaint (.pdf) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.

[ related topics: Privacy Spam Law Enforcement Databases ]

High-viz jackets don’t affect how close motorists pass cyclists, at least in the U.K.

The only jacket that appeared to make a meaningful difference to the average passing distance was a jacket with the word 'police' written on it. Motorists passed the cyclist at an average of 122cm. The police jacket also warned road users they were close to a camera-using cyclist. However, while wearing that jacket increased the average distance of overtakes, 1 to 2 percent of passes were still deemed very close (less than 50cm), said Walker. Close passes were a factor of wearing all seven outfits.

Cyclists cannot stop drivers overtaking dangerously, research suggests:

When the Transport Research Laboratory measured bicycle overtaking distances in the same part of the country back in 1979, they found drivers left an average gap of 179 cm when overtaking a cyclist. The average gap in this study was 118 cm, suggesting that the treatment of cyclists might have become worse over the last few decades.

None of this does anything to dispel my cynicism that bright clothing simply makes you a more visible target.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Law Enforcement Clothing Pedal Power Bicycling ]

News at JAMA: Coffee Hydrates as Well as Water, Study Says

The belief that caffeinated drinks such as coffee could cause dehydration is based on a 1928 study that demonstrated caffeine’s diuretic effect. Since then, only 2 studies have tried to show whether evidence exists to support that belief. Results were mixed, so investigators at the University of Birmingham in England devised new research to compare whether drinking coffee affected hydration differently than water consumption.

The study is PLOS ONE: No Evidence of Dehydration with Moderate Daily Coffee Intake: A Counterbalanced Cross-Over Study in a Free-Living Population.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Education ]

Institutionalized victim blaming

[ related topics: Photography ]

The Atlantic: Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South? (Via).

But it's a little deceiving to talk about "our" mobility rate. There isn't one or two or even three Americas. There are hundreds. The research team of Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Herndon, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez looked at each "commuting zone" (CZ) within the U.S., and found that the American Dream is still alive in some parts of the country. Kids born into the bottom 20 percent of households, for example, have a 12.9 percent chance of reaching the top 20 percent if they live in San Jose. That's about as high as it is in the highest mobility countries. But kids born in Charlotte only have a 4.4 percent chance of moving from the bottom to the top 20 percent. That's worse than any developed country we have numbers for.

Possibly related: Slate: Map: Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Health Bay Area Theater & Plays Currency Maps and Mapping ]

RT (Re-Tumblr) mr-craig:

Today would be the birthdays of Lewis Carroll, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Jerome Kern. Why not celebrate by climbing down a rabbit hole and flagellating yourself whilst singing showtunes?

Via nonelvis

Sam Sykes - Unfortunate Modesty, on writing about sex:

To paraphrase Jessica:

“Rape is just there.  It’s in the story and there’s not a lot of ways to interpret it.  Whereas consensual sex is the beginning of something more, a lot of emotions coming out and making themselves known.  Fear, lust, desire, sometimes even hate.  Things don’t get less complicated after you introduce those.”

And that’s when it hit me.

We had been thinking about sex entirely wrong.  I had been thinking about sex entirely wrong.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Writing ]

responding to "emptythought", MeFi user "um" wrote:

how do we even know the brew [sic, quoting an autocorrect error, was meant to be "new"] robocop sucks? It hasn't even come out yet!

It's rated PG-13. This isn't climate science: there is nowhere to get lost in this equation.

[ related topics: Dictators Global Warming ]

Experience tells us that if we must use a tape measure, we should always use the same one.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Shadow forwarded along Autos.Yahoo.Com: RYNO Motorcycles: changing the game one wheel at a time. What else? A one-wheeled motorcycle.

Direct link to the whole YouTube playlist.

[ related topics: Games Movies Current Events ]

All the memories fade together... Were the '80s really like this? Sure seems so: Cruising Electric (1980). An ad for the slot-car set that brings the subtext to the fore...

[ related topics: Movies Automobiles ]

School ditches rules and loses bullies:

Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol.

Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a "loose parts pit" which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.

Auckland New Zealand's Swanson Primary School is participating in a study about childhood behavior, hopefully we'll see the results of that study. (Via /.: New Zealand Schools Find Less Structure Improves Children's Behavior.

Also from New Zealand: Man fights off shark, stitches up his own wounds, goes to pub for a pint.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Current Events Pyrotechnics Woodworking ]

RT Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud):

The spec for rum is really quite fascinating. https://law.resource.org/pub/crs/ibr/cc.crs.25.2008.html Don't forget the coconut water. https://law.resource.org/pub/crs/ibr/cc.crs.3.2010.html

I wanna find a way to get paid for just learning about a breadth of stuff like this...

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Education ]

RT: Michele Catalano ‏@inthefade

State of the Union drinking game: just cry into your drink. No one wins.

[ related topics: Games ]

RT Richard Dalton ‏@richardadalton:

If carpenters were hired like programmers: "Must have at least 5 years experience with the Dewalt 18V 165mm Circular Saw"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Woodworking ]

Yay, weather.gov has chance of rain on Thursday up to 50% (weather.com says 30%. Boo.).

