I've tried the freezer trick to help what sounded like an ailing bearing , but with limited success. No amount of freezing seemed to help. To make things worse, when I took the drive out of the freezer, moisture started condensing immediately on the cold PCB. I tried to place it on a sponge to help sop up the water, but I can't imagine this helped the drive at all.
I have some friends that swear by this, but I am extremely doubtful especially because of the condensation problem. I feel like this is an a apocryphal bit of "knowledge" that has been passed down from a time when drivers were larger, slower and had less precise bearings. I can imagine that on a big old drive freezing the drive *may* have helped. But then again, perhaps it's something like throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder or touching wood--something your grandma told you to do, but doesn't actually do anything.
And once again we are reminded that using the same password on every site is a terrible idea for just this reason. I know I'm guilty of recycling a generic password on sites I don't care about, but I fear that my family members are even worse. I'd say there's an 80% chance that my family recycles the same password on both social and banking sites.
It doesn't help that many password validation routines choke on spaces. Being able to use a passphrase is way easier than trying to remember some random group of characters that just happen to have a high entropy. The Correct Horse Battery Staple model is my new favorite for any site that will accept spaces. Sadly, one bank that I have done business with won't even allow a password that is more than 8 characters and only accepts letters and numbers. They try to shore this up with some bogus security questions on the following page, but I don't feel really "secure."
What other password strategies do you all use to make sure you keep reasonably secure? I eventually gave in to using KeePass to keep my less frequently but more important passwords secure.
Geek can be a style! Check out this amazing Nixi Tube Watch. It's awesome, geeky and pretty great to look at. It doesn't go too well with an Armani suit, and it isn't quite classy enough to flash around a funeral, but it sure would score you some points at a geeky interview.
Gesture based input is lousy for coding, managing systems, writing books and pretty much anything that depends on the accuracy and specificity of a keyboard. But that doesn't mean that a display like this doesn't have its uses. Rendering and manipulating objects through this sort of interface would be amazing! Also, think about how clunky and absolutely STUPID touch screens were just ten years ago. Heck, you can still find the same old crap displays at airport checkin kiosks. Now think about how a good implementation in iOS/Android devices has totally changed the world of touch interface. The inovations of Apple, Android and others have given us totally novel ways of interacting with our data. I would have never voluntarily brought one of those old touch screens into my home, but I cary one around in my pocket every day now.
This implementation might not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction for novel forms of input. Once someone cracks an awesome 3D/Gesture interface that works well and doesn't make you feel like your stomach is going to push out through your eyes, it will quietly creep into ubiquity just like the (good) touch screens today.
The Norwegian government had to recalculate my taxes and my wife's taxes no less than three times. They have the power to deposit money and withdraw it from my bank account. I tried to work out their calculations, but not being a native Norwegian speaker, I struggled to understand how they were doing things. I just have to trust that things are correct.
The Norwegian government always seems to do what they say they will, they just do it in their own time and usually with six or eight tries to do it right...
I wonder what kind of battery life one could expect from such a high bandwidth BT connection. Also, I wonder what the battery pack for these things is going to look like. I hope it's as dorky as a head lamp.
Where I live, the local bus company's web site is terrible. It's difficult to use, forces you to fill in forms over and over again when you make changes, can't figure out where you are or where you want to go half the time and frequently has issues figuring out transfers at all. Worst of all, the bus company never seems to have current route information posted at the bus stops.
Since Google started supporting transit directions in Stavanger, Norway, my life has been so much easier. I especially love the Android (Gingerbread) integration. I have shortcuts on my home screen that will show me the best route and next three busses from wherever I am to my home, work and down town. It's amazing.
If you regularly use public transit, it's worth your time to see if Google supports your city.
Now the only thing missing is real time route information. I can't wait until that feature comes to town. Sadly the bus drivers are rarely on time and make a sport of speeding away when they're early and you're sprinting for the bus.
Fantastic. In all my googling I never came across that. I'm going to have to give that a try. It's orders of magnitude more elegant than the disaster I've been kludging together. Thanks!
