I'm hardly a weapons instructor or member of law enforcement, but this advice goes against just about everything I know.

- You won't open the door at all if there is a bad guy outside.
- You do need practice, a dozen rounds a year against clay pigeons is a waste. If you actually intend to defend yourself, take a shooting defense course, take several.
- Firing a weapon outdoors is far different than indoors; exposing the family to proper gun safety is a good idea, but outdoor != enclosed space at night.
- Pistol grip... Eh, you can aim and handle recoil far better with a shoulder fired weapon. Again, practice matters here.
- Most bad guys will take off as soon as they realize they have a chance of being caught. Racking a shotgun may scare away someone intent on doing you harm, but the guy there to take your stereo will scram if you flip a light switch.

The main point here is that if you ever have to defend yourself, you're going to be scared, probably in the dark, and probably having not handled your firearm in quite some time. Think quickly, where is the trunk release on your wife's car? Ok, it's dark; which is the SAFE position on your shotgun's safety? If you actually want to effectively defend yourself, you have to understand the most likely scenario under which that will occur. No amount of advice on any web site or book will take the place of regular training and practice.

The camera isn't exactly unprotected. It's a GoPro Hero, which comes with a fairly thick acrylic case. They're designed to be attached to all sorts of stuff for extreme sports. Among other things, they're water proof to 180 feet.

Palm Pre was my first smartphone, so perhaps I'm biased. But the user interface was far superior to andoid or iphone. It is just more intuitive to use, and easier to open apps and manage multiple open applications.

Palm failed due to underpowered hardware. Sprint was the first big carrier, they released the underpowered pre, then nothing to replace it. Pre 2 was never released in the US ( I don't think), same with Pre 3. The real story of the failure of webOS is really about the lack of hardware.

What?
My old palm pre is on my desk right now, it operates in airplane mode and works just fine, with no cell plan at all. My data usage was less under palm as compared to my verizon android phone, though I suspect this is because there are more free ad supported apps on android.

I've worked with schools for years, and can point out some things that may help. First, if the school is in a poorer area, check out your E-Rate eligibility. In some cases, you can pay 10 cents on the dollar for technology. Among the eligible technology would be video streaming, such as vbrick.
The vbrick units are highly scriptable, and you can ( and I have ) programmed them to do as follows:
- user hits the button, as in a physical button on their desk or the wall or whatever
- system records for x minutes
- system uploads video to VOD server
- VOD publishes video to public web server

Yes, you can even have an "on-air" light turn on when the system is recording.
Later on, you can add tags or other information on which people can search your content. You can attach documents, or links to other web-based content. So your video of a lesson has the associated homework, plus link to your states' DOE standards web site or whatever else you want. It can be integrated with moodle or similar systems. You can limit access to video by username/password and/or by IP address. If you want, videos recorded in the high school can be limited to specific users and/or IPs, so lets say the 2nd graders can't watch the sex-ed class. Likewise, you can limit videos on the public internet to your low bit-rate content only.
The critical part here is ease of use. Teachers are asked to do more and more with no new resources. If your solution consists of login to this, click that, then this, etc.... it simply won't get used except maybe by a couple tech-savvy teachers. Of course when those people leave or change positions, your project dies. Then your well intentioned project becomes just another expensive boondoggle. In some ways, spending MORE on a project will guarantee success. Administration may let a 10K project disappear, but probably not a 100K project.

You made a J-Hook, those are supposed to be part of any properly done structured cable install. Some examples

As I tell my customers when they ask, "You can't fix behavioral issues with technology." If employees want to waste time instead of working, they can surf the web or send chain emails. Take that away, they can play solitaire. Take that away, they can gab around the water cooler or stare into space and day-dream. Blocking porn and gambling sites is probably a good idea for liability purposes, but I can't see that it helps productivity.

Most frequently I'm asked to look at log files or email and tell employers things that I simply cannot know. I can tell them that an employee didn't log in to their PC until 10am, but I have no way of knowing when they actually arrived at work.

I wrote a very simple extension for my own mediawiki site that pulled in external pages as an iframe within a wiki page. I'd imagine you can do the same, Build your own wiki, with the wikipedia pages included below your own content.

Yes, there is a product, computrace makes a product that is installed at the BIOS level on a lot of corporate level laptops. Even if you replace the hard drive, it reinstalls itself.

Ditch deep freeze, microsoft has a lesser known and free substitute which is smart enough to allow windows updates or antivirus updates to work properly, but freeze the remainder of the system.

Steady State.

And yes, it is a huge pain. Much more so if you realize that most organizations who'd consider power usage as a significant amount of their bottom line probably have hundreds if not thousands of PCs.