Flutterby™! From 2014-06-02 to 2014-06-30

Shadow forwarded along a video titled COOLEST! TABLE SAW OR ROUTER JIG EVER! MAKE WOOD BOWLS! (YouTube video) which, I think, is overselling it a bit, but it is a neat jig for shaping.

Not sure how he cleans out the insides, though... Charlene just ordered an Arbortech Mini-TURBO for cleaning out the insides of the projects she does...

[ related topics: Movies Video Furniture Woodworking ]

I Am Scout Willis And This Is The Only Thing I Have To Say About Walking Topless Down The Streets Of New York Last Week:

My situation was in no way unique; women are regularly kicked off Instagram for posting photos with any portion of the areola exposed, while photos sans nipple -- degrading as they might be -- remain unchallenged. So I walked around New York topless and documented it on Twitter, pointing out that what is legal by New York state law is not allowed on Instagram.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Invention and Design Law Civil Liberties New York ]

Slate Sex and Pop: Oh! You Kid! How a sexed-up viral hit from the summer of ’09—1909—changed American pop music forever.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Music Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Fuuuu, they just keep coming: Critical new bug in crypto library leaves Linux, apps open to drive-by attacks: Vulnerability in GnuTLS allows malicious sites to execute malicious code.

The bug is CVE-2014-3466.

Buffer overflow in the read_server_hello function in lib/gnutls_handshake.c in GnuTLS before 3.1.25, 3.2.x before 3.2.15, and 3.3.x before 3.3.4 allows remote servers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a long session id in a ServerHello message.

[ related topics: Language Free Software Books Open Source Invention and Design Mathematics Cryptography ]

Two thoughts that are longer than a tweet but not an essay:

Last night I was talking with Charlene about how companies incur technical debt, and then don't pay off that debt (but continue to pay interest), and how, unless a technology is your company's core competence, spreading development over multiple customers is more economically savvy than developing for a single customer: For instance, developing an accounting system in-house vs paying six figures a year for maintenance on an external one. Then this morning I see @jwgoerlich tweet:

Four in the morning thoughts. Technical debt is another form of business debt. It is an investment providing you manage the payments.

Something in the zeitgeist, I guess.

And then this morning, a long twitter exchange about Apple's new language, "Swift", and C++ and modern languages made me realize that:

1. We don't have a good cross-platform language other than C++.
2. I was going to leap to the defence of C++, and then saw the GnuTLS bug of the day.
3. Containerization, with tools like Docker, is quickly chasing language development as the path to building isolated systems (even more so than SELinux), and that sort of process isolation also works for situations where we don't trust the code to not go snooping no matter what the language (for instance, Skype, especially given the revelations about NSA cooperation within both that tool and Microsoft's environment).

No complete thoughts there, but I kinda feel like there's a common thread between those two symptoms.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft Nature and environment Invention and Design moron Writing Economics Real Estate Woodworking ]

Vice interviews the founders of Beautiful Agony

Previously on Flutterby.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Archival ]

Web developers: always have a fallback that works without JavaScript, just in case someone is using Internet Explorer. #sigh #FML

[ related topics: Law Net Culture ]

Artist Ryousuke Ohtake Carves Incredibly Realistic Lobster from Boxwood (hat tip to crasch).

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Sadly accepting that the software usability we had back in the '90s will never again emerge from the glitter and flash of modern GUIs.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU.

The Sarasota police were using Stingray devices to intercept cell phone calls.

When you look at it as the Federal agents trying to stifle the efforts of the organization focused on defending the U.S. Constitution, it makes sense.

[ related topics: Wireless Law Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

RT jessamyn west ‏@jessamyn:

15% of adults don’t use the internet at all. Population-wise that’s all these state’s worth of folks. http://mlkshk.com/p/Z9N1 #digitaldivide

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

At Open Secret book store in San Rafael they had Glenn Beck filed under "Ascension and Channeling" http://www.flutterby.net/Image...-04GlennBeckBookAtOpenSecret.jpg

[ related topics: Books Bay Area ]

Yesterday, helping an older friend download and install OpenOffice, saw that the "anti-virus" scammers had ads on the download page. Sigh.

[ related topics: virus Woodworking ]

Testing with a picture from our Memorial Day camping

Well, apparently that last bit isn't working. Went to Facebook, Twitter, and my personal RSS feed with the picture, but no picture here until I edited it. Need to figure that out.

