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.

I spent the weekend at a family reunion in the north west of The Netherlands at a vacation home with no interwebs. This is the first I've heard of the snowpocalypse. I find it rather amusing that the /. pole informed me before any other source. It wasn't even a news headline. I had to vote "Didn't make my local news." because it didn't make the Dutch radio news while I was driving...

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?

Back in the day, about 8 years ago when I worked there, much of the "Kirkland" (Costco) branded items were made by the same manufactures that made the name brand items. For example, Duracel made the 40 pack batteries, Tide made the 5 galon buckets of detergent, etc. I assume that it has something to do with volume; selling twice as many batteries at a price that is $0.20 less per batterie probably makes up for its self in volume at some point on the curve.

In any case, when I worked there Costco would take ANYTHING back. ANYTHING . That's changed a bit in the last few years as they will no longer offer a refund on your 5 year old computer. Other than ancient computers, I have personally assisted in the return of used batteries, worn out sneakers, an almost empty gallon of milk and an 80% eaten pumpkin pie among many, many other stupid returns. If you find that your 40 pack of Kirkland batteries aren't living up to your expectations, bring them back. If you find that your Kirkland detergent just doesn't get your whites white enough, bring back the *almost* empty box. Costco will take back almost anything if you pitch enough of a fit and threaten to cancel your membership.

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.