I could just hire a sort of Cato to jump out and give me a fright every so often:

The scientists were able to show that following high-intensity exercise, which enlists the sympathetic nervous system's "fight or flight" response, CRTC2 integrates signals from two different pathways-the adrenaline pathway and the calcium pathway, to direct muscle adaptation and growth only in the contracting muscle.

Lazily awaiting science's creation of an exercise pill that will activate this protein for me.

Dagnabbit, I skimmed the options too quickly and voted "Bladerunner" because I didn't see the "1984" option. Obviously, it's 1984 and yes, we are very nearly there as a whole, and either currently are or have been there in parts (thinking N.Korea, the former E.Germany (which I had a chance to visit while it was still very much DDR)).

The skeevy Google tracking prevented me from falling in love with the Nexus 7 (and from using any stand-alone Google products on my computer). I really wanted to love it. It's a nice piece of kit, but I felt so icky-sticky with how very much Google was getting its fingers all over me that I returned it within a week. That was my first and, so far, only Android experience (I'm still cheesed off at myself that I wasn't clever enough to set up a throw-away Google account before trying it out). We're getting an Acer C720 on Tuesday and I'm planning on immediately putting some flavor of linux on it.

On the Firefox memory issue, I just read that a major contributing culprit could be my won't-live-without-it Adblock extension . The linked post explains briefly why that's the case, but also points out:

Of course, it should also be noted that Firefox (and Chrome, let's not leave anyone out) can also be a pretty big memory hog on its own without any extensions.

I was pretty much forced to install the Classic Theme Restorer extension to get things back to what I consider useable. I don't know if it's the extension or simply v29, because I installed the extension immediately after updating, but Firefox has been quite crashy ever since. If it is the extension, then I'm kinda boned, because I don't much feel like using Firefox without it.

This thread just cost us $230. The spousal unit teaches online courses in the summer and would like to untether from his desk. He's got a tablet, but it's not sufficient to the task. We have an old netbook, but ... netbook. He's got a laptop, but it's long in the tooth and short on battery life. He's been eyeballing the MacBook Air 11, but it's pricy and hasn't updated adequately in a very long time. If one is going to spend that many $$, one wants a bit more in terms of screen, power, storage ... all of it.

Realizing all that, he was at the point of deciding whether to spend $$$ on a prior-gen MBP 13, or wait to see what possible updates might be on the horizon for the MBAs, when this thread got started. I poked around, found the Acer C720, looked into whether slapping elementary OS on it was a thing (it is), and floated the idea to him: "So ... it's kinda like the netbook of today, but better and more useable ... you could think about maybe this for $230? It wouldn't be an MBP, but it'd be ... it'd be $230." Sold. It arrives Tuesday. I can't wait to get my grubby, little fingers all over it.

A few questions, though, assuming anyone is still looking at this days-old thread:

• Anyone have the C720 with elementary OS?
• Anyone have above, but with C720P and, if so, is the touch screen well-supported and worth it?
• Anything else I should've told the spousal unit to consider before he squeezed the trigger on the purchase (not too late to change the order), e.g. is 2GB RAM sufficient?

Interesting. I've definitely never heard of Tarsnap before. From the description, I'm not sure it'd pass the "so simple my grandma uses it" test, but perhaps they're aiming for the more technically savvy user.

Most of my friends and family got hit by Katrina. I happened to live out of state at the time so almost everything I had was ok. (Almost.) Nearly everything they owned was gone: out of print sci-fi games and comic books, priceless heirlooms and wedding albums and family pieces, vehicles and houses.

Man, that's awful. That had to have been simply devastating for them.

I have 12 pages of ideas. Despite all of the ideas, I think it's still possible to make it stupid simple for the noob while also having the crazy advanced settings for the expert. I just don't see that option very often in most programs!

You just might be right. I can think of programs that do some of what you outline, but not everything. If you write such a program, you'd likely have a lot of fans.

Yep, for local backups I'm using a combo of Time Machine (daily) and SuperDuper (weekly). I did not care at all for the frequency with which Time Machine backed up so, after playing around with some other solutions for tweaking its frequency and finding them not suited to my needs, I gave up and used Automator to handle it. I ended up using a similar solution for SuperDuper when it stopped behaving well wrt its inbuilt scheduling feature.

Ah, that's a clever idea, and seems like it would serve some individuals (i.e., not businesses, but normal people with normal things to back up) well. I think I remember someone else suggesting/using such a method a while back, but had forgotten. This method wouldn't have the kind of reliability that Backblaze or other services would have, but perhaps it's good enough for mortals and it's something I'd definitely consider trying myself, were I to have data I wanted to ensure was backed up offsite ... and friends.

...to answer "my butt" or "right here in my pants", but bravely managed to resist.