Storage is cheap, but backing it up to S3 is less cheap. I looked through a bunch of the mail and discovered that what I really wanted to save was the text. The rest is backed up on Google. If I lost it all, it wouldn't be a tragedy, but the mail between my wife and I before we were married and messages between my family are the things I treasure most, not the photos that I can find on facebook/flickr/gmail/picasa/etc.
Finding a way to save some space and some bucks is worth while for me. After a lot of googling, I eventually landed on a script by Mike Leonetti that did most of the work for me stripping mime attachments. I had to tweak it to work with fetchmail and procmail, but I eventually kludged it into working. I'm just testing it out now and hopefully it will do the job. Perhaps others would be interested. You can find a copy here: Stripping Mime Attachments.
If anyone has a better solution, I'm definitely interested as my Perl fu is pretty weak and this solution is a pretty huge kludge.
Google doesn't make the hardware, but they certainly endorse some of it. In particular, the Nexus line. One would think that Google would choose to endorse only the best those manufacturers have to offer. It certainly doesn't do them any good to endorse crap. My N1 hasn't been too stellar so far having broken twice in the first year. While HTC did a pretty speedy job at replacing it, I wasn't super impressed with a device that craps out in less than a year of gentle ownership.
I bought a Nexus One from Google and had to return it to an HTC service center twice in the first year of ownership. The main board needed to be replaced the first time. The second time I had to return it for a bad power switch. Apparently when the service center installed the board, a faulty switch was used, or they crimped the ribbon. Either way, it's bad QC on the board, the switch and the labor.
I really like my N1 and I find FY to be a pretty snappy OS, but I'm not supper impressed with the longevity of the devices. There are no plans to roll the next major OS version for the N1 which doesn't speak too highly of Google or HTC's expectations of longevity. The iPhone line on the other hand has all the products on the latest version of the OS even if every phone doesn't support the latest and greatest features. It would be nice to see a greater commitment to lasting hardware from Google and the various phone makers. I expect a mobile to last around 3 years of normal use; perhaps I'm being too optimistic in the current age of accelerated obsoleteness.
KeePass is GREAT. I've talked my mom and wife into using it. My mom simply put the master password in her safe-deposit box and left instructions in her will to allow us access to it. My wife and I simply shared our strong master passwords with each other and stuck them into our respective KeePass DBs.
It is a bit of a hassle keeping everything up-to-date, but it is well worth the hassle you leave for your loved ones to try and sort out potentially dozens of passwords after you're gone. Just think about how hard it is sometimes to prove that you own an account that you've forgotten the password for. Now multiply that by the fact that you're dead and your loved ones have to prove that you intended for them to get into your accounts.
Do your family a favor and make it easy for them to find all your passwords in the event that you kick it sudenly.
The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada and some of the folks over at iFixit are making a decent shot of it. I have no idea what their finances are, but their sites and offerings continue to grow. It looks to me like they are making some decent and honest money based off of the industry of others.
Jonathan Coulton of Code_Monkey fame is doing alright. I heard a pice on NPR about him recently. He's making a living writing fun songs and distributing them himself.
Obviously not everyone who gets into the on-line creative business is going to make a fortune, but it looks like there's plenty of niches that aren't all occupied.
I was pretty disappointed that TFA didn't offer any suggestions to best practices to prevent hacking, or even suggest how a user might determine if they were compromised. It was just a moment for everyone reading the article to feel aloof and point their fingers at all the plebes under them.
I've been using Google's 2 Step Authentication for a few months, and HTTPS since it was offered and feel pretty secure about the security of my Google login, but if someone hijacked my account, I don't think I would really know until a friend pointed it out, or the hijacker changed the password.
How would YOU tell? What steps can an average, non log-poking user figure they've lost control of their account?
Or for those of us that grew up in the 80s with the Apple II and Mac Classics, "Open Apple". I still think to my self, "Open Apple+C; Open Apple+V" when I'm copy/pasting.
This is one of FIRST things I taught in my 2nd Grade computer class this week. CTRL-Z and CTRL-Y are probably the single most useful things for a new computer user to learn beyond basic mouse and keyboard skills. The copy and paste can come later, but being able to undo a giant mistake for a kid is HUGE. The look on their face when they accidentally swipe an hours worth of hunting and pecking and replace it with a "Q" is pretty tragic. Teaching them that CTRL-Z can save their bacon is also pretty priceless.
