After living for several days without power after hurricane Ike, I found that all I needed was water, a camp stove, some light, and anything edible that did not require more cooking than add (hot) water. Plenty of that in the grocery store if you don't like the backpacking type of freeze dried food.

Only needed light when I needed to find something at night, so I used very little power after sunset. I treated it like a backpacking trip with much more comfortable spots to sit and sleep.

I had a crank up radio/charger, and keeping it charged with the crank was a pain in the ass.

Assume you're going to lose power and start in on eating all the perishables when the weather service puts you under a watch/warning. You don't need a generator but it sure is nice to have. Any car with a working cigarette lighter can be used as a USB power source for recharging.

Having said all that it's helpful that i'm single. Wife (and kids) kids not being a factor, I can 'rough it' for a few days. Boy was I glad when one of the local TexMex restaurants opened up. I imagine the kajillion people eating there were as happy as I was.

I've been looking into this myself since hurricane season is coming up. It's not easy to find this stuff, because a search that includes USB finds a lot of things.

On Amazon, I have found flashlights, lanterns, weather radios, and FRS radios. Sometimes you have to read the detailed description of the item to find that it can be charged from usb..

Frank

As an avid sci-fi reader for 40+ years, and wanna be writer, I've wasted many hours thinking about space battles. My conclusion is, massive fleets doing battle is unlikely because it will just be too damn expensive. I Iove stories about fleets of ships, from the biggest capital ships down to swarms of fighters, but now I'm starting to think, when yet another battleship explodes like the Death Star, damn that was a lot of money.

I read one story where a planet was wiped out using sand. Granted it was a LOT of sand accelerated to nearly the speed of light but it points out that something very small, going very fast, is a potent weapon. Just look at today's headlines where a few dollars of diesel and fertilizer are destroying much more expensive things. Could any economy support the construction and destruction of such expensive toys? Personally I think such massive fleet actions will remain the stuff of science fiction.

Putting the economic arguments against such things aside, I'm an advocate of the right tool for the job school of thinking. Which just means there will be all kinds of weapons in play. Someone building mirror coated ships means someone else will invent a hammer throwing gun. Either way, someone is in for some bad luck.

Frank

I remember the same type of discussion here on /. regarding print vs web. People were complaining about websites that looked like they had scanned in their brochures, and for some that was literally true. It seems that the more things change the more they stay the same. The old school still wants to treat the screen as if it were a piece of paper. God forbid that the person doing the reading might want, or need, a different font size. That might disrupt the carefully chosen 1.2345 microsnick paragraph spacing.

I recently downloaded my first iBook to my iPad: The Yellow Submarine. (I'm a long time kindle guy.) First impression was: wow this is gorgeous and shows what an ebook can be. My 2nd impression was: holy crap I can't read this small font, let me bump up the... oh wait it's hard coded. I can see where it really would have messed up the flow of that book if I had been able to change the font. I think the ebook industry needs to have that spark where a new approach to layout is discovered that, right now, no one seems to have.

I will admit that I don't understand much about typography and layout. Most of my reading doesn't require anything more complicated than what can be produced on a typewriter. What I do see, is that we are at a point in time where the screen is taking over, and the print industry is struggling with a change that threatens to leave it behind.

Frank

Looks a lot like any number of sports stadiums to me, or the Pentagon with the corners sanded off.
Frank

Electrical tape crossed my mind too, then I thought a more interesting project could be a small mirror redirecting the camera's field of view to the dog's food bowl, or the fish tank. Or if you really want to go high tech, something with fiber optics in place of the mirror. Frank

Time to fire up the theremin, we're gonna party!

FrankN

... our congress critters can't see past the next election. No immediate political benefit, no funding.

Frank

It's amusing to see the outrage from the Kindle's target market of /. readers.

The first 2 books I purchased for my Kindle 2 were from http://www.webscription.net/. They were downloaded to my PC in .mobi format; drag and dropped via USB to my K2; and both have already been read. The folks at Webscription even have a page on their site explaining how to read their books on the Kindle.

I'm on my 3rd book now. This one I got from Amazon via the wireless link. I paid $0 for it.

What I'd love to see is for Google, and others, to recognize the Kindle browser. Google knows the Wii browser, so why not the Kindle? That would make it so much easier to find stuff to download to the Kindle.

Frank

I canceled my XM subscription on Nov 24th. I had been paying for 2 radios on a family plan. At first I listened to XM a lot, then over time I listened less and less. I listen to my mp3 collection at home, and local talk radio when I'm in my car.

Toward the end, what really started bugging me, was hearing songs repeated 2 or 3 times in a 4 or 5 hour period. This was on a channel that was supposedly pulling the play list from the last 3 decades. I imagine that, even restricted to a particular genre, 30 years produced more than 4 hours of play worthy songs.

So, in accordance with the service agreement they have online, I canceled my family plan via email. I got an automated email informing me that 1) they got the email and 2) how great XM is and thanks for being a customer.

I waited a few days and checked my account online and didn't see any indication that the status of my account had changed. Then I got another email saying that if I really wanted to cancel I'd have to call customer support. I guess the service agreement page on their website is meaningless since they don't abide by it.

So, I called customer service, and the nice lady who answered asked me for some basic information, got my account information pulled up, and then asked how she could help me. I said, I want to cancel my subscription.

That's when the hard core retention pitch started. Paraphrased:
Why are you cancelling?
I don't listen to it anymore.
What if we give you 3 months of free service?
No thank you, please just cancel the account.
Are you sure you don't want an extra 3 months to think about it?
No, thanks. Please stop with the sales pitch I just want to cancel my subscription.

Now here is where it got interesting:

Do you have a car kit? (I think: Wha?)
Just cancel my account.
Can you give your radios to someone else? (Me to myself again: Wha? -the other neuron kicks in- They must be getting desperate.)
Just cancel my account.

She finally gave up and told me the account was closed and the date my radios would stop working.

If I had an interest in listening to sports, or shock jocks, or more than a handful of music genres, I might have kept XM. But even with a radio sitting within reach from where I type this, I have hardly turned the thing on over the last few months, and I spend a lot of my time sitting right here. Sirius XM has a lot of competition, and in my experience it is just not compelling enough to be part of my entertainment budget.

Frank