I think that they have ensured that only the diff of a truecrypt volume gets uploaded after you change a volume.

I have been thinking about sticking all my photos in Dropbox, but if I do, it will be inside a large trucrypt volume, so that only I can view them. This will be a very large initial upload, but then as I add more photos to the volume, only the new photos will be uploaded (as a few hundred meg difference in the TC volume).

Crappy Dropbox info is here: https://www.dropbox.com/help/28

The problem with this is that people will then dual boot Windows (XP, 7) and ChromeOS and will then end up just defaulting to Windows all the time... That is what happens when you give people the option in my experience. Google (or the folks who can hack ChromeOS) should perhaps enable different desktop environments, i.e., log out of ChromeOS and log into gnome. That should be possible right?

All GPS receivers (AFAIK) have a map of ephemerides, they all know approximately where the GPS satellites are. What a phone does is work out an approximate location using other sources (cell towers, wifi hotspots) which speeds up the GPS solution.

I think that this is right. GPS is not just the ability to get a location. There is a whole bunch of other stuff which you can throw at the signals to get a better, more accurate location. On top of the software, the hardware is also quite important. A really good antenna is worth big money, and there are probably is dedicated hardware these days optimised to solve for coordinates which uses less power than the software of a phone. Now, your Dad may not know that he should turn off bluetooth and wifi in order to conserve battery life, and he is not going to want to do fancy stuff with the data in the field, which is another advantage of a smartphone. I reckon that the software in a Garmin is going to be easy to use, the hardware is top notch and that is what I would get.

Err.. It's Tasmania, and yes, we grow opium poppies. I have a small patch in my backyard, the processing isn't so hard but packing it into the little plastic capsules takes ages and your hands go numb.

link: http://www.launc.tased.edu.au/online/sciences/agsci/alkalo/popindus.htm

I think it is completely stupid, since anyone can arbitrarily get around it. That guy, the right to die euthanasia guy, was giving tutorials to old people, showing them how to get around it. If oldies can get around it, and young people can too, it will probably only work for middle aged computer illiterate parents of teenagers.

This means that the only people made happy by it's ability to block terrible shit on the interned will be those ignorant folk with kids most vulnerable!

I intend on filtering my home internet when my kids are a bit older, although I haven't looked into it, either that or ensuring the kids only access to the interned is in the family areas of the house.

Me too. I have two of the sites I frequent a lot unblocked (ars included). Reddit responded to its uses disgust at one of the adds on its site which goes fullscreen by assuring that it was an accident, they mentioned how it happened and put something in place so that it would not happen again. I use addblock a lot, and I am shocked when I use a computer without it. The web is very different with those big, flashy adds.

Hi there, I am a spatial guy so thought my 0.02 may be worth something. I am not too sure about digitising them, maybe a print shop or as suggested in other posts you could talk to your local university geography department or a government mapping agency

Once they are digital though you need to georeference them. As mentioned in the title of my post, it is easiest to use GIS to do this and you can use QGIS with relative ease. Install it using osgeo4w on windows or the ubuntu ppa for qgis. Alternatively if you have a license then use ArcGIS. If you have a map of the underlying roads for the maps you are digitising then what you do is find points on the roads and match them to points on the scanned images, this provides data for a transformation and will shift the map onto your coordinates.

I don't want to hear no buts. I tried installing a nice piece of GIS software (QGIS) which is super easy to install on Ubuntu (apt) and windows (osgeo4w, which uses a cygwin style interface) but on OSX it is a paiin in the arse to get the full program with GRASS (kind of a dependency).

I wish OSX had bloody apt working, not port where you need to wait days for anything to bloody compile, but true package management. I use VLC, Thunderbird, FIrefox, GIMP and all the other FOSS software but it is all independently maneged. OSX is great and stable (compared to Ubuntu) and beautiful but the package management should be fixed.