The suicide "problem" at FoxCon is a bit overblown; for the number of employees, FoxCon is right around the national average for suicides in China. That's not to say the working conditions are great, or that FC is entirely blameless, but statistically, working at FC is no more suicideagenic than being Chinese.
Which is why it's always important avoid concentrating your services in just one provider.
Or, to ensure that you have a solid backup regime that pulls down your data and spreads the risk around. I pop all my gmail, compress it and store it both locally and with a cloud backup provider. Same goes for my contacts and calendar entries. This article motivated me to double check that everything was working as I expected, however.
It would certainly be inconvenient if I was locked out of my email account, but downright tragic to lose my address book. It's one of those things that is hard to value until it's gone.
Issue (3) Can you be sure that the hardware is secure? Though unlikely, a key logger is a real threat to even this type of security.
When I don my tin-foil hat, I often wonder how secure any hardware is in this regard. Given the number of USB devices that have shipped with mal-ware factory installed, I wonder if there are not more deliberate and high-level attempts to manufacture hardware with key-loggers or similar nastiness built in. When Lonovo bought IBM the idea crossed my mind that it would be fairly trivial for Lonovo engineers (or any other company for that matter) to in-build hardware and software that logged keys and mined data. Even if only 1 out of 10,000 of your notebooks found its way into a government agency, or into the hands of a fortune 500 company, it might be worth the risk. This is especially true if someone like the Chinese government is backing you up.
Among other reasons such as wasted space with the sim-tray hardware, I suspect this has something to do with the sim card unlockers that slide into the sim card tray along with a standard sim card. A smaller sim foot print would make such devices much harder to engineer.
Radio Lab has a great episode interviewing Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, regarding her part in developing the sound recordings for the voyager mission. She beautifully captures the art and love inherent in such an awesome act of science and exploration. If you have a free few minutes, you won't be sorry you listened.
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As many as it takes until we know what happens to this awesome nuclear powered rover with frikin lasers on another frikin planet!
I've tried the freezer trick to help what sounded like an ailing bearing , but with limited success. No amount of freezing seemed to help. To make things worse, when I took the drive out of the freezer, moisture started condensing immediately on the cold PCB. I tried to place it on a sponge to help sop up the water, but I can't imagine this helped the drive at all.
I have some friends that swear by this, but I am extremely doubtful especially because of the condensation problem. I feel like this is an a apocryphal bit of "knowledge" that has been passed down from a time when drivers were larger, slower and had less precise bearings. I can imagine that on a big old drive freezing the drive *may* have helped. But then again, perhaps it's something like throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder or touching wood--something your grandma told you to do, but doesn't actually do anything.
And once again we are reminded that using the same password on every site is a terrible idea for just this reason. I know I'm guilty of recycling a generic password on sites I don't care about, but I fear that my family members are even worse. I'd say there's an 80% chance that my family recycles the same password on both social and banking sites.
It doesn't help that many password validation routines choke on spaces. Being able to use a passphrase is way easier than trying to remember some random group of characters that just happen to have a high entropy. The Correct Horse Battery Staple model is my new favorite for any site that will accept spaces. Sadly, one bank that I have done business with won't even allow a password that is more than 8 characters and only accepts letters and numbers. They try to shore this up with some bogus security questions on the following page, but I don't feel really "secure."
What other password strategies do you all use to make sure you keep reasonably secure? I eventually gave in to using KeePass to keep my less frequently but more important passwords secure.
I believe this is called the tyranny of the majority.
Geek can be a style! Check out this amazing Nixi Tube Watch. It's awesome, geeky and pretty great to look at. It doesn't go too well with an Armani suit, and it isn't quite classy enough to flash around a funeral, but it sure would score you some points at a geeky interview.
Gesture based input is lousy for coding, managing systems, writing books and pretty much anything that depends on the accuracy and specificity of a keyboard. But that doesn't mean that a display like this doesn't have its uses. Rendering and manipulating objects through this sort of interface would be amazing! Also, think about how clunky and absolutely STUPID touch screens were just ten years ago. Heck, you can still find the same old crap displays at airport checkin kiosks. Now think about how a good implementation in iOS/Android devices has totally changed the world of touch interface. The inovations of Apple, Android and others have given us totally novel ways of interacting with our data. I would have never voluntarily brought one of those old touch screens into my home, but I cary one around in my pocket every day now.
