In August 2009, a boy was hit by lightning and later died in hospital. Witnesses said the sky was blue above them, and there was no thunder or rain.

Link

Why is systemd bad?

The issues posed by adopting systemd to various distros are listed on the site: Boycott systemd.

Spread it around so people know ...

Mod this up!

I had to deal with a remote customer whose person on site does not speak English, by getting him to enter UNIX shell commands. His native language (and mine) was Arabic.

What I did was to tell him what Arabic key to press so that the English equivalent would be the one sent to the shell.

We were lucky that his Arabic keyboard layout was the same as mine. That was not a given in those days (Late 80s, early 90s), but we lucked out.

He was describing to me the output in English (vertical bar, vertical bar with a circle at the bottom, ...etc).

It worked out and we solved the problem in less than an hour.

Home Depot stores credit cards with the transactions.

I know this because when you go to return something I bought, they don't ask you for the credit card, and sort of highlight that this is a convenience that is unique to Home Depot.

I complained more than once to the cashiers about storing credit card numbers (it is not their fault, it is management and IT). The cashiers would say: "Don't worry, we don't have access to it!"

My response was: it is not you whom I am worried about.

Now we know that storing credit cards is a bad idea, and why ...

I work from home, and have been using a recliner as my only "desk" for about 6 years and have the following to share ...

- My recliner is a La-Z-Boy. Can't remember the model since it is has been many years, but it is not something fancy. I tried leather for a little while, but it can be sweaty and sensitive to even your finger nails. So I have been using fabric.

- If you recliner has a wall behind it, then move it away from the wall a bit so it can recline back.

- Your LEGS (calves and feet) will feel better on a recliner.

- Use a pillow or something to support your NECK. It will feel better.

- Watch for your BACK. Put a stiff-ish wide pillow below you if you feel like you bottom is sinking in the chair. Also, put another stiff-ish wide pillow behind your lower back. Experiment with different pillows until you find the right combination.

- Avoid any FANCY back support that curves your spine too much. These are the most common ones on the market in my experience. This includes the wire frame lumbar support mesh thingies (they aerate well, but will hurt your back because of too much spine curvature), or those cylinder shaped hard pillows.

- Use a LAPDESK (those foam filled sacks with a vinyl covered plywood surface).

- Get a table that is level with the arm rests beside you so you can easily sip your beverage of choice, and have some handy items too (pens, paper, mobile phone, ...etc.)

- You will be absorbed in whatever you are doing, so interaction with the wife and kids will be mostly "huh? what did you say?" or "later, I am focusing on something else here" ... Not quality time ...

How timely. I am doing a presentation at the local LUG (KWLUG) on OpenWRT in a couple of days.

There are various options out there that are supported by OpenWRT.

In this day and age, you want the most memory and flash that you can get, gigabit ethernet, Wirless N dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz), as well as USB.

I use The D-Link DIR-835, which has 128MB RAM, 16MB flash (the most memory and flash that you can get for a reasonable price) and all the above features . It goes for ~ $80 in Canada.

There are other options that support most of the above, but with a bit less RAM or flash sometimes, but perhaps 2 port USB, ...etc.

They are:

TP-Link WDR-4300 ~ $70
TP-Link TL-WDR3600 ~ $55
TP-Link TL-WR1043ND ~ $50

All of the above are supported on OpenWRT development snapshots (soon to be a stable release, Barrier Breaker).

Implementing proper domain and user authentication by baking PGP or some other PKI right into the email protocols will both solve the spam problem comprehensively AND allow UTF8 domains with minimum risk of phishing /spoofing.

I agree. The real solution is hardened authentication getting baked right into email. I'm all for UTF8 domain names and email user names, however if the email protocol suite is going to be expanded to allow for more features, then I think security should be top of that list.

Sure, for a while, domains that span multiple character sets such as hotmail.com with a Cyrillic o could be spam flagged, however what happens when (not, if, but when) legitimate domains with multiple character sets start appearing? What about domains that use characters restricted to the intersection of two character sets such that they appear to be from one but are in fact from another?

The ONLY answer to this is an email client that can associate a certificate with a domain and checks it against received email as a matter of course. This solution not only has the property of preventing domain spoofing, but also comprehensively solves the spam problem. (It didn't get done earlier because it fell foul of the "requires everyone to agree at the same time" point on that pro forma "Why your proposal won't work" sheet.)

For AF447, wreckage was spotted 2 days after the plane went missing, and bodies of passangers were recovered 4 days after that. That gave a rough area to search for the black boxes.

Not a single piece of wreckage from MH370 was found to give a clue on roughly where it went down.

The area is vast, so it is a mind boggling task.

What would be wrong with just buying a couple of Nexus 7s, remove all junkware, put skype as the only app on it and distribute those? Surely the center has WiFi?

Reminds me of the Berserkers in Viking stories, who went into battle and fought in a trance like frenzied state.

Yea! We don't need no stinkin' ecosystem! We got technologies! Raaa!

Or very, very right.

All these puns suck.

Another Tiny Tiny RSS user here. I run it on the home server, and never looked back.