Back on topic, I've been avoiding the offsite backup thing because I never thought I had anything so terribly important that it required that sort of protection. Backups, absolutely yes, but offsite? Nope. Then again, I'm also someone who can't imagine the house burning down or flooding (or what if both??). That said, I have briefly looked into Amazon Glacier. Do I really, really need to insure all those photos of my trips and videos of my cats are protected against acts of god/fsm or theft? Those of you who do do offsite backups, what sort of data are you protecting/preserving?

Almost any statement can be improved by appending "right here in my pants!" I'll have to give this add-on a try.

<BarryWhite>Our puncture-resistant nanotech laboratory gloves protect you so well, you can do science naked . Yeah, baby.</BarryWhite>

Fixed in the edit.

This makes me glad I still have an "old-fangled" CRT television.

I, too, would like to see ISPs declared common carriers (if that's the correct term). Unsurprisingly, AT&T has a nice load of specious reasoning as to why this would ruin everything . Additionally, despite increasing condemnation of the "fast lane" proposal from FCC commissioners and senators (I'm proud to see "my" Wyden in there), it appears this is headed for a vote no matter what.

On the other end of things, Cogent is hopefully discovering its balls as it's taken the stance that it's Comcast who should pay for connectivity , and web host NeoCities has decided to demo the slow lane in protest of the "fast lane" proposal:

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's internet slow and expensive forever' lobby,"

Brb, makin' popcorn

It makes no sense talking about fast lanes, slow lanes, and different types of packets, shaping, throttling, etc. As I mentioned, I'm ALREADY PAYING FOR HIGHER TIERED SPEEDS!!!

Oh-so-much this. I've not had a cable TV service in over a decade and I can't remember the last time I turned on my television to watch an OTA broadcast, but it's been literal years. My conduit to entertainment and news is the internet (and a sizable collection of DVDs). It's safe to say, then, that I'm attached to having fast, unimpeded internet access. That said, I have considered and will again consider giving it all up out of sheer frustration, and possibly to make some sort of statement, if threats and degradations continue.

My ISP is in the packet delivery business. They need to understand that and, not that it likely accomplishes anything, I try to remind them of that whenever I go down to the local office to renew my service. It doesn't matter if the "packets" they are delivering to me are in the form of cable TV signals or via the internet, nor does it matter where those packets originate. Their whole job is to deliver the packets I request in a timely manner and unmolested. That is all. Any ISP who gets this will get my business.

The trouble is I live in the US . There is but one choice for ISP in my neighborhood (as is likely the case with many, if not most, US neighborhoods). Thus far they have behaved well, but I do not like the idea that my unfettered internet access is wholly dependent on their continued good graces. There is no competition in their fiefdom and they damn well know it.

Just ran across this article, "Comcast is destroying the principle that makes a competitive internet possible" , which is proving a useful read. The same author has other relevant articles here and here .

Hmm ... Here's a (probably) dumb idea, but aren't there Amazon "affiliate" links, or something, where if someone purchases something from ama via said link the affiliate gets a very small portion of the sales? Perhaps |. could have one of those. It likely wouldn't generate loads of revenue, but it'd be unobtrusive (I assume it could be presented unobtrusively, much as somafm does theirs) and possibly offset some of the cost of running the site. Ok, dumb idea concluded.

I definitely care about net neutrality, but I probably don't know the facts. I keep A Guide to the Open Internet handy to point people at, but it was created some time ago and perhaps fails to reflect or address the latest threat.

This payola internet is such an obviously terrible idea. "Nice packets ya got there. Be a shame if anything happened to them." I'm so very disappointed in Netflix caving to Comcast and Verizon. ISPs should be dumb pipes, nothing more, and certainly not content providers. I'm so angry and frustrated with this that I've stopped making sense. I've been angry and frustrated for so long that I'm in danger of no longer being able to care. Perhaps that was the plan all along: keep grinding away at the issue until we all get so tired of fighting we give in to apathy. I really hope I'm alone in this feeling. We need to keep fighting.

The "demo the slow lane" proposal is interesting and has merit. To make a real impression it will take widespread participation and, particularly, the involvement of high-profile players. I hope it gathers sufficient momentum.

[Aside: the same guy who created the infographic linked above, has also created No Way NSA ]

We still have a fully-functional Commodore 64, along with the color monitor, disk drive, joysticks, several game disks and cartridges ... Most of sits in storage, though, with only the Commodore 64 sitting out, proudly, with our collection of obsolete technology (Lazer Tag, Coleco Electronic Quarterback, Microvision Game System, Arcade Defender, etc.).

It looks as though someone has submitted a bug report on this. For future reference, bugs can be submitted here (login required).

Hopefully, someone with access to the site source will perform a mass deletion of those already submitted, as removing them individually is beginning to give me an rsi. Also, my latte is getting cold.

Nice gear. Thanks for the info. I'm going to pass all that along to my bro-in-law, as he's a Canon man and would really appreciate that lens and photo.

