I've lost 10-12 pounds in the past month, mostly from lower calorie consumption, habit disruption, and moderate exercise increase. I live in a condo, and the condo board finally got around to doing the roof replacement they'd been planning for a while (with nearly no notice), which meant that we could do the ceiling sheetrock repair that the place has needed after a few years of minor roof leaks, and replace the rug which had long since warn out, and since the ceiling was going to need to be repainted, it was really time to repaint the rest of the place. So we moved all our furniture and junk into storage where we can sort through it, and started talking to contractors, floor people, sheetrock fixers, and trying dozens of different samples of paint that aren't quite the same color of almost-white as the wall [long rant deleted.]

The TV's packed safely away facing a wall, so we're not watching it, and the couch is also packed away. The dinner table's temporarily replaced by a tray table and a couple of chairs. Half the weight loss probably happened the first week, hauling boxes around, but I seem to be eating a good bit less in general, and we've been more likely to have a salad or some hard-boiled eggs at home than to go out for lunch or dinner.

The classic book "The Hacker's Diet - Weight Loss through Stress and Poor Nutrition" really got a lot of things right...

Well, yeah. When he said "We need to be more transparent", he meant the American public needs to be more transparent so they can eavesdrop on us without having to spend so much money or violate so many laws.

But Louis Freeh's FBI under Clinton didn't want Americans to be able to use encryption, and Bush's Homeland Security mafiosi wanted to wiretap us without warrants and got a Patriot Act wishlist draft handed to Congress within a week of 9/11, so it's not like there's much different about President Obama except whether he sounds like he feels guilty about getting caught. (Too bad - Senator Obama and Candidate Obama had been pretty decent on privacy issues.)

The most common channel choice recommendation is to only use channels 1, 6, and 11, for entirely non-overlapping operations. There's an alternative, 1-4-8-11, that's pretty low interference. Back when people used 802.11b, or most of the time with 802.11g, I didn't get much interference from my neighbors, especially since I picked a relatively quiet channel. But when 802.11n came out, I started getting a lot more interference. Part of that was just changes in what channels they were using, so that helped a bit, but eventually I bit the bullet and got my own 802.11n router (and was startled to find that it didn't do IPv6 yet.)

Google, of course, is smart enough to have allocated channels in some optimal manner to reduce interference between their equipment; I don't know how much they paid attention to what other users were doing.

By the way, the reason I used an SDHC instead of a USB stick was mainly because the SD slot fits inside the laptop body, while a USB drive would have stuck out and I'd have had to remove it every time I put the laptop into its bag, plus I often needed both USB slots. For a desktop box the USB would win, or an internal SSD hanging off a SATA port, which most motherboards seem to have spares of.

A hybrid drive builds the caching function into the drive, as opposed to having the OS keep track of disk-vs-flash-vs-RAM and doing its own caching. So yeah, it's possible that if the hybrid drive is badly designed, a failure in the flash could result in losing access to the data on the spinning drive as well; you'd hope they'd avoid that.

And yeah, of course you need backups. A bullet-proof hybrid drive design or OS caching algorithm isn't going to stop you from scribbling the wrong stuff onto the drive.

30 years ago, disk failures were a serious problem. 20 years ago they were still a problem. By 10 years ago, Moore's Law was cranking disk price/performance so fast that your disk had a 99.99% chance of being boringly small and obsolete long before it failed, and it's still the same. Yes, that 8GB SSD cache for your 1TB drive may fail in 5 years, but 5 years from now you'll have junked that wimpy drive and replaced it with a cheaper 128GB cache and 8TB drive.

Yes, SSDs are faster and more expensive. The obvious approach is to have an SSD that's big enough for the stuff you use all the time, and a spinny drive to handle the bulk storage. Hybrid drives (which were the original topic here) have a spinny drive with a small flash cache, so you can do most of your I/O from flash and it can keep the mechanical drive updated at its leisure, so your CPU isn't stuck waiting for rotation latency.

