A few years back my girlfriend had C. Diff, pretty badly. At the time, fecal transplants were still new / in testing (or, at least, the doctors hadn't even mentioned it, but we had read about them online). She happened to be browsing journals and found an article that mentioned Saccharomyces boulardii as a possible treatment. A few weeks after starting a pretty healthy regimen, her symptoms cleared up and have been gone ever since. In that respect, a probiotic was effective as a cure.

It truly is the sort of thing that one should seek medical attention for, I agree. However, at the time she had no insurance and the oral vancomycin that had been prescribed to her was going to be $1,500 per prescription fill, and as you said, it probably wouldn't have helped too much -- C. diff creates spores that tend to outlive most treatments, lending to its 'difficile' name. It was a scary time, but she got very, very lucky.

We've been off-handedly following news articles about treatments like this one, and this pill is an excellent advancement of treatments. Here's hoping no-one else had to go through what she did.

If you ask me, the Netgear WNR3500Lv2 is the "true" successor to the WRT54GL:
Pros:
- Cheap! -- around $40
- Is supported by Shibby's Tomato port -- no problems with uptime; frequent updates in the face of Heartbleed, etc.
- 4 Gigabit Ports in addition to the WAN port
- N support
- USB support for a NAS, but I've never used that functionality

Cons:
- Only 300 mBit N support
- Only 2.4 GHz
- Internal antenna only
- Flimsy base, heh. Mine broke, but the router still stands up.

Netgear seemed to be pretty open to the idea of supporting open source firmwares through their My Open Router website and forums. ...But Netgear was also caught with a backdoor in their firmware, like a lot of other vendors, but I would hope that replacing the stock firmware with Tomato would help with that. (Although since I'm using someone else's build instead of doing it myself who knows!)

I've really loved this router, though.

I wish it were newer (AC support I guess?), had a 5 GHz radio and/or supported faster N speeds... but 300 Mbit is enough for anything I'm doing.

Totally agreed. My friends and I still play UT2k4 on a weekly basis. With the Heaven of Relics mutator and some of the great Community Bonus Pack maps, it's still fun, ten years on. As it came out March 16, 2004, happy Tenth Anniversary UT2k4!

As I said above, this is someone I trust at his word. If he had dropped it, he would have owned up to it. He buys enough phones from HTC that he is happy to give them the business. You don't have to believe the story, but I do.

You guys don't have to believe it, but he's someone I trust and who wouldn't make up the story to me. I've known him long enough that I believe what he says.

I had a user whose laptop was replaced by Dell under warranty, except that they sent him back a 17" monstrosity rather than the 13" machine he had at the time. They wouldn't budget on giving him something smaller. After filing a small claims court case, they reimbursed him for the price of his original laptop and I think told him to keep the new one, too. He was happy after that.

Another friend had a HTC One phone whose screen popped and shattered while he was browsing twitter. HTC refused the replacement despite being a month old, claiming he dropped it. After filing a Better Business Bureau complaint, they replaced it under warranty.

Either way, something like that will get someone's eye and hopefully the original poster will be happy. The bigger problem is that this is a thing Dell will break a warranty over, which is ridiculous.

I have a deal with a friend who is geographically disparate from me: He knows the password to an encrypted flash drive that I have in mhy possession. In the event that amnesia (or god forbid something worse) should befall me, he knows to come and retrieve this drive. We generally chat on the phone once a week or so, so he would know pretty quickly if there were a problem that required this. On the drive is a list of passwords and associated data to reclaim most of my digital life, and to let others know what's going on.

Every year or so I pull the drive out and update it with changes and ensure that it's still functional. So far it feels like a pretty good plan. If I wanted to step it up a little more, I would put this in a safe deposit box in a bank. I still ponder doing that, but really I'm not so important for it to truly matter, haha.

It's a real thing. We have a couple of I think either Techtronix or Agilent scopes that run Windows 2000 or XP. A few years back someone plugged one of the 2k scopes into our network, at which point it became a movie server, hosting "Mr. Deeds". It is no longer allowed to be plugged into the network.

One group just updated a crazy analyzer to a Pentium M with 1 GB of RAM. Cost: $40k. It's obscene.

Reading through the imagur link, which is fantastic, tells me that the new projector does 20 million stars. Fritz, the old Zeiss, did 3,000.

Although the old Zeiss was super impressive, technologically it was old hat -- lots of burnt out bulbs, etc. And while I understand that it's not about the specs, here's something that maybe makes it a bit better: I work for some folk at CU that have some degree of involvement with Fiske. One of the professors said to me of the new display: "It can resolve 2 million individual points of light with incredible detail. You could go into a show using the new projector with binoculars and looking at the display would be similar in effect to looking at the actual night sky with binoculars."

I'll definitely miss the imposing nature of the old Zeiss, but the new projector should have some of the best star shows around. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. And probably Laser Pink Floyd and Laser Nine Inch Nails, too, heh.