An armed robbery in South Africa, captured on video, caught my eye because it involved a cyclist, but also shows some of the implications of the personal surveillance society (at least as the arms race between recognizable recorders and thieves evolves):

• MTB Gunpoint Robbery in Somerset West (YouTube video)
• Mountain biker catches robbery on GoPro

Via several sources, including Shadow.

[ related topics: Movies Television Video ]

Your OpenSSL exploit security notification OTD: https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140605.txt

[ related topics: Current Events ]

RT Mark Atwood ‏@FallenPegasus

IPMI UEFI SecureBoot mean that when your server is p0wned, the OS will never be able to tell & only fix is junking the hardware

Paul Elard Cooley: Essay–A POX ON ALL YOUR HOUSES:

In a nutshell, but is again very one-sided, here’s an article that explains what’s going on in easy to misread steps.

So basically what everyone loyal to Hachette and the other members of the Big 5-4-3-2-1 is decrying is that Amazon is “bullying” traditional publishing into a corner. Why? Well, because the then Big 6 colluded with Apple to fix e-book pricing. They wanted to protect their ability to manipulate the market and did so by working with Apple to essentially over-cut/under-cut Amazon. Nice job, guys. It ended up with everyone going to court. Apple and the Big 6 lost the judgement. Result? The Big 6 (now Big 5) have to negotiate contracts with online sellers. The first one in the bucket is Hachette. And Amazon is playing hardball.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Books Writing Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Economics Real Estate ]

Your "if you're not outraged about the way that the telecom monopolies are screwing you over you're not paying attention" links for the day:

• Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused
• Verizon demands that Netflix stop blaming it for choppy video. Netflix says no. Which is awesome, it's time that we start asking why ISPs are oversubscribing their Internet interconnects, and why they don't just freakin' scale to support their paying subscribers. Oh, wait, I guess we know why...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Net Culture Video ]

Hidden drawer tutorial, including a wooden combination lock in the back of an upper drawer in a dresser that unlatches the hidden one. Some neat woodworking.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

In the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco: Birth Control Proposed as Long-Term Remedy for Problematic Parking on Bocana.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

RT Ben Marsh ‏@benmarsh:

An unfortunately pairing of articles on the @guardian http://pic.twitter.com/GHyTdxXJ5R

I don't think it's unfortunate, I've been thinking about a replacement for the iPad and this is timely information.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices Archival ]

• PSD viewing and diffing, PSD files are Adobe Photoshop Documents, now you can embed them and use them in your web page.
• Programming the MSP-430 on Ubuntu, probably already linked this or similar, but...
• The Emperor's New Clothes were built with Node.js, a good intro to the awesome of NodeJS.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Software Engineering Clothing ]

Considering the similarities between the Bay Area's relationship with the dollar and Germany's with the Euro. Common currencies are hard...

[ related topics: California Culture Currency ]

Violet Blue goes off on Sergey Brin and Google+.

The struggles of a woman whose DNA doesn't match the children she gave birth to.

In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells -- or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother's womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes -- two separate strands of DNA.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Some things are worth over-doing. We are getting ready for a 3+ week trip to Burning Man and some parts in between, possibly being in Black Rock City for a 10+ days. I hope to be picking up a utility trailer this afternoon, which gives us some capacity for hauling some extra gear out for the camp as well as ourselves. I looked at my existing 5 gallon plastic spare gas cans and realized they were not something I wanted to haul/store gas in. We need to be able to run the generator and make it back out of the desert without running out of gas. I think I bought 2 of the last gas can's (and spouts) I'll ever need today at: JerryCan.com. What I realize is, I've spent more than that on the collection of swollen cheap plastic cans with missing, borken or non-sealing caps that I have now. It some ways, it's a perfect example of how "cheaper now" turns into "expensive".

[ related topics: Burning Man Sports Travel ]

So London's property values are skyrocketing in a way that makes the San Francisco Bay Area's home prices look downright sedate. Because of this, people are finding new and innovative ways to create additional real estate, including driving small diggers into basements and digging out additional sub levels. Turns out it's cheaper to just bury the thing than to crane it back out after the basement is dug.

JWZ's headline was "Some day I will reactivate my Killdozer Army", but I got to thinking...

