Let’s all remember that Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste.
I lost one of my little Moleskine notebooks today. On the way to the airport today I was summarizing my notes from two days of discussions and I must have left it in the back of the limo. I hope the driver finds it. It did make me painfully aware that these things are not part of my backup strategy.
I don’t like taking notes in a laptop during meetings, I find them distracting and I often make a little drawing, whether it’s class diagrams or geometrical sketches. But most of all, I like the tactile feel of a notebook and tightly written notes on gridded pages – leafing through one of those years later is a lot more fun than going through an old word document.
But in the future, I’m going to add them to my backup. Mozy and digital cameras FTW.
Dear marketing people,
for various reasons that I don’t feel I need to go into here (because face it, you all know what they are) I’ve decided to boycott this year’s Olympic games. Not only will I not be participating (yeah, right) but I’m extending my personal boycott to the following:
That last item is most likely going to be the hardest. I already stopped buying Coca Cola (though I’ll extend it to restaurants) and eating at McDonalds, so those are going to be a major issue. But today I noticed that Tine is sponsoring the Norwegian Olympics team – so many of their products are off limits.
I’m lazy in my extremism, so I will limit my boycott to such items that actually carry the 5 rings on them. If you’re supporting the warolympic effort, but it’s not obvious to me while I’m in the shop, you might get away with that.
I’m learning a lot about AS3 these days. It’s not a bad language, and it’s basically Javascript for Flash. Among the learnings:
int i every time I should write var i : int.Despite all this I’m starting to really enjoy coding in Flash and getting noticeably faster every day.
This week I went to my first geohashing event ever. Report is on the wiki. We were four people, and one person that came at a different time so we didn’t get to meet. It was a lucky break: Normally, coordinates in the Oslo graticule are at locations that are really inaccessible. This time, it was in the outdoor seating area of a pub downtown.
I’ll be celebrating 16 years on the internet this summer, and as anyone can imagine that means I’ve seen a lot of crap. Even with the big storage of useless information that I call my brain, that means I have a lot of bookmarks, and with Firefox 3, I notice my habits of bookmark-keeping have changed substantially: I bookmark everything now.
Before FF3, keeping more than a few hundred bookmarks was self-defeating. Finding anything in the mass was hard, adding something to the right folder so it could be found again was getting progressively more difficult, and a Google search was almost always more efficient for finding things. FF3 changed this in three major ways:
What about you? How big is your bookmark collection, what do you bookmark, and how many of you have managed to save any bookmarks from the 90s?
Neat things that caught my eye lately:
Yesterday, Sweden voted for a new wiretapping law that gives the police the power to listen in on all traffic crossing the Swedish border – without a court order! this is reminiscent of the Great Firewall of China, and even Germany hasn’t gone that far. Obviously this is bad news for Sweden, but why is it bad for you?
11 302 ms 26 ms 27 ms level3-117311-s-b3.telia.net [213.248.78.110] 12 184 ms 410 ms 205 ms ae-11-11.car1.Stockholm1.Level3.net [4.69.135.17] 13 * 210 ms * ae-4-4.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.135.22]
In my own case, my provider (NextGenTel) routes at least some of its traffic through Stockholm. Which means it’s crossing the border to Sweden, and can be listened in on by the Swedish police. Who can’t be trusted.
Which should be a reminder for everyone to use more encryption. Encrypt your mail. Use SSL where you can. And encrypt your IM sessions: If you are using Pidgin or Miranda IM, you could install plugins for Off-The-Record messaging (pidgin) (miranda).
And if you’re saying “I have no secrets”, reconsider that statement considering you lived in a country like China. You would have secrets there. And what if your traffic gets routed through a country like that, and somebody reads it? You might just end up on some no-fly list for saying something ironic about a major global power to your girlfriend. And because encryption requires everyone you communicate with to take part it’s hard to get critical mass, and it will be too late by the time you need it.
I decided to test another virus scanner. I’m generally not interested in them, but there are people who are, and I’d like to be in a position to give a favorable recommendation for one or the other. It’s always easy to name the ones I don’t like (NAV, Antivir), or won’t trust again (AVG), and my recommendation so far has been for avast!, although the user interface it forces on you is really, really terrible.
So now I’m checking out NOD32 (30 day trial). It gets pretty good review, the interface is nice and clean, and it seems to be much less of a system hog. I like that I can really customize what it does – I especially don’t like my virus scanner to scan every file I touch, because that seriously cramps my compile times. So far the only fault I can find is with the explorer menu, and the lack of an option to turn off the balloon that comes up every time it updates its virus definitions.
Today when I connected my Nokia 6300 to the PC with the USB cable, I got the error message in this post’s title. The 6300 has not been a great phone for me (I miss my Ericsson W810i), but at least upload over USB had been painless until today. It’s full of really bad engineering like this:
When your background image is an animation that’s stored on the memory card, it will lock the memory card.
Yes. It seems somebody made the memory card an exclusive resource, and the code that’s playing background animations locks this resource. Solution: Reset the theme to factory settings. Upload podcasts again.