I've frequently had the, "I wonder who wrote this... wait, it was me?!" experience. It's always a bit disconcerting and sometimes, if run across some old code I wrote that happens to be a bit clever, I don't feel pride so much as a sinking sense that I've somehow gotten dumber and less experienced over time.

I've been fortunate to have eyes that function with somewhat better-than-normal vision (at least until recently (damn you, aging!)), so I'd never given a lot of consideration to the visual-enhancement value a camera can provide. What a nice bonus to have in addition to the preservation of images.

Excellent photo of the moon, by the way. I think it turned out as well, or better, than one I took with a tripod, and furthermore appears (at least at this size) to have little-or-no chromatic aberration. It's said that it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but having the right tools, and ones that are of high quality, clearly makes a difference. Agreed, therefore, with your stance on cameraphone safaris. Far better to be immersed in the moment.

Ooh, ah! It's about to go over my house!

I would've thought the same, but a timely comment pointed out the ISS tracking site. FWIW, the ISS is in the light, now, but the image is pretty over-exposed. It's difficult to make much out. Either that, or it's really cloudy...

Of course by the time I get around to checking this out the ISS is in darkness, so there's nothing to see. Turns out you can track the location of the ISS here .

Yes, I was about to say, "seems like a good basic set of principles for any group or individual."

This is perhaps off-topic, but I found the description in the linked post of the voting methodology used by the group quite interesting. It's fun to see not just "here's what we've decided" but also "here's how we decided".

First off, kudos to the editor for turning this into a meatier post.

It'd be easy to write off Netanyahu's outburst as the curmudgeonly grousing of an older man who doesn't get modern technology, but perhaps there's some truth in what he said. The reaction, in particular, to the statement

"if you did not take a picture, it's as if you didn't live," or take part, in the occurrence

reminded me of an experience I had a while back. We'd gone to South Africa for a visit and were being taken on a "safari" around Kruger National Park by a really wonderful guide; she'd previously been a grade school teacher and carried over her desire to teach and inform into her new career as a safari guide. At one point she stopped the truck, turned to us and said (paraphrasing), "Now ... I want to encourage you to put down the cameras every so often and record with your eyes - to see things first-hand and not from behind a small screen. The memories you make this way will be far more valuable than any videos or photos."

As a habitual photo-taker, I did not do a particularly good job of heeding her advice. I have lots of photos to document the fact that I went and saw some animals, and I enjoy looking at them and showing them to others, but my memories of the trip are largely of those snapshots and of frowning at the buttons and dials on my camera. What few genuine sense-memories I have are from the times when I left the camera behind or elected not to use it. In my case, taking photos seems to have made me less likely to take part in the occurrence, not more.

Humans love to play show-and-tell and I'm no different. Whenever I see something that interests me, my first inclination will always be to want to show it to someone else, and so I will always be reaching for my pocket to grab my phone. It's good, though, for me to disconnect on occasion, and just record with my eyes. Leave the phone in the pocket. Don't send that "hey, check this out" email/message right that instant. Watch the interesting stuff happen in real life and not from behind a small screen. The other day I saw a crow do a barrel roll ...

There are instructions for creating a bootable usb drive which might also work for creating a live cd: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#flashmemLive

There's also a "LiveCD with OpenBSD" project on sourceforge, but it looks as though it's using version 5.2 (which is from 2012): http://livecd-openbsd.sourceforge.net/

I took a cursory look at Tails last year, but this announcement has me wanting to give it more than a passing glance. I'll be spending the day seeding the torrent and playing around with the OS.

I was also just recently poking around Adafruit and wishing I had considerably more disposable income and gumption than I do currently. Here I was feeling all pleased at finally figuring out how to turn my pi into an always-on VPN/Privoxy server for when I'm out and about on cellular, and then I see stuff like this guy's project and feel I've really set my bar too low. Always wanted to try circuit bending, too, and George Gleixner's recent project is something I would love to reproduce. So many awesome projects, so little talent and motivation.

It's what my parents always told me...

A change was made a couple of weeks back to raise the default moderation score of non-AC posters to 1. It's a new-ish development, but so many additional things have evolved on Pipedot in the interim that it feels like it happened quite a while ago.

I know that I, apparently erroneously, inferred from his statement just prior ("a forked Apache") to mean NGINX is also multi-threaded, though he did put "just" in quotes, so perhaps I should've read something into that.

Coincidentally, I was just skimming an article on Ars about Heartbleed when I ran across the following: "Note: all my experiments and the CloudFlare challenge are targeting Nginx which is single-threaded. It is possible that for a multi-threaded wWb server, more leakage can be observed."

Time to look into open-source firmware. Replacing oem with, eg, dd-wrt would mitigate this sort of thing, wouldn't it? I'm honestly asking.