In the climax of Terry Pratchett's excellent exploration of currency, Making Money, SPOILER ALERT! the protagonist Moist von Lipwig tells a huge army of golems to bury themselves and wait unused, in order to back the value of the money he's printing. I see a parallel...

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Bay Area California Culture Machinery Currency Terry Pratchett Real Estate ]

Enabling Students in a Digital Age: Charlie Reisinger at TEDxLancaster (YouTube). I'd like to see a written longer-form version of this, sounds like there's some cool stuff happening at Penn Manor School District...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies ]

The social medias today have exploded with "OMG! The FDA is going to ban traditional wood cheese shelves! Catastrophe!" alarmism today. Metafilter: First they came for your raw milk, then your Parmigiano Reggiano has a bunch of links, but the resulting thread (which is bloody huge) has a few gems, and I did a little reading of my own.

Back when cutting boards went plastic, there was a grand rush to HDPE, and then some investigation and it was determined that although the ability to throw the cutting board through a commercial dishwasher was handy, wood cutting boards were actually better for home cooks because the inevitable and eventual scraps and cuts were less likely to harbor live bacteria.

This only seems to be true if the board is scrubbed and dried. Modelling the competitive growth between Listeria monocytogenes and biofilm microflora of smear cheese wooden shelves.

The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanism of the observed inhibition of Listeria monocytogenes by the natural biofilm microflora (BM) on wooden shelves used in the ripening of a soft and smear cheese. For this, BM was harvested and we conducted a series of experiments in which two strains of L. monocytogenes were co-cultured with BM on glass fiber filters deposited on model cheeses. Compared to monoculture, L. monocytogenes growth rate in co-culture was not reduced but the growth of the pathogen stopped as soon as BM entered the stationary phase. This reduction in maximum population density can be explained by nutrient consumption and exhaustion by BM as no production of inhibitors by BM has been detected. This mechanism of pathogen inhibition has been previously described as the "Jameson effect".

So Listeria monocytogenes grows happily on wood.

What seems to have happened in a regulatory sense is that the FDA was making a lot of field judgments on what was or wasn't safe, and a a local FDA office was dealing with a dairy with really lax sanitation practice, and turned to Washington for clarification, from whence this edict, which is consistent with previous rulemaking and law, came down.

There has been much whining about "well in Europe...", well, in France, Listeriosis happens at a rate two thirds again that in the U.S., however...

In 8 other European countries, the incidence of listeriosis has increased, or remained relatively high, since 2000. As in France, these increases cannot be attributed to foodborne outbreaks, and no increase has been observed in pregnancy-associated cases. European countries appear to be experiencing an increased incidence of listeriosis among persons >60 years of age. The cause of this selective increased incidence is unknown.

It sounds like the FDA is backpedaling a bit, but it also seems like there's some nuance to the food safety aspect of this that the alarmists are ignoring.

Edit: The FDA is making various clarifying statements, see http://uk.reuters.com/article/...fda-cheese-idUKKBN0EL2IV20140610 and http://www.forbes.com/sites/gr...-down-in-fight-over-aged-cheese/ and more

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Bay Area Theater & Plays Sociology Work, productivity and environment California Culture Woodworking ]

The Calorie theory: Prove it or lose it:

During June and July of 2009 I approached the British Dietetic Association (BDA), Dietitians in Obesity Management (DOM), the National Health Service (NHS), the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the Department of Health (DoH), the National Obesity Forum (NOF) and the Association for the Study of Obesity (ASO) to ask all of these expert organisations for proof of the 3,500 formula (also known as the calorie theory).

[ related topics: Health Community ]

Because Turing tests and bad journalism are in the zeitgeist of late:

13-year-old boy passes the Turing test

For the first time in recorded history, a 13-year-old boy successfully passed the Turing test and convinced a panel of middle-aged men that he was an actual human. This has far-reaching implications for future relationships between teenagers and everyone else ...

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Via Shadow: Israel Gets Its Very Own Burning Man Festival, the "midburn" festival. Looks cool!

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

http://geogit.org/

GeoGit is an open source tool that draws inspiration from Git, but adapts its core concepts to handle distributed versioning of geospatial data.

Version control for Shapefiles, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and SQLite/Spatialite geographic data.

[ related topics: Free Software Databases ]

Huh: Tesla Motors: All Our Patent Are Belong To You:

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

Some question about what "in good faith" means, my take is that it's an attempt to do a massive cross-licensing deal all at once. Interesting.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Robert Kroese: The time I was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Travel By Drone, a map of videos of aerial photography from around the world. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

Mediaite: No Time to Fact Check, the NY Times Has Moral Panic to Cover.