This implementation might not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction for novel forms of input. Once someone cracks an awesome 3D/Gesture interface that works well and doesn't make you feel like your stomach is going to push out through your eyes, it will quietly creep into ubiquity just like the (good) touch screens today.
The Norwegian government had to recalculate my taxes and my wife's taxes no less than three times. They have the power to deposit money and withdraw it from my bank account. I tried to work out their calculations, but not being a native Norwegian speaker, I struggled to understand how they were doing things. I just have to trust that things are correct.
The Norwegian government always seems to do what they say they will, they just do it in their own time and usually with six or eight tries to do it right...
I wonder what kind of battery life one could expect from such a high bandwidth BT connection. Also, I wonder what the battery pack for these things is going to look like. I hope it's as dorky as a head lamp.
This sounds a lot like the glasses that Manfred Macx uses in Stross' Accelerando.
Though after trying a couple of the glasses mounted screens and getting some serious motion sickness, I'll wait for the brain implantable version.
Where I live, the local bus company's web site is terrible. It's difficult to use, forces you to fill in forms over and over again when you make changes, can't figure out where you are or where you want to go half the time and frequently has issues figuring out transfers at all. Worst of all, the bus company never seems to have current route information posted at the bus stops.
Since Google started supporting transit directions in Stavanger, Norway, my life has been so much easier. I especially love the Android (Gingerbread) integration. I have shortcuts on my home screen that will show me the best route and next three busses from wherever I am to my home, work and down town. It's amazing.
If you regularly use public transit, it's worth your time to see if Google supports your city.
Now the only thing missing is real time route information. I can't wait until that feature comes to town. Sadly the bus drivers are rarely on time and make a sport of speeding away when they're early and you're sprinting for the bus.
Fantastic. In all my googling I never came across that. I'm going to have to give that a try. It's orders of magnitude more elegant than the disaster I've been kludging together. Thanks!
Storage is cheap, but backing it up to S3 is less cheap. I looked through a bunch of the mail and discovered that what I really wanted to save was the text. The rest is backed up on Google. If I lost it all, it wouldn't be a tragedy, but the mail between my wife and I before we were married and messages between my family are the things I treasure most, not the photos that I can find on facebook/flickr/gmail/picasa/etc.
Finding a way to save some space and some bucks is worth while for me. After a lot of googling, I eventually landed on a script by Mike Leonetti that did most of the work for me stripping mime attachments. I had to tweak it to work with fetchmail and procmail, but I eventually kludged it into working. I'm just testing it out now and hopefully it will do the job. Perhaps others would be interested. You can find a copy here: Stripping Mime Attachments.
If anyone has a better solution, I'm definitely interested as my Perl fu is pretty weak and this solution is a pretty huge kludge.
Google doesn't make the hardware, but they certainly endorse some of it. In particular, the Nexus line. One would think that Google would choose to endorse only the best those manufacturers have to offer. It certainly doesn't do them any good to endorse crap. My N1 hasn't been too stellar so far having broken twice in the first year. While HTC did a pretty speedy job at replacing it, I wasn't super impressed with a device that craps out in less than a year of gentle ownership.
I bought a Nexus One from Google and had to return it to an HTC service center twice in the first year of ownership. The main board needed to be replaced the first time. The second time I had to return it for a bad power switch. Apparently when the service center installed the board, a faulty switch was used, or they crimped the ribbon. Either way, it's bad QC on the board, the switch and the labor.
I really like my N1 and I find FY to be a pretty snappy OS, but I'm not supper impressed with the longevity of the devices. There are no plans to roll the next major OS version for the N1 which doesn't speak too highly of Google or HTC's expectations of longevity. The iPhone line on the other hand has all the products on the latest version of the OS even if every phone doesn't support the latest and greatest features. It would be nice to see a greater commitment to lasting hardware from Google and the various phone makers. I expect a mobile to last around 3 years of normal use; perhaps I'm being too optimistic in the current age of accelerated obsoleteness.
