It's Australian speak for what you would call a "power strip"

Even more so in countries like Australia where our library is less than half the size of the US one. By blocking my access to other netflix regions, they're well on their way to losing another customer. I know it's the rights holders that are the issue, but the only language they understand is money.

As a geek, I can definitely relate to it. I'm married to a much less geeky wife, and our relationship dynamic is definitely similar to Penny and Leonards, with him being book smart but life challenged, and her being life smart but academically challenged. Sure it's an exaggeration of a stereotype, but so much of comedy is.

Of course, the exception where my wife goes against type is in her relatively new hobby of collecting Pop Vinyls figurines, which even makes her go into comic book stores and the like of her own accord!

I used to work for a manufacturer of poker(slot) machines and hybrid/table casino games, and this was a non negotiable requirement. A given set of source code had to produce exactly the same binary output, to the point where you'd get identical checksums when verifying it. Furthermore, external test labs responsible for certifying the software also needed to be able to build the software from source, and verify the binary in the same way.

The biggest headache in the process was anything that included a date time stamp in the object code or final binary .. from memory there was some part of the build process that would reset all those date stamps to a fixed value. A virtual machine as a build box was also the only reasonable solution for guaranteeing a very locked down, but easily cloneable build environment (before that we were resorting to supplying physical build machines to each test lab)

You really need to investigate exiftool, as it can easily do all this kind of renaming, and more.

Loving my Aeropresses (office and home), but one thing bugs me slightly. If you lock the end cap on for storage, the rubber bung part can only be stored inside the tube, which causes it to degrade more quickly. If you have the rubber bung protruding past the end of the tube, the end cap obviously doesn't fit on. Could the design be slightly tweaked in some way to allow storage as a single piece without degrading the bung?

Some forums on there, yes. But there's usually useful info tucked in there, and there's nowhere better for "shiny new toy X has released, where's the best place to buy it from?"

Also, some more general tips about buying things online here. Ordering from dealextreme (the non AU warehouse version) takes around a month or more to arrive. Ordering things from HK/Chinese based ebay sellers can sometimes take about the same time, or sometimes take less than a week. You can often find a AU based ebay seller with comparable items and a slightly higher cost if you need something more quickly. If you're buying media (blu rays + console games particularly), order from UK based sites (eg Amazon UK) since they're the same region as us, and you'll run into less problems, as well as them usually being substantially cheaper. DVDs should be region free though.

I'd also thoroughly recommend http://ozbargain.com.au/ where members share good bargains that they've found, in addition to the whirlpool forums mentioned previously

Totally agree, as a native Aussie, it's probably the most useful and active forum across a wide range of subjects that I've found.

One of our Cavalier King Charles Spaniels will go nuts barking if she either sees another animal on the TV screen. Off screen barking will set her off too. Having said that, if a doorbell goes off on screen she'll also run to the front door excitedly.

Couldn't agree more. I work in IT for an Australian investment bank, and I've seen a lot of good and competent people pushed out the door in favour of either off-shore workers in Manila, or outsourcing agreements with Indian companies. Almost all the contractors are gone now, and I'm sure the permanents are running scared too.

Unfortunately the off-shore staff require so much support and help to do anything, that it takes 3 times as long as it should do do any one task, and the remaining on-shore staff are run ragged trying to do their own jobs as well as the demands of supporting the off-shores.

So here I am, doing what I've been told by multiple key people is an amazing job, taking on team leadership roles across some projects, delivering consistently on or ahead of time, working extra hours without question just to get the job done. How do I get rewarded for this? Still no rate rise (despite being promised one for over a year now), and an extended 1 year contract instead of 6 months (so now it's a year before I can have any chance of a rate rise).

The IT industry in this country is going from bad to worse, and I don't see any positive change happening any time soon.

To me, although there's good OSS photo management software, there's really none I'm aware of that is able to work well with multiple machines. The easiest way to do this would be pick one of the photo managers that uses a database to store photo information, then you basically write the sync agent that pushes updates to one database(+ associated photos) to the others.

Would be a very useful project, and nicely database heavy. Am considering doing the same thing myself using digikam as a base if ever I find the spare time...

The company I work for does hot desking / activity based working, and only a small percentage of the desks and all the meeting rooms have fixed phones.

Every single employee is issued with a mobile (cell) phone. At the office there's some kind of technology that will route any inbound "landline" calls to both your mobile phone, as well as any desk phone you happen to be logged into. There's also the option of using VOIP via a headset connected to your laptop, which seems to be the option most "phone heavy" people choose.

In reality: most people hardly use their work issued mobile phones at all, or even keep them charged. Most real time colloboration is done over instant messenging and the occasional conference call for meetings with people who are working from home or offshore.

You've really asked about two issues, how do I manage that many photos, and what do I do about backups?

Backups, IMO, is the easier one. What I do, get two identical hard drive enclosures, each with a suitably large drive in them (these days, look at 2Tb + each). Aim for a powered one (so you can use larger drives), preferably with eSata connectivity (for speed). Then mirror your photos and whatever else you want to back up regularly onto the drives. Then, every week or so swap drives, and take the now disconnected drive to somewhere off site (your work, parent's house, safety deposit box, etc). Doing the mirroring via an automatic scheduled task is better. Now you're covered for most risks, and if your house is on fire and you've got time to grab something on the way out, you grab the currently connected backup drive.

Now, how do you manage a large connection of photos, possibly stored across multiple machines? There's commercial solutions, with a pretty hefty price tag, but not much out there with distributed capabilities in the open source world. At least, not that I know of. For myself, I've kludged up something using f-spot as a base, and using Mercurial to track the photo database, but it's messy. And now, f-spot in Ubuntu 10.10 has become a pile of flaming crap, so I'm going to have to try the same approach in Shotwell.

The issue with facebook is really rather simple.

Facebook's value for its investors is that it's a gigantic comprehensive advertising database where the marks *cough* I mean customers input all the data on their own. People put information into Facebook that they'd never tell someone taking a survey and you don't even have to pay someone to ask them the questions. Achieving this goal is basically top on Facebook's list of long term priorities, just as it will be on any other free social networking site which doesn't want to operate at a massive loss.

The conflict is that the users of facebook didn't sign up for that. They want and quite rightfully expect a certain level of privacy for the content they post on the site. You might argue that telling everyone about your personal life is the antithesis of privacy, but privacy is about your ability to determine your own level of disclosure, not having some specific level of disclosure which the older generations find appropriate.

Essentially the end result of all of this is that every 6 months or so, facebook tries to turn all the information it has into cold hard cash and shortly thereafter their userbase throws a wobbly and they have to back out.