And now we have another deluded trafficking “victim” — this one named Chong Kim. She was the “true story” behind Eden, a tale of “underage women conscripted into sexual slavery by a criminal enterprise from which there is seemingly no escape,” as described by the New York Times book review.

More on the exposing the Chong Kim fraud.

You may have also heard about Somaly Mam, who made a career and two Pulitzer Prizes out of making up stories of sex slavery in Cambodia.

As so many people have pointed out, if you want to address slavery, go after domestic and agricultural work, and if you want to go after prostitution then empower women (and men) and provide them with economic opportunities.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Douglas Adams New York Economics ]

Erotica Written By Someone With An Appropriate Sense of Privacy:

However many of them there were at the time strategically exited their clothes and proceeded to do what frankly is none of our business.

Via Bruce Schneier.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Clothing ]

RT Torrie Fischer ‏@tdfischer_

Why was http://hackron.org 's DNS broken? Because with cloud-to-butt, I pasted http://buttflare.com as the new DNS servers.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

I was vaguely aware that, some time after I left Pixar, a friend of mine was involved in the remastering of Knick Knack from the original 1989 version (the label on this image, stolen from http://www.dvdfr.com/ says 1991, which I think is meant to reference the VHS release date) to the one that Disney released, but I don't know that I ever saw the actual change.

Original VHS version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH0te9z_ODM

2004 version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctMYgRzQxPc

[ related topics: Pixar Photography Animation Movies Graphics Archival Woodworking ]

It's hard to forgive Elon Musk for both PayPal and the Hyperloop crap, but between the recent Tesla patent strategy hints and this, I kinda like the guy: http://www.vice.com/read/elon-...=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[ related topics: Intellectual Property History ]

Damn it. The suckage of Google+ makes all the things that used to be nice and easy with Google annoying, complex and difficult.

Yes, Charlene just used her cell phone to take a picture of her laptop screen because Google Maps wanting to share via Google+ sucks so hard

Nightmare on Connected Home Street #iot http://www.wired.com/2014/06/t...htmare-on-connected-home-street/

Waitibg in the United lines. The computer is down.

The good bit about going to the airport is that you get to see how much more professional the Uber and Lyft drivers are than taxi drivers.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Not the usual class of boat we see in the Turning Basin...

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

Not the usual class of boat we see in the Turning Basin... fixed

Okay, not really fixed. Next attempt when I get home and can debug...

Still need to figure out why pictures aren't making it across to here, but

http://www.greggmarine.com/mar...equipment/quindeltaspecpage.html

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

QOTD: "This blind abstraction of every bit beyond your CPE is some mysterious mass of condensed vapor is the world's largest cup of Kool-Aid, and everyone's thirsty." -- Dave Brockman

[ related topics: Quotes Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Huh. I had never fumble-fingered "killall ssh" as "killall sh" before. That was... interesting.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Head Injuries Didn't Rise in Bike-Share Cities. They Actually Fell

Late last week, several media outlets ran stories on a study published in the American Journal of Public Health that allegedly showed head injuries increasing in cities with bike-share programs. Kay Teschke, who studies city cycling at the University of British Columbia, read the news with great interest. Then she read the actual journal publication, and her interest changed to alarm.

The study is Public Bicycle Share Programs and Head Injuries, led by Janessa Graves of Washington State University.

Results. In PBSP cities, the proportion of head injuries among bicycle-related injuries increased from 42.3% before PBSP implementation to 50.1% after (P < .01). This proportion in comparison cities remained similar before (38.2%) and after (35.9%) implementation (P = .23). Odds ratios for head injury were 1.30 (95% confidence interval = 1.13, 1.67) in PBSP cities and 0.94 (95% confidence interval = 0.79, 1.11) in control cities (adjusted for age and city) when we compared the period after implementation to the period before.

Despite the conclusions being strongly about pushing helmets on bike share users, if you read carefully this is all about the proportion of injuries which were head injuries, and in the bike share cities head injuries declined 14% while overall injuries declined 28%.

