In my neighborhood (Chicago area), they most certainly trim the trees, to the point that many of them look downright weird. That doesn't completely prevent storm-related power outages, but it at least makes them pretty rare for me.

Still, if the crown of one of those trees snaps off, like it did in a severe storm late this June, it can result in an extended outage. That's when I discovered that my UPS outlasted the batteries in Comcast's local infrastructure by a wide margin.

I've never had voltage sag to the point that the battery was needed, but there have been a few times, during summer heat waves, when my UPS would go into boost mode (about 108V or so at the wall socket). Lately, though, I've been getting higher-than-normal voltage, consistently 124-127V, and when it gets above 126 the UPS will knock 16V off. At least it can use an autotransformer to deal with minor over- and under-voltage conditions, instead of killing the battery. If it were switching to battery I'd be calling my power company.

Back on June 30, a severe storm knocked out power to my neighborhood for about 20 hours. I had my systems on a 1500VA APC Smart-UPS, and after a couple of minutes, when it was obvious the power wasn't coming on soon, I turned off the big machines and stayed online with an Atom box.

Unfortunately, it appears that Comcast hadn't planned for long power outages. Twenty minutes after the power went out, the internet went down and stayed down. That kind of performance doesn't give me much confidence in their home phone service, needless to say. Of course, the AT&T landline kept on trucking, but it's looking like that won't be an option for too much longer.

"Extreme Shrimp" is going to be my next band name.

I've tried both wireless client bridges (300Mbps N) and powerline Ethernet adapters for an HDHomerun tuner, and my results were: a) only one tuner could stream over the wireless and b) the powerline adapters were an epic fail. The punch line is that the HDHomerun works fine and dandy over 100BaseT. Between the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum and the poor penetration of 5 GHz, wireless just doesn't cut it for anything that needs throughput.

String some Cat5e or Cat6, and leave the wireless for laptops and tablets.

Cat5e will work fine for gigabit. Cat6 will support 10G, but 10G costs a fortune.

I have a 2010 Honda Fit with the manual transmission and a 1.5l four-banger. In my real-world driving, I get about 32-36 MPG in city driving, and 38-42 MPG on the highway. As it turns out, that's quite a bit better than the EPA numbers: 27 city/33 highway. I try to drive efficiently at least, but I wouldn't consider myself to be a hypermiler, either. I can't help but think that the EPA numbers assume idiotic driving with jackrabbit starts and racing to red lights. And now they're claiming that the estimates overstate things?

I guess I can't be too surprised that they'd pull a cunning stunt like this, just because they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar already, with the "spam router" fiasco. It's hard to believe it's been over a decade since that, and they're still baking stupidity into their routers.

It's sad to see they snapped up Linksys, but Linksys was already on a downward spiral anyway. In any case, I'm not buying a router unless I can install DD-WRT or OpenWRT on it. Of course, with Comcast now pushing integrated router/cable modem setups, I might just have to run a firewall distro inside a VM on a system with two NICs. I trust Comcast even less than I'd trust Belkin.

Recent versions of the BeagleBone Black have 4 GB of internal flash and come with Debian pre-installed.

That being said, I have a RPi, mainly for use as a media center (one of the best uses for it).

I've noticed this problem (not the CPU so much as RAM and storage space) with my LG F3. Recent updates to Google services have bloated things enough that I have trouble applying app updates in its limited storage space, and multiple apps that used to work well together now no longer fit in available RAM. Sometimes I have to uninstall and reinstall an app to update it now. Things get cramped with less than 1.3 GB of internal storage, even with an SD card installed.

I'd love to see an up-spec F3 with double the RAM and gobs of storage (but keeping the SD slot and removable battery). I don't really need a hyper-expensive flagship phone, tempting as it may be. For all of the F3's faults, it has LTE, good RF performance in general, and outstanding battery life. It also puts the lie to the claim that you can't have a slim phone with a replaceable battery and an SD slot.

I've generally had about 3 years or so from CFLs in the porch lights, which are on all night (approx. 9-15 hours per day depending on the season). I'm still working my way through a six-pack of CFLs (the others are inside), but last fall I decided not to wait for the CFLs to go before switching the porch lights to Cree soft white LEDs. So far, I'm quite happy with the results, especially with the instant full brightness regardless of temperature. When it's -14 F, CFLs are pretty dim.