Friend of mine got to name streets in a lot of towns around Alaska. He was working for the Alascom phone company, and they got funded to put satellite dish phone access to a couple hundred small towns in remote parts of the state. Phone company offices need to have street addresses, and many of the towns hadn't bothered to name their streets (why, if you've only got one or two?)

Years earlier, I did some training at South Central Bell in Alabama. They were still converting their databases from paper cards to computers, and a lot of their rural customers had address descriptions like "take the third dirt road after you get to where the Jones place was before it burned down", because their official Post Office addresses were either just "Rural Route 6 Box 32" (which doesn't tell you anything about how to get there), or "P.O.Box 32, Podunk, Alabama" and they picked up their mail at the post office.

The installation instructions says that logging isn't one of the services included in Snappy Ubuntu Core by default; you have to install syslogd or equivalent if you want it. (Presumably it's not just because it saves space, but because the system can be more flexible about whether or where to have writable storage if it's not logging things, and because one of the typical behaviours of Internets of Things is that they're for consumers who aren't going to bother reading logs anyway.)

UPI Story on CIA and UFOs says half the UFO reports in the 50s and 60s were really sightings of their U2 aircraft, which were secret because they still hadn't found what they were looking for, and which flew enough higher and faster than normal airplanes that people didn't recognize them. (Remember that propeller planes were still common, though jets were starting to be common.)

Even in the late 80s / early 90s, supersonic planes weren't common - the Concorde only went that fast over the ocean, mainly due to sonic boom concerns, and the new wide-area air traffic control system that was being developed then wasn't spec'd for them; you'd typically get one blip and then they'd be off the radar screen.

Even Gjoni later admitted that didn't happen. But the *chan boards where he posted his long attack screed against his ex-girlfriend had been attacking Anita Sarkeesian for months, for the sin of showing totally made up clips of Grand Theft Auto and many other games being misogynist. (Oh, they weren't totally made up, they were right out of the game? Our bad, let's attack her for dissing Mario and Luigi, or harass Brianna Wu instead.)

And did your post just make technology look like a more friendly place for half the population to work, or less friendly?

Why put that computer into a keyboard when you can put it into a joystick? (Jeri Ellsworth's C64-Direct-to-TV)

Clock speed is 1.4 GHz, just over double the speed of RasPi. (That doesn't mean it's only 2x as fast, since it's probably a slightly newer ARM core, but it's unlikely to be 20x as fast, even if it's doing something like Odroid's quad-core ARM.)

It's definitely cute, but I'd think the Chromecast HDMI/USB-stick format, or something a bit larger but still pocket-sized, makes more sense.

First URL should be Core, and also in the second line of my post there's a missing quote mark after "of course you've got a huge disk drive even though you don't have much RAM or CPU .

Core is a lightweight version of Ubuntu, intended so you can build it on small systems like cloud VMs or ARM boards or embedded devices. (That's an Ubuntu-ish use of "lightweight", which seems to be "of course you've got a huge disk drive even though you don't have much RAM or CPU, but I haven't yet loaded all the pieces to find what it takes to get a minimally useful system. It ain't Puppy Linux, but it's at least a JeOS replacement.)

Snappy is a package manager. It's designed for doing transactional updates to apps and frameworks, so you can load things that you really want to either succeed completely or else fail completely and clean up after themselves, without getting into trouble like dependencies or having to wait until the next semi-yearly Ubuntu release to have all their pieces. It's a replacement for apt/yum/ports/etc.

Snappy Ubuntu Core is an implementation of Core with a Snappy package manager on top of it. You'd typically load a framework like Docker on top of that, but you don't have to if your apps don't need it (or if you just don't have room.) Almost all the "Snappy Ubuntu Core" articles, including at Ubuntu.com, are mostly about Snappy package management, not actually about Core. Sigh.

• Some URLs:
• A minimal rootfs
• Installation Example
• Good intro to Snappy Core as JeOS replacement
• Description of Snappy as an App-building environment
• Cloud-init example
• UVtool for creating VMs.
• Snappy Guides
• Installing on different kinds of clouds

My medium-security passwords were usually L33tSp34k versions of one or two dictionary words, plus whatever capitalization and punctuation were required. But now that I'm occasionally accessing the web through tablets and accessing work systems over cellphone, I've had to switch to Android-friendly passwords, so the letters get grouped together, followed by the numbers, and usually any punctuation is the limited set that appear on the same keypads as the letters or the numbers. So it's Abc,1234 instead of Passw0rd! for trivial passwords now...

I've had a number of devices over the years where the default password was the MAC address of the admin port or first wired Ethernet port or equivalent, and was also printed on a label on the device. It's not perfect, but it's at least unique, and is strong enough that in most cases, people won't try to crack it, or anybody who might try cracking it has physical access to the box (in which case you're toast anyway.)

Ok, not any more, but for many years the root/admin/whatever password on Stallman's MIT machines was just carriage return. The point was extreme openness, so that anybody could log on, see anything, fix anything, copy any code.

I didn't buy it, largely because the gas mileage was lame, but the last time I bought a car I thought seriously about buying a Nissan Cube to replace my nearly-dead van. It would have to be blue, not only because it really does appear to be "bigger on the inside", but because for many years there was a building in Silicon Valley called The Blue Cube that was Spooky Satellite Control System Headquarters. It's gone now (looks like they've even cleaned up most of the rubble from dismantling it.)

If I'd actually played Portal, I'd probably have voted for Companion Cubes, though.

Finally got around to putting my landline on the Do Not Call List. The robots still call me, but half of them don't connect me to a recording, just sit there silently, and if they do play a recording and I hit "1" or whatever to speak to a live agent, half of them hang up on me. (One even plays an announcement saying "1" isn't a correct extension.:-)

I don't know how much of this is because their robots are broken, how much is because they don't have enough call center workers at the times they're calling me, and how much is because they're just trying to harass me.

I was ok with Google ads, because they were just a little box with some text links, no bulky images, no animation, no Flash, and if there was any Javascript in it, it was well-written and not a resource hog. (Eventually I gave up and let AdBlockPlus block them too, because collateral damage was easier than special-casing them.)

But Zedo, the folks with popunder windows? Kill them with fire, put all their domain names in /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.2, tell Firefox to block images from them, and block Javascript and Flash from anybody I could identify using a Zedo ad. (Same for X10.)

Doubleclick was an early ad company, and as far as I could tell, before Google bought them their slogan was "Be Evil. Buy Ads from the Dark Side, We've Got Cookies!" so I'd been blocking them in /etc/hosts for a long time.

So if Bad Guys were putting even more malware into Zedo and Doubleclick, that's just a reminder that blocking aggressive advertisers is a good idea.