While I'm not going to rant against helmet use (even though per hour of activity, you're still less likely to get a head injury from cycling than while walking or driving), reporting this as "bike share cities need to promote helmet use" is beyond irresponsible.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Current Events Journalism and Media Sports Education Flowers Pedal Power Bicycling Model Building ]

I'm on the Nixle mailing list for the local Sheriff's alerts, and a good number of those are reports of hikers long-lined out of bad situations by our regional rescue helicopter program.

There is at least one hike that I love, the McClure to Kehoe beach hike that involves going through three sea caves, at low tide, which has a "no, really, don't screw up" difficulty factor.

Every time I get one of those Nixle alerts about someone getting airlifted out of a bad situation, I wonder if so far I've been lucky, or prepared... I hope that I never know which...

http://www.friendsofhenry1.org/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Software Engineering Aviation - Helicopters ]

Repl Electric (Vimeo Video). Ambient music created in real-time (ie: the musician is typing the code to change it) in Emacs Lisp.

[ related topics: Music Video ]

SFGate: Privacy, accuracy concerns as license-plate readers expand talks about a couple of lawsuits around errors in automated licence plate reading and the associated databases which correlate that data with other sources.

Haddad said license-plate readers have an error rate as high as 8 percent. "There's some acknowledgment by the manufacturers," he said, "that there's a significant percentage of the time that they're wrong."

Meanwhile, we see face identification systems being deployed in "anti-terror" boondoggles. What could go wrong?

[ related topics: Privacy Databases ]

Wired: What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse:

If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.

Yep. We use roads at capacity, which would be fine if we were making money on roads, but we're not. We lose money on roads, and they've become a huge drain on our economy.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Currency Economics ]

One of those ridiculous fantasy things Charlene and I have talked about for the back yard, to replace the small patch of ill-maintained grass we have back there nestled in the garden, is one of those pump driven pool/spa combo things, I think one of the brand names is "Endless Pool".

Except that us being us, we've said "well, what if we could combine aquaculture and hydroponics with that?" So I've been on the lookout for resources for natural pools, you know, should that time come...

David Pagan Butler has a big page on Organic Pools, and a YouTube channel on living pools.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Gardening ]

So I'm confused: BottleRock Napa is happening again. Did they eventually pay back all those vendors who got screwed last year?

Edit: In the comments, Shadow points out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55D-ybnYQSs which says

Please do not rehost. Contact for broadcast permission.

and points out that it was created by folks associated with http://inkblock.net/ so go view it there!

http://ysabelfaerie.tumblr.com...thecrazycorgilady-jewishpolitics

<img src="/images/other0002/tumblr_n41qamhQq01s5rsdao1_400.gif">

[ related topics: Photography ]

Uh oh: Docker VM container exploit proof of concept code.

Doh, that was supposed to have a link with it, but that tab is long closed. However, it doesn't work in Docker 1.0, and the maintainers speak out here: Basically, Docker won't contain UID0 yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909622

Serendipity: Both "Why Are People Into That?" and "99% Invisible" just ran episodes on high heels. Fascinating different perspectives...

[ related topics: Shoes ]

Playing with [redacted] last night, kind of liked this shot of the box I made for my square dance checkers

[ related topics: Photography ]

So apparently 2 factor auth doesn't mean starting every command with "sudo sudo ..."

So back in 1994, when Meuon and I first started Chattanooga On-line, a reasonable dial-up speed was a 28.8 modem, which the "Convert Everything download speed calculator" says says is 12.36mb/hr. My current home ADSL2+ line is syncing at about 8Mbps, which by that same standard runs about 3.76 gb/hr, or about 300 times faster.

EIDE hard drives happened in 1994, which broke the 540 megabyte hard drive size. If you were to buy a new leading edge hard drive today it'd be about 4 terabytes. So that's, what, 8000 times larger? And a hell of a lot cheaper.

When I left Pixar, the graphics R&D group was exploring the fundamental changes in rendering that might occur as the available memory far outstripped the needs of resolution. All of a sudden the cost of the frame buffer was no longer a limiting factor: Store a link to the geometry that made up each pixel rather than compute small sections of the screen at once? Sure, why not? Toy Story had a horizontal resolution of 1536x962, about 1.5 megapixels per frame. Modern 4k video is 12.6 megapixels, a ratio of a little over 8, and in the mean-time memory sizes have grown by thousands.

Seems like there's a similar differential in growth between bandwidth and storage. And the "N²" problem of the network, as exposed through the current fights over Net Neutrality, suggest that the link to the end user is likely to continue to stagnate, while their local storage continues to explode.

