Quantify your activity level and improve it.

The FitBit (or Nike Fuel, or Jawbone up, or even a basic pedometer) is a nifty tool to help you quantify who much you move in an average day, and to encourage you to improve it.

We have authoritarianism, it just gets its power from corporate lobbing and campaign donations instead.

NC started a few public fiber in some towns, so Time Warner lobbied and made broadband operating as any other public utility illegal, ignoring the protests of many local tech businesses and even the FCC.

Actually, startup and memory use is the reason I don't use Chrome.

Firefox has a setting to only load tabs when you click on them, and Chrome doesn't. Because of how many tabs I keep open from session to session, Firefox is a much better choice for me at the moment.

If and when Chrome ever closes this bug, I may well jump ship too. But Firefox 15 will be out in a few weeks, and many of the memory leaks will be fixed, so we'll see. ;-)

Yes, the "Cosmos for rednecks" gag was good, but isn't it also worth mentioning he's currently producing the next Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Ann Druyan?

It's vaguely interesting to me because he used to be my aunt and uncle's next door neighbor in Kennet Square, PA. He seemed to be a nice guy, but his bulldogs were a bit over the top.

I heard he played some stick-ball game or something also, but I must admit I don't care about that very much...

Motorola Mobility is now a subsidiary of Google.

According to this article, the actions started in Nov 2010, before the acquisition, but it's now a patent war case of Google vs Microsoft.

iOS has "full drive encryption" in iOS 4 and later.

It's just protected by a 4 digit pin which can be easily brute forced by default.

You can use a stronger passcode, but you have to type it on every unlock so few do.

Oh, they do. They may not care what is *right*, but they care what the people want.

If you want to get the attention of an elected official, it's much more effective to appeal to their pocketbook or need for campaign volunteers than to their sense of decency,

They do have a stable SDK with forward compatibility now, just most extensions were not written to use it as they were written before it was released. Like Chrome's API, it's less powerful than the XUL addons, but it covers what 95+% of addons need.

IMHO they should have released the SDK first and pushed for developers to use it, and then started rapid release, but that's not how they did it. ;-)

It's a legacy problem like that many other systems have. Getting big enough that people bitch about some of the early imperfect decisions you made is a problem many devs would like to have. ;-)

IMAP is another potential answer.

I run Dovecot locally, and it stores every mail I've ever received, indexed for quick searches.

This way I can get my mail with all history and a fast search index on all my devices also.

This is why Time Warner pushed a bill through NC to put lots of roadblocks up for municipal broadband here.

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/cities-consumers-lose-municipal-broadband-fight/Content?oid=2440390

The local LUG was quite vocal in fighting this, but we don't have the resources of Time Warner.

Fuck you very much Time Warner.

Specifically, they use a lithium-ion polymer battery, also called LiPo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Model_comparison

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_polymer_battery

Energetic chemistry is energetic.

Go find some RC enthusiasts and ask them if they've seen LiPos burn. There's a good chance they have.

That's why we charge our batteries in a lipo bag or other fireproof container.

Of course, RC batteries are abused much more than those in phones, but it's highly non-surprising that occasionally one lights on fire.

Is it really possible that in 80 posts, no one has suggested The Geek Atlas?

It's a book of 128 geeky sites to visit, with background stories and science discussions for each one, as well as the normal location and logistic information.

There's also a website with maps and other content, as well as an iOS app that will give you info on the places closest to you and other handy reference info.

It's also damn easy to make.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLhwkFKLdPA

You'd have to be fairly confident in your chemistry skills to put the result in drinking water purifier, but for home chemistry and presumably for whatever it's used for in meth production(yeah, really don't feel like googling that), it should be fine.

So once again, our laws only hurt the legal users.