The best you can do with a good ergonomic set-up is to minimize the negative effects of spending hours in front of a computer.

So sure: get a decent chair, make sure your monitor is set to the proper height. Experiment with sitting/standing configurations. Use a laptop or tablet (or book) periodically which lets you get away from your desk. Get up and walk around every hour or so. That will all help.

But what fixes your musculature and skeletal is actually stressing it. Yeah, weight training. 2x weekly minimum, 3x is a good standard, 4x if you decide to go gung-ho. 30-90 minutes per session. Focus on your backside ("posterior chain"): calves, hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors, lats, traps. Movements like squats, deadlifts, rows/chins, and kettlebell swings. You're going to want to do a full-body program ultimately for balance, but the lifts above are going to be key.

Simply supporting your body in a comfortable state will disengage musculature, as will rests, splints, and other crutches. What builds and strengthens muscle is progressive overload.

For more on this, a great starting reference is The New Rules of Lifting by Schuler & Cosgrove. Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength or Stronglifts 5x5 are good beginning strength programs.

Toss in 3-4 sessions of cardio, including some HIIT interval work 1-2x weekly, and you'll be in far better shape. Particularly as you get older. Which I hear happens in time.

Please, at the very least, make that sugar-free. Water, green tea, black tea, or coffee are all far better for you (in rough order) than soda. Let's re-phrase that. The first two or three are actually beneficial, the fourth 1-2x day is OK. Soda is nothing but bad.

That's possible.

Any dictionary of "common passwords" is going to have to be adaptive.

But the thing is, if you look at lists of common passwords, and of how many accounts can be compromised by them, the really common ones are really common.

Hotmail have taken a long-overdue step here. I'd love to see all major online service providers follow suit, though if we could just get major email providers (Google, Hotmail, Apple, Yahoo, AOL), and Facebook (used for single sign-on), we'd be ahead of the game.

There are still myriad problems with password recovery features (especially in a world of "free" online services which aren't tied to payments, a payment/credit card account, or billing address).

And there's the fundamental problem that most user-based networks are far more interested in increasing the number of users, not in boosting security. Security provisions slow sign-ups, and are fundamentally at odds with increasing userbase.

It's the metabolic and endocrine impacts which Lustig and Taubes are concerned with. You're dumping a load of sucrose (triggering an insulin response) and fructose (triggering a triglyceride release from the liver) with either. If you're eating excesses of either sugar or HFCS, you're going to trigger the same effects. The effect on your taste buds is not significant to the article.

Y'know, I'm tempted back into the fold, I really am.

fvwm's config file format is powerful, but also somewhat opaque. Might still just grab that bull.

As for old school, one of the most tricked-out desktops I've ever seen is Steve Hand's twm configuration (he's one of the core Xen developers). Multiple desktops, all hot-keyed, flying back and forth between windows and desktops while coding up a storm, building sources, and running VMs. Just goes to show you don't need to ran teh new hawt an shinay for a productive desktop.

There are two, hopefully simple, things XFCE4 could provide which would make it a tenable desktop for me. Otherwise, I'll stick with WindowMaker:

Pinnable window lists. In WindowMaker, the feature provided by hitting the middle mouse button, or F11 key. A window menu with a list of all available windows. Allows you to scroll through these, click on likely subjects, etc., trying to find that 24th rxvt instance or the 7th Iceweasel window that you'd lost track of somewhere. Without this, managing the mess of windows my typical desktop devolves to after a day or so (and sessions typically run weeks to months) becomes an utter nightmare.

Circulate-and-raise alt-tab navigation. Similar rationale to above, and also implemented in WindowMaker (or Mac OS X or the Windows desktop). Under XFCE4, an outline of the window raises. Utterly .... useless.

Really, of all the alternative desktops (and I regularly revisit GNOME, KDE, XFCE4, OpenBox, ionwm, and others) XFCE4 comes the closest to a replacement for WindowMaker. But 12 years after having first tried that old standard, it still provides a light, fast, stable, configurable (from a keybindings and behavior standpoint), extremely workable desktop.

My one concern is that WindowMaker's seen no development since 2008, though it is very nearly feature complete, and is certainly very highly usable. I recommend it particularly for newbies.

Otherwise, congrats to the XFCE4 team for their milestone. Anyone else missing features (if I dare ask)?