The web is degrading. Bit rot means a random walk back through the Flutterby archives reveals lots of links to spam farms, domains that were abandoned and bought up by people desperate for traffic, and many of those then abandoned yet again as Google changed their algorithms, so that the vast interconnected database that Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson or even Tim Berners Lee once envisioned has, essentially, become centralized: We don't find things by following links as much as we do by searching.

Heck, last summer Charlene and I went to the "Weave Your Heart in San Francisco" square dance convention, but if I reference that by URL now, you get a page selling cash advances and credit card processors, not a record of a cultural event with depth and meaning.

In my utopian world, we'd use the increasing gap between storage and bandwidth to move documents around, and cache them. If we had the legal and cultural framework, there's no reason a blog like Flutterby couldn't cache a document, referenced by some GUID, and if the original source for that document disappeared or moved, we'd still have context.

Right now, nobody much cares, but there's something there... something I want to see happen...

[ related topics: Pixar Interactive Drama Politics Weblogs Animation Spam broadband Invention and Design Bay Area Sociology Law Monty Python Graphics California Culture Chattanooga Video Databases Archival ]

Office of the Inspector General United States Post Office: Postal Inspection Service Mail Covers Program May 28, 2014, looks at how the USPS's program to share scanned labels of mail with law enforcement is working:

...Of the 196 external criminal mail cover requests we reviewed, 21 percent were approved without written authority and 13 percent were not adequately justified or reasonable grounds were not transcribed accurately. ...

[ related topics: Language Books Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Gambling ]

A few musings on bandwidth vs storage, and a resilient web. http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/19863.html

[ related topics: broadband Archival ]

Duh moment: If Moore's law the exponential growth of point-to-point bandwidth holds, network bandwidth to the home will only go up linearly, because networks have N^2 connections.

Long conversation on Twitter with @Medley and @Sungo about Moore's Law really being about transistor density, not all of the other things that follow roughly the same growth path but aren't transistors in processors has led me to revise that a little bit.

Long conversation on Twitter has suggested that I should have tried harder to make a point about exponential capabilities rather than using Moore's Law, which is really just about transistor density. But where we've seen point-to-point links, processor speed, storage densities, all run roughly 10k order of magnitude increases over the past 2 decades, bandwidth to the home is running in the 100-1000 scale.

I was trying to fit it in 140 characters, and still don't like the phrasing just right, but...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband ]

I normally find McSweeney's to be a little cloying, but this is pretty good: Excerpts from Three-Star Yelp Reviews of the World’s First Time Travel Company.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

OH phone config: "She wants to change the ring cycle to six seconds..." Uh. Doesn't that normally take 3 days?

[ related topics: tolkien Pedal Power Bicycling ]

In an effort to cut down on server load, I'm denying somewhere north of 1500 spamming IP addresses using ufw/iptables. Fingers crossed...

Ugh. The developers of FedEx's website should be forced to use it, as penance.

One morning when I lived in Fairfax, we were driving east out Sir Francis Drake, and when we hit San Anselmo and the road went from one lane to two (in each direction), some guy was driving aggressively close, whipped around us on the right and took off, well over the speed limit. I think I got as far as "Never a cop when...", and one of the San Anselmo police pulled out of the high school and pulled the guy over.

Shadow forwarded along an animated GIF of a similar situation of justice served involving a taxi, a bicyclist, and a bike lane: http://imgur.com/MECS3ts

[ related topics: Children and growing up Animation Bay Area Law Enforcement Bicycling San Anselmo ]

I know some people like that...

I know some people like that....

The problem with thinking about design and having a workshop is that a $30 plastic toolbox purchase becomes an evening of product tweaking.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Graphic Design ]

Woodworking porn: Shadow passed along this set of pictures of making a live edge oak set of bookshelves, with a fairly simple support system. I think I'd have toned down the gloss a bit, but it's still pretty cool!