KeePass is GREAT. I've talked my mom and wife into using it. My mom simply put the master password in her safe-deposit box and left instructions in her will to allow us access to it. My wife and I simply shared our strong master passwords with each other and stuck them into our respective KeePass DBs.
It is a bit of a hassle keeping everything up-to-date, but it is well worth the hassle you leave for your loved ones to try and sort out potentially dozens of passwords after you're gone. Just think about how hard it is sometimes to prove that you own an account that you've forgotten the password for. Now multiply that by the fact that you're dead and your loved ones have to prove that you intended for them to get into your accounts.
Do your family a favor and make it easy for them to find all your passwords in the event that you kick it sudenly.
The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada and some of the folks over at iFixit are making a decent shot of it. I have no idea what their finances are, but their sites and offerings continue to grow. It looks to me like they are making some decent and honest money based off of the industry of others.
Jonathan Coulton of Code_Monkey fame is doing alright. I heard a pice on NPR about him recently. He's making a living writing fun songs and distributing them himself.
Obviously not everyone who gets into the on-line creative business is going to make a fortune, but it looks like there's plenty of niches that aren't all occupied.
I was pretty disappointed that TFA didn't offer any suggestions to best practices to prevent hacking, or even suggest how a user might determine if they were compromised. It was just a moment for everyone reading the article to feel aloof and point their fingers at all the plebes under them.
I've been using Google's 2 Step Authentication for a few months, and HTTPS since it was offered and feel pretty secure about the security of my Google login, but if someone hijacked my account, I don't think I would really know until a friend pointed it out, or the hijacker changed the password.
How would YOU tell? What steps can an average, non log-poking user figure they've lost control of their account?
(it's a COMMAND + F on a Mac!)
Or for those of us that grew up in the 80s with the Apple II and Mac Classics, "Open Apple". I still think to my self, "Open Apple+C; Open Apple+V" when I'm copy/pasting.
Real editors use [esc] /
This is one of FIRST things I taught in my 2nd Grade computer class this week. CTRL-Z and CTRL-Y are probably the single most useful things for a new computer user to learn beyond basic mouse and keyboard skills. The copy and paste can come later, but being able to undo a giant mistake for a kid is HUGE. The look on their face when they accidentally swipe an hours worth of hunting and pecking and replace it with a "Q" is pretty tragic. Teaching them that CTRL-Z can save their bacon is also pretty priceless.
The suicide "problem" at FoxCon is a bit overblown; for the number of employees, FoxCon is right around the national average for suicides in China. That's not to say the working conditions are great, or that FC is entirely blameless, but statistically, working at FC is no more suicideagenic than being Chinese.
Which is why it's always important avoid concentrating your services in just one provider.
Or, to ensure that you have a solid backup regime that pulls down your data and spreads the risk around. I pop all my gmail, compress it and store it both locally and with a cloud backup provider. Same goes for my contacts and calendar entries. This article motivated me to double check that everything was working as I expected, however.
It would certainly be inconvenient if I was locked out of my email account, but downright tragic to lose my address book. It's one of those things that is hard to value until it's gone.
Issue (3) Can you be sure that the hardware is secure? Though unlikely, a key logger is a real threat to even this type of security.
When I don my tin-foil hat, I often wonder how secure any hardware is in this regard. Given the number of USB devices that have shipped with mal-ware factory installed, I wonder if there are not more deliberate and high-level attempts to manufacture hardware with key-loggers or similar nastiness built in. When Lonovo bought IBM the idea crossed my mind that it would be fairly trivial for Lonovo engineers (or any other company for that matter) to in-build hardware and software that logged keys and mined data. Even if only 1 out of 10,000 of your notebooks found its way into a government agency, or into the hands of a fortune 500 company, it might be worth the risk. This is especially true if someone like the Chinese government is backing you up.
Among other reasons such as wasted space with the sim-tray hardware, I suspect this has something to do with the sim card unlockers that slide into the sim card tray along with a standard sim card. A smaller sim foot print would make such devices much harder to engineer.
Radio Lab has a great episode interviewing Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, regarding her part in developing the sound recordings for the voyager mission. She beautifully captures the art and love inherent in such an awesome act of science and exploration. If you have a free few minutes, you won't be sorry you listened.