I've moved back to WindowMaker. I've complemented this with some of the utilities from Rox-Desktop, such as roxterm and roxfiler, largely because they work well and avoid Gnome/KDE dependencies and often enough, Dbus as well.

I wish WindowMaker was scriptable in Lua, or had more features. However, it is ICCWM compliant and has a wide number of features (I might have even put some in there... its hard to recall).

I say either take the kit lens of 18-55mm and hold-off on buying additional lenses... OR skip the 18-55mm kit lens and buy a 55-200mm and a 50mm/f1.8 lens. Some stores will offer bundles on the body + 55-200mm lens, which makes this an affordable option.

Its kind of strange, an 18-55mm lens is a good range if it is your *only* lens (which is why it is a kit lens), but I find that if I'm outdoors I'm most likely to carry the 55-200mm and if indoors, I'll definitely have the 50mm/f1.8 on.

I haven't done it yet, but I do plan to try using my 18-55mm with a reversing ring & bellows for cheap macro. It wont match a good macro setup, but I expect it should do decently for the sub-$50 price-tag.

Pick up a 50mm f1/.8 when you feel limited with the kit lens.

+1 on this

I don't have the expertise to know at what point spending more money isn't going to do me, as a camera newbie, any good. Any thoughts?"

To this point, don't go *beyond* the Nex-3 or the A33/A35 cameras in price or complexity. The Nex-3 is about $450 and hardly larger than a typical pocket camera, it will be an amazing upgrade from a cell phone, without exploding in physical size. It has interchangeable lenses, although few (and expensive) -- the A33/A35 cameras are similar but take common Alpha Sony/Minolta lenses. Because of the new translucent lenses in this line of cameras, these cameras are significantly smaller than and shoot faster than others in this price range.

So now I'll answer the, "but it is Sony!". Yes, it is true that there is a great distain for all things Sony, and no they are not the market leaders in the SLR space... However, for an unbiased entry-level SLR, the Nex-3 and A33/A35 cameras are an amazing deal... and offer things that others do not for the non-discerning entry-level shooter.

I've noticed this on LinkedIn as well, where celebrities are less likely to be making random friends.

This plan would work incredibly well... in San Francisco where there are tens of access points accessible from any given place you might be. This would work horribly in the suburbs. Hell, it would work terribly in the residential areas of large cities where there would be enough density for this to work, but where people are too poor to have wifi (thus lowering the effective density of the mesh network).

Another good science fiction series which also discuss "the 1% problem" and human rejuvenation are the Lazarus Long novels by Heinlein, particularly Methuselah's Children and Time Enough for Love.

Print your photos as ads in a large newspaper. This will be archived by libraries, historical foundations, places like Google and Archive.org. It might not last forever, but it will last a whole lot longer than anything else. Some of the photos and information about my *own* family that was otherwise lost or forgotten was discovered via these means.

Of course, this isn't *practical* for large sets of data, but if it is super-important for long-term storage, you probably have no more data than will fit on one or two pages. It will cost a lot less than other means of *reliable* long-term storage with reasonable means of future-accessibility.

It will be a lot easier to get a phone with a reverse keyboard. There are plenty of dialer apps for Android, for instance. You could also have your computer dial your calls for you. Ideally, you shouldn't even be using a dial-pad. Either your numbers are originating from the computer or from paper, which probably is going to be recorded, stored, and saved on the computer.

Anyway, if you really need a calculator that works this way, it is called a computer. Just remap your keys...

It mentions Overdrive when you click the link contained within the press release. This is also one of several published within the past year related to this new feature. The other press releases were more explicit about how this would be through a partnership with Overdrive.

I always make purchases when I visit B&N... I browse the selection, scan the ISBN with my phone, and have the book shipped free via Amazon Prime!

This isn't strictly true anymore, but it used to be. Today, most of my book purchases are directly with the publishers that will sell me DRM-free digital copies or from used bookstores. B&N has done very badly with their online store in identifying the format of books and if they contain DRM or not. (They're not all epub)

Furthermore, as much as I really wanted to like the original Nook - I tried, really - it was a failure, especially for working with DRM-free content. This drove me to the Kindle and now I'm unfortunately stuck in that ecosystem.

Where does this or any other article say that Overdrive isn't buying the books through payments to the publishers? Because this is through Overdrive and because of the description of the changes to Whispersync, I'm more inclined to think these books are provided from Overdrive themselves and Amazon has simply provided this already-existing library service to push their books to Kindles. Either way, the library of works available goes through Overdrive, not through Amazon. Overdrive has explicit, direct partnerships with the publishers of the content the serve.

Single-layer BD-R disks and 2TB SATA disks are currently matched at $0.04/GB. I will assume that the OP's data, which contains images, is already compressed sufficiently.

The BD-R disks have an unknown livespan and the OP's dataset would have to span 2-3 disks per project. The 2TB disks would hold multiple projects. There is an argument to be had that it is less expensive and more reliable to use the BD-R disks from the perspective of adding a single parity disk. The loss of any disk set would lose that project, not multiple projects. The data would be immediately offlined. As optical media tends not to fail by-disk, but by block, a filesystem like ZFS may be safest.

Contrast to the 2TB solution where you could use RAID-5, fill the array, & then offline for archival. For as long as the drives are online, there is an increased risk of failure. The loss of the array would lose multiple projects (~66 projects). Your individual drives are arguably more reliable, but you have fewer disks at a greater capacity, so the impact of a disk failure is much greater than with the more distributed BD-R model.

The benefits of hard disk storage here are ease-of-use and a better known MTBF. With fewer disks, it is easier & faster to online & verify your archives every so often. Even with ZFS-on-BDR, I'm not sure how well BDR disks will last over 10 years in a humidor, let alone on a random shelf.

Twice as many frames means that if you view it at the standard 24 frames per second, the movie will be twice as long!

I've tried Swype. I don't get it. I mean, I get how it works, I don't get why people like it. I want to type, I don't auto-completion or guessing. I don't want to switch context from typing to reading words from a list and then selecting them. It is slow and inefficient.

Plus, honestly, I think that Swype is particularly bad for me as a lefty. I don't think the tracking algorithm is righty-only, though it may be, I suspect that the greater issue is that in English, we read from left-right. Since a lefty's thumb covers the left-sided keys as they Swype, you really need to read the keyboard from right-left to operate as efficiently as a right-handed user. This results in a much steeper learning curve.

Finally, I work with Linux/Unix systems and the primary purposes of my Android device are to login to machines via SSH and to send emails. Both frequently contain Unix commands, Python source code, HTML, and other forms of non-English input that very often includes special characters. Most software keyboards fail miserably with these, and for this, Swype is particularly bad. Still, the size and layout of the default Galaxy Tab keyboard is surprisingly good, good enough that if not for being stuck on Android 2.2, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.