Canon's actually pretty cool about the use of custom firmware. Plus projects like CHDK and Magic Lantern (and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier) have been around for quite a few years, and Canon hasn't tried squashing them.

(Although apparently their hacker-friendly nature most definitely stops when it comes to the EOS-1 line.)

A (cheapskate) friend of mine had an old Russian Lada which inexplicably came with a keyhole for engaging a 'launch mode'. Of course, he didn't have the key, but eventually he managed to pick the lock.

It would appear there'd been some kind of mixup in the relevant Soviet factories and it actually was a launch mode - and this peculiar Lada-Soyuz hybrid launched straight up into the sky, friend included.

He's probably still up there. Wonder if he ever tried docking with Mir?

Temperatures took the longest to get intuitively as I had to live through the various weather patterns before I could feel it. But, even then there wasn't really any advantage to it as I was still comparing it to what I consider a comfortable temperature.

Temperatures are easy.

-18degC: typical freezer.
0degC: freezing! Literally.
4degC: typical fridge.
10degC: bit parky out, definitely put a jumper on.
20degC: room temperature.
30degC: really quite warm.
37degC: human body temperature.
40degC: really bloody hot innit.
100degC: boiling (literally!)

Some of the Europeans I've run into say that Amtrak's on-board experience compares favorably to what they get in their countries, even if the trains are slower.

As someone who's travelled on more than his fair share of trains in Europeland - at least on the west coast, Amtrak trains are super-comfy. Big seats, loads of legroom, decent food (on the last trip - previous trip a few years ago involved a fossilised, tepid space-burger).

Best of all, there's often a carriage specifically for viewing the scenery going past. Of which there is a lot. Possibly including someone describing the scenery going past. I learned a lot about Mount Saint Helens that way. (Main reason for choosing trains - I fly a fair amount also.) Way better views than, say, the Eurostar - where you never even glimpse the sea you've been under.

I vaguely recall the WiFi working when I went from Seattle to Vancouver BC. Not terribly fast, but enough to email friends and family about the delays. (A swing-bridge had got stuck in the 'open' position, and the train had to wait for half an hour or so. The driver had then disappeared somewhere to get a sandwich, causing another ten minutes delay.)

Amtrak is great fun (some of the announcements on that Vancouver trip were gloriously surreal) but it's hardly an efficient means of transportation. I got the train from Seattle to Portland once, and realised it's a similar distance between the two cities as it is from Brussels to Paris. I used to catch the Thalys between Brussels and Paris - in the time it took to go from Seattle to Portland (including a freight-train-induced pause in sidings), I could have gone from Brussels to Paris to Brussels then back to Paris again.

Here you go.

It's not too hard to spot the ISS going overhead when the conditions are right - it's like a fairly bright star going at a fair speed across the sky. It's visible for just minutes at a time - it's sufficiently close to the Earth that you'd definitely need a hefty world-wide network to communicate directly.

(NASA ISS sightings site here.)

Someone comes along playing the sound of a drone on their smartphone and you realized what a waste of time and money it was.

Here you go! Down near "Sound can be a "two-sided coin" in war, he argues."

User: GuardianLTD
Password: 123password

It's the Grauniad. It was more likely to be '123passwrod' [sic].

But then I just realized it's "booK" with the letters all mixed up.

I've always assumed it's some weird endianness issue. Which doesn't bode well for the actual e-books...

You can still pull the plug from the electrical socket. They haven't figured out how to fuck that up....yet.

My school acquired a weird IBM Aptiva thing somehow in the early 1990s (I think it was won in a competition?) - and as is inevitable at a school, someone copied some games on to it. I forget the exact game responsible, but it was non-obvious how to exit - and with an increasingly irritated teacher looking at us pupils, the sensible thing seemed to be to power-down and restart. Push power button on computer, it turns off, push power button again, it turns back on - resuming to the game we rather needed to exit.

Right, go for the nuclear option - pull the plug from the socket. Plug back in, power up, shitting hell it's just resumed to the game again.

There's some pretty decent views on the way, too - the train runs right next to the sea for a significant portion of the route.

All the colors are in the color spectrum.

Magenta?

Right me and that other guy just made it up for...why exactly? Or maybe, just maybe, you got lucky or chose a really good model? The Olympus cameras don't seem to have this problem but a LOT of the cameras sold in your B&M stores DO have this problem.

Which manufacturer and camera models suffer from this problem? I'd be interested to know, so I can recommend against them.

(I've helped out with a fair amount of digital camera stuff for friends and relatives, and I've never actually seen a corrupted memory card. Plenty of accidentally deleted photos, one accidentally formatted card, one memory card that was flat-out dead, but no corrupted filesystems.)