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment Theater & Plays Woodworking ]

Must-read on the increasing militarization of our law enforcement: http://www.salon.com/2014/06/2...lew_a_hole_in_my_2_year_old_son/

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Salon magazine ]

As there are some very inventive people that also go to Burning Man that hang here, I thought I'd put some musing here. Nancy and I are going to be a part of Spiritual Playa this year, and my project is to deal with waste water (grey water), that, because of the nature of the camp, could be 200-300 gallons of grey (post bathing) water. We would like to evaporate as much as we can, but could haul out a few hundred gallons in the drums we haul water in, if we clean/sterilize them for re-use next year. In doing some research, and getting ready I find the following swags:

• Surface area is the biggest factor.
• I might be able to add energy to the water
• Evap Calc says 10 sq meters of surface can evaporate 4+ kg of water per hour
• I have about 1kWh per day to run pumps and motors.
• 100 Gallons of water weighs about 835 pounds or 378 kilograms
• Guess: 5-6 days of needing to evaporate water = 144 hours, 70 of bright daylight
• 378 / 4kg/hr = 94 hours at 10sqmeters for 100 gallons

Which means I need more area, (rotating wheels, etc..) or adding heat... am considering parabolic mirrors, solar steam generator..

Laugh at me.. please.

[ related topics: Religion Burning Man Interactive Drama Music Nature and environment Photovoltaics ]

RT Miles Sabin ‏@milessabin:

OH: Credit default swaps on technical debt

Evolve - Playthings (YouTube). Promoting gun safety around children ... with dildos!

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Guns ]

Greenhouse is a browser plug-in that looks for the names of Congress members in web pages, and when you hover over them gives you a pop-up with a list of their major campaign contributors, with dollar amounts.

The Daily Dot notes that:

... For example, I brought up an article on the recent failed bipartisan energy efficiency bill that was shot down via filibuster, with Senator John Cornyn playing a major role in its defeat. A quick mouse hover over Cornyn’s name revealed the likely cause: a campaign contribution of over $1 million from the oil and gas lobbies. What a coincidence!

Edit: Shawn pointed me to http://days.maybemaimed.com/po...te-thinksquad-the-murky-world-of which points out that

This makes an HTTP POST request to the site at http://data.nicholasrub.in/data.php and in addition to sending along some information about the political candidate it recognized on the page you loaded, it also sends along the URL of the page you loaded and the page’s title.

It's gotta post it somewhere, and I totally understand why a developer might cache that data on their own server, but be aware. Also, this plug-in may cause performance issues.

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Currency ]

That "cut the cheese" still has meaning in the land of Colby and Jack is a testament to something.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

The centrally planned characteristics of our transportation system may be the US's most Soviet characteristic. Aside from the NSA.

Lot of gorgeous wood in the Turning Basin. Open to see tomorrow 10 to noon

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

I hate that lighting technology is changing fast enough and flakey enough that fixtures need changing as often as bulbs...

Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment. The paper is Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.

We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.

Nice Marmot asks what does this mean as Google owns not just our search results, but the fiber to our homes.

Yeah, the sky is falling, but: William Randolph Hearst did it before these guys.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Shadow forwarded along this Reddit thread on the FBI seizing MyRedbook.com and SFRedbook.com. I was actually vaguely aware of this because it's causing Bay Area sex workers to have to scramble to rebuild trust and accountability networks.

It should also be noted that although phrases like "trafficking" and "children" are getting tossed around, those seem to be unrelated to this bust.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement California Culture ]

If you are in Petaluma, get down to the Turning Basin and tour the wooden boats

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Boats Machinery ]

Note to self: when feeling crummy and wondering if you should be in the workshop at all, 60 second epoxy is not the right glue.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

a little comic about growing up different and finding your voice.

Which I found via It's Drenthe! @itsdrenthe:

Were you teased because you preferred princesses to GI Joes? Picked on because you wanted to wear pretty jewelry? http://dartvaspaws.tumblr.com/...strin-the-literal-best-comic-ive

Elsewhere is a discussion about converting florescent lights to LED. In this case, this is in the RV. I'm playing, so I only did one for a comparison for now. These are Warm White High Density LED's, which emit light closer to an incandescent light bulb. This little conversion took me about 30 minutes, a 2nd one will take < 10 minutes. Roughly equivalent light output, went from approx 16 watts to a whole lot less. More pics uploaded as comments.

[ related topics: Photography Law Community Race Archival ]

Checked in to the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Squeeze The Hive is going to be a very comfortable week of square dancing.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Charlene may revise our decorating plans for the bathroom renovation

[ related topics: Photography ]

Home for the next week

[ related topics: Photography ]

Usually, my hotel room ends up overlooking air conditioners and maintenance shafts...

[ related topics: Photography Travel ]