But you could do just as well by having an operating system doing the caching in separate storage; hybrid drives are mainly a win for people with lame OS's. (Oh, wait, most OS's are a bit lame about this.) MS's Readyboost stuff was supposed to be a big win; I've only tried it using an SDHC flash card, which might be on a slow bus, instead of an SSD that probably has a faster connection, but I haven't seen a significant speedup when I use it.

Guest networks are socially important, and friendly, no matter how much the cable modem companies dislike sharing. Unfortunately the WiFi encryption standards assume that if you want privacy you also want to limit who can use the network, so if you want encryption on a guest network you need to resort to approaches like your SSID "passwordispassword".

For a long time, most of my neighbors and I ran unencrypted networks, so if my DSL was out for a day, I could borrow a nearby "linksys". (When 802.11g came out, most of those routers got set up with passwords, so I'd have to go over to Starbucks if my DSL was down.) The only problem I ever had was when one of my neighbors got a virus and her PC used my Wifi to spam. Fortunately I have a friendly ISP, so they just called me and said "BTW, we've blocked half a million spams from your line today, can you see if it's your PC or your Wifi?" One of my friends considered it a civic benefit to run Wifi so his neighbors' teenage kids could have uncensored Internet if they wanted - was fine until the kid discovered file-sharing and flooded the airwaves.

My guess is the opposite - you'll probably notice the difference in resolution more for black on white text than for photos.

My first laser printer was an Imagen wet-process printer (based on the printer mechanism of a Canon copier engine.) 240dpi, with a liquid toner that was pretty much carbon black dissolved in kerosene. It didn't need anti-aliasing to smooth out jaggies :-)

Until we see a lot of 4K TVs out there, we aren't going to get cheap 4K PC monitors. As far as high enough quality for work goes, color resolution doesn't matter to me; pixel count and size do. (And as for responsiveness for gaming goes, as long as the screen isn't actually flickering, Nethack isn't bothered by 50ms latency.)

Having finally acquired an HDTV this year, I've found that it's nice to have a monitor that is in the same aspect ratio as movies so I don't need to black-box or have the sides cut off, but there aren't that many movies that really need the extra resolution as opposed to the correct aspect ratio. Regular TV programming cares even less about resolution; either the writing's good or it's not, and HDTV won't fix bad writing, and talking heads are either saying something sensible or blathering. Sports and nature programming are exceptions to that - being able to see a moving hockey puck or tennis ball better helps a lot, and wildlife pictures on National Geographic do look a lot better if you've got hi-def.

Yeah, for a 24" monitor I'd be happy to have 300dpi, because I want to be able to read my computer as easily as I read paper. 200x200 is a standard-mode Group 3 Fax machine resolution, and while it's a lot less ugly than the 100x200 mode, it's still ugly (though of course your monitor doesn't have the vertical sloppiness that mechanically-driven paper printer rollers have and the fuzzy pixels of thermal paper.)

If you're watching movies, or even still pictures, resolution doesn't matter as much, because your eyes will fix that stuff. But when I'm using a computer monitor, I usually want to read lots of text. For that you need actual pixels, even if most of them are running in 1-bit color, or 4-bit color so you can do better navigation clues.

At $DAYJOB, we're always getting lots of company propaganda about "Don't Text While Driving". Not a problem for me - I can't do texting without my reading glasses, and I can't drive with my reading glasses on. And the [expletive-deleted] HTC-flavored Android texting application may look pretty, but it doesn't let me change the font size, and doesn't let me do the two-finger stretch thing, and doesn't even do a decent job of adapting to landscape-more screen orientation. Yes, the Google-provided keyboard thing with it has a little button you can press to do speech-to-text, if you've got your reading glasses on so you can not only press the [expletive-deleted] little button and then read the results it got back to be sure they're not hopelessly garbled, but that doesn't really help.

Yes, a higher resolution screen helps make the text clearer. But what I really want is a phone that can be controlled entirely by voice for most common applications, like texting. The Bluetooth connection to my car supports voice dialing; why can't the phone support at least voice-controlled reception of text messages?

Skills don't show up by magic; they're something you learn. You need both talent and practice to get them, and if you've got less talent you generally need more practice (or better teaching materials to practice with.)

If Apple's actions are being described correctly, that's time that clearly belongs to be on the clock.