I confess the Asimov's are the Spousal Unit's. He's also an avid collector and reader of scifi anthologies (and has, in the past, taught a Science Fiction Literature course). He's a fan of the Asimov mags. Whether that means they're good, I can't say, but I do think he has better and more diverse taste in literature than I, so I'm inclined to think there's something in those Asimov mags worth reading.

I must've read some Kurzweil at some point, as we've got plenty of scifi laying around (I have no excuse for being so scifi illiterate/ignorant), though I cannot recall. I'll definitely try to track that series down.

Perhaps it's more difficult to recognize those long-term, far future predictions as they must, necessarily, be more removed from our current existence and therefor tend to be seen as "mere" fiction rather than as something potentially eventually achievable presented within a fictional framework. It's a lot easier to look like a prophet when predicting the near-possible almost-now. One doesn't have to wait as long, for a start.

I don't know about current authors and predictions for the next 50 years, and I am very much looking forward to what others contribute to this conversation. When I've gone back and reread some Gibson novels years after I first read them, though, I've sometimes been surprised at how prophetic some aspects of them seem (he hardly qualifies as a utopian, mind you). The same is true of some Stross, though that's really likely more a case of catching an emerging trend and expanding on where it might logically progress.

Ok, people, hit me with a reading list. I need some horizons expanded.

Indeed. I find myself in the odd position of rooting for Capitol One. It's heartening and satisfying to learn the judge had the wisdom to see these patents for the nothing they were and to prevent this case from going to a jury trial. Had it gone before a jury, I'm not so confident the outcome would've been as good.

It was interesting to note, in Ars' writeup, that several of IV's much-touted "inventors" are themselves patent lawyers.

Good point. The sites for which I did create new passwords had issued new certs within the last week or so, but I hadn't really given adequate consideration to the possible ramifications of what might occur were I to create a new password on a site that did not yet have all its ducks in a row.

Ditto. I went through the list on Mashable ( http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/ ) and changed what needed changing. I've not yet checked other sites for which I have logins that were not in Mashable's list, though I could/should be doing so at either LastPass ( https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/ ) or 1Password ( https://heartbleed.agilebits.com/ ). This is mainly because I'm super lazy, but also because, like you, I've got a unique password for each site. I feel less urgently inclined to change those passwords on sites that are largely unimportant to me. That's possibly the equivalent of "Put my fingers in my ears and chanted La-La-La-La" and, if so, I'll just have my own laziness to blame.

Btw, if anyone's got a good list of sites whose passwords need changing, a la Mashable's but more complete/updated, I'd be much obliged if you posted the link.

I wish I'd heard about that. It looks like it may have been worth supporting.

I love(ed) my WRT54GL with DD-WRT, and set up a number of family/friends with the same router/firmware combo. It was replaced a while back, due to wanting 802.11n and also due to concerns that the hardware itself was getting quite long in the tooth (I was paranoid of immanent failure), but it's still sitting around the house somewhere, gathering dust, simply because I'd grown attached to it.

The replacement router, while pretty to look at (not necessary, but a nice thing to have when the router sits out in a plainly visible part of the room), is not able to take third-party firmware. Not having DD-WRT has been a hardship. It's so wonderfully tweakable and gives me so much control that I find myself continually frustrated by the limitations of the factory firmware on my current router.

I'm pleased to see the release of the WRT1900AC, but its current pricing scheme is indeed very cost-prohibitive; I'll certainly not be running out to buy one immediately. In time, of course, the price will come down to something I can stomach, but how long that will take may well depend on how popular this router proves to be, and I have a feeling it'll be very popular. I could end up waiting a very long time to get one of these.

I was the editor and should have caught that. My apologies. Thank you for posting a clarification.

And for those unfamiliar with FruityLoops, now known as FL Studio, here's what that's all about.

I'd commented yesterday on following along with the recreation using SuperCollider , but it appears those comments got lost in the ether. At the risk of repeating myself, SuperCollider is kinda neat and, using the code in the aforementioned recreation article, did indeed produce something very similar to the Deep Note. It was fun. As an additional amusing exercise, the author decided to see how close he could get to the original sound if he pared the code down to 140 characters:

play{Mix({|k|k=k+1/2;2/k*Mix({|i|i=i+1;Blip.ar(i*XLine.kr(rand(2e2,4e2),87+LFNoise2.kr(2)*k,15),2,1/(i/a=XLine.kr(0.3,1,9))/9)}!9)}!40)!2*a}

It's not as good an approximation as his lengthier code by any stretch, but it's still recognizably something like the Deep Note.

Finally: Deep Note is often the best part of the film.

Gracias, benevolent overlord. Tested and confirmed.

Ok, I just finished following along with the creation in SuperCollider, and that's some neat/fun stuff.

I *love* Deep Note. I'm going to have to take a look at SuperCollider right freakin' now.