I went to get my taxes done at a franchise of a big financial services chain. They asked me to sign their privacy policy. When I started to read it the rep said I just had to sign it. I said I was going to read it before signing. She interrupted me several times as I was reading (two pages of small type), saying that I had to sign it before they could do my takes. Meanwhile, she was already entering my information.

I finished reading and said "please stop entering immediately". It seems burried down at the end of the document were two shocking disclosures...

They share all your personal and financial information with other financial services companies for purposes such as ... marketing and debt collection.

To make matters more interesting they send all of your personal and financial information to a foreign country where it may be accessed by any government agency allowed to under the laws of that country..... Under the laws of that country, government agencies may access all information on non-citizens without either a warrant or probable cause. Also, that country has a long documented history of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

READ and understand the privacy policy before you hand over your tax return slips

Union leader stops police from inciting violence.

Warning!! if you run Gentoo and have not already been bitten by the expat upgrade bug, do not emerge any package that pulls in expat-2.0.1 . It will break your system. Be prepared for a multi-day revdep-rebuild during which time your system is unusable (which may not succeed), or build binary packages (of world) in a jail or on another system.

Version 2.0.1 of the XML Parsing library was recently marked stable on all architectures despite the fact that it causes a segfault in any program that is linked against expat-1 and it does not block on <expat-2.0.0 .

In the forums 1 2 and in the bug reports 1 2 the developers have made it clear that they regard this event as nescesary and desirable (to encourage people to upgrasde to the newer KDE and GNOME versions). Many have also said that this is to be expected in gentoo. Note that expat-2.0.0 did block on <expat-2.0.0, thus preventing it from being pulled in by another ebuild accidentally, and allowing anyone who needs it to go to the forums and see why it was blocked and plan their downtime.

Some users (including me) have responded by switching to other distributions; for us, continuity of service (or at least lack of unplanned downtime) is more important than slighly more flexibility than the norm.

Why was expat-2.0.1 marked stable without blocking on expat-1.x?!?!?!?!?

I have a residential ISP (the cable company) and fetch my mail via POP3. I can check my email anywhere, but I can only send email from within their network, in the same city. If I take my laptop out of town or to a hotspot that uses the other major ISP in town (the phone company), I cannot send email.

I am currently in the process of frankensteining an ancient laptop to act as a personal webserver. Does anyone know of a very small linux application that can accept SSL'd and Authenticated ESMTP connections and forward mail on to the ISP's outgoing mailhost? I'm looking for something similar to ssmtp, but able to accept SSL ESMTP AUTH connections. There will be no scripting interpreters on the laptop, so PERL, Python, Ruby, etc are out.

Two fighter jets just flew over south Nanaimo heading north at high speed and low altitude.

Phone lines are down in Cinnabar valley for some reason. And it's a valley out of town, so no cell phone either.

So today I went looking for an open-source anti-virus package. Of course, being an open-source project I expected it to be under a .org domain. You can see for yourself what I found by going to www.clamav.org . I have left this link intentionally non-clickable. Do not go to that site with internet explorer or a non-up-to-date firefox! I suggest lynx or wget.

Looks like I might be about to develop a niche photographing performing artists. Fast primes, monopods, and low-contrast film have their uses. I may have to get a studio and lighing setup for headshots and promo photos though, or maybe rent time at APHID for a while.

35mm film/slides consumer garbage??

Perhaps you have it backwards... Consumer 35mm print film is garbage.. shipped and stored in uncontrolled temperatures, for who knows how long, made to wider tolerances, etc.

To make matters worse, auto-everything volume-lab printing is crap. Well, not crap, just set up to make passable snapshots from crap exposures on crap film, not great prints from great images on great film. They're also often set up to save costs by always scanning at 6MPixel, regardless of the intended print size.

Films like Provia, Portra, and even Sensia and Kodak HD (if you get them fresh) are really good. Processing is really good anywhere that the machine is kept clean and running properly and the chemicals are kept fresh.

Scanning the film yourself is the ticket, even with a cheap scanner like the Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV (which I use). Once you have the exposure calibrated (use the strip at the beginning of the roll that goes from fogged to unexposed), set the whitebalance (just like with digital, have a photo of someone holding a white card in the same light), lock the settings and scan away. You've just made images far better than the minilab would make, assuming your exposures, composition, and subject matter is good.

From that point on, the images are just the same as images from a dSLR, except with more flattering contrast if shooting pictures of people with print film, and higher resolution for a given capital expense. When you interpolate to different sizes for printing, the grain seems to disappear from 400iso. Just like digital, you can print on your own inkjet, send them to a printing service (mpix or whatever) or take them to a minilab to get prints done. If you take them to the minilab though... tell them to do no corrections or they'll leave the machine on auto-everything and you'll get crap again (but this applies to any image shot with the camera on any mode but the most basic, film or digital).

Sounds like the rantings of a film zealot? No, if I were running a portrait studio (other than high-end), shooting sports, or photojournalism, I'd probably be using a dSLR for their lower cost per picture and faster results. Most of the techniques I use apply to either film or digital equally well.

From this discussion on Photo.net.

I got my 4x5 negs back yesterday... One of them is a really great picture of a tree atop a rocky hill at Pipers Lagoon, but I used too much front tilt to make the rocky hill in focus up it's entire face, and there is severe vignetting (completely black) in the top two corners. Bummer.

On a positive note... I found out I can eliminate newtons rings by scanning the negs emulsion down and mirroring the file in software. The B&W emulsion is too rough to cause newtons rings.

I've been very slowly working on ~200 images that were very badly damaged at the processing lab last november. There are severe scratches and huge amounts of debris all over every image (possibly exhaused developer at the lab? silver still left in the film? (C-41)). Today I found out that

for i in *.tif; echo $i; convert $i -noise 4 $i-good.tif; done

does the job in about 10 minutes per image for all but the worst damage, which I can clean myself given a clean source to clone from. It does lose a little sharpness, but I have more detail than needed anyways.

I just got the new (as of last November) version of Audacity. It now supports stereo recording with the iMic on MacOS. Given a quiet room (blanket over window, only laptop on) and the built in noise reduction filter it's quite easy to create a high-quality low-noise recording. If I can get two microphones and some way to plug them both into the microphone jack I might just finally get around to doing interviews for CHLY.

I was looking for specific formulas for calculating tuned intake and exhaust manifold lengths... From most of the western world I found either over-hyped ads for products and services or general, wish-washy -it's sorta like this but we can't tell you any more because it's a trade secret- information.

So where did I find the actual formulas? A site in Iran.

Now I just have to find out what the "specific heat ratio" is.

Now I'm getting spam advertizing a spam ring...