Just in case you missed it also: 2014 State of the Union Full Transcript - I went to bed instead, very late to worry about my fate, from a man with a plan without much time span.

No big suprises: healthcare heartwarming stories, min wage and terrorists. A little bit of "the world is not flat" pro-USA sentiments.

[ related topics: Politics Law Work, productivity and environment Furniture ]

So over on Twitter, Jay recommended this: /.: Why Do Projects Continue To Support Old Python Releases?, which linked to this query about why projects support old Python, given that 2.4 was EOLed in 2008 and 2.6 was EOLed in October of 2013, and Rob Galankis's response, which includes some of the issues of maintaining Python in EVE online.

I think I've mentioned that I've been using a few spare cycles to rewrite the Flutterby.net static site content manager from Perl into C++, using it as a way to both refresh my C++ and to learn some of the C++11 features. After doing so much Perl, I'm really enjoying having a typed language again, getting more of the errors at compile (or syntax check) time, but it also occurred to me:

If you had to pick a language where you could still compile code from the 1970s, a language that has proven itself for long-term maintenance in complex systems, it's kinda C or C++.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Perl Open Source Monty Python Python hubris ]

Tired of Farmville, Cow Clicker, and the like? Build your own! Idle Game Maker...

... is an online tool that lets you create idle games (browser games focused on clicking and waiting for resources to build up), simply by writing a text file. No programming knowledge needed!

More at MetaFilter: Click here to seize the means of production.

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Theater & Plays Writing Work, productivity and environment ]

Apparently Atlanta got two inches of snow yesterday, and the combination of the forecast and various public and private entities not shutting down early enough meant that kids slept at schools and people were stuck on highways overnight.

Of course this is getting various prognosticators going about failures. Larry said:

With all the traffic nightmares I keep wondering if Gov. Deal did something to piss off Chris Christie.

Which I giggled at, but as we dig deeper we run into things like: Mother Jones: How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta also published at The Atlantic: How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta:

Metro areas of 6 million people need to be prepared for anything.

Let's just get this out of the way right fast: The author of that piece is a moron. Complaining that people are driving at a reasonable speed for conditions is the worst sort of idiocy. But there's a deeper thing here, because the arrogance on display in this piece is getting a lot of linkage:

The real problem is that kids were in neighborhoods that were so sparse that they couldn't walk home. That we've come to accept 20+ mile commutes as normal.

You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that's so fragile, that's so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we're seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it).

This isn't solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.

And we start doing that by not building huge Interstate rings around cities, and by not encouraging suburban sprawl.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Weblogs moron Automobiles Machinery Public Transportation ]

We have been using an old laptop with a local copy of our music and gmusicbrowser to drive our music listening. It sucks. The laptop takes up space, we haven't ever really figured out the queue vs playlist vs individual song paradigm (and would be much happier if there were still a supported XMMS package...), and... well...

My first generation iPad is getting long in the tooth, and Charlene asked "couldn't we just get you a new Android tablet and use that as a music interface?"

Welcome to walled-garden deferred-income-model app-store hell.

Options so far:

• DAAP is a protocol apparently reverse-engineered from something earlier versions of iTunes used. Later versions than my iPad apparently uses, though. Anyway, I installed "forked-daapd", can access my music with the Android DAAP app, the iPhone SimpleDaap app sees my music.
• DLNA is also a protocol that apparently many modern stereos see. Assorted people describe the various Linux servers as "sucks less", but MiniDLNA appears to be working. "Fusion Stream" on the iPad sees it.
• Subsonic looks like a free server, but the app access appears to be "pay ongoing license fees".

Will have to lay some of these apps on Charlene and see which one she thinks sucks least.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Music Open Source Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Gardening iPhone ]

The World's Worst Penetration Test Report by #ScumbagPenTester

Oh, look, the Whitehouse is trying to gut an open data and transparency bill:

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the bill's sponsors,  expressed similar dismay over the mark-up. “The Obama administration talks a lot about transparency, but these comments reflect a clear attempt to gut the DATA Act.," he told FedScoop. "DATA reflects years of bipartisan, bicameral work, and to propose substantial, unproductive changes this late in the game is unacceptable.”

Although I must confess that anything that has the support of Darrell Issa is probably pure evil.

[ related topics: Games Work, productivity and environment Race Real Estate ]

Is it time for me to go ride my bike? http://isittimeformetogoridemybike.com/

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

We should bemoan, not celebrate, that imagination is stronger than knowledge, and that myth is more potent than history and reality.

http://w3fools.com

From W3Schools's own footer… "We do not warrant the correctness of [W3Schools] content. The risk from using it lies entirely with the user. " We couldn't put it much better ourselves.

An awesome intervention website about W3schools.com

[ related topics: Privacy ]

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/tractor-square-dancers/

Yes, Dan, you can square dance with tractors... in drag. Why? Because this is 'Merica.

Some very americana fun farm folk on Farmall's furl skirts and do-si-do with style and leave me craving some apple pie.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Politico Magazine: TSA Screener Confession.

We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.

And more. Worth a read if your blood pressure isn't already elevated over the idiocy that is the TSA and the security theater that we're wasting billions of dollars on.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Guns ]