Rasberry Pi is as quiet and small as you can get, and BMC running on it is nice. http://www.raspbmc.com/

Going on right now (well, starting soon) is the greatest wild party in the middle of nowhere, 2 hours from the closes cell signal, and they have internet access. Ask some of the Burning Man guys to help with such a setup. They don't use 4G, but they have T1s in nearby towns and they microwave it out to the festival site. It works very well, even in the worst dust storms, and is not nearly as reliant on the whims of cellular carriers.

This fire is burning right next to actual people, not sure why we need to worry about SF 200 miles away. Actual people are right on the fire line in danger, they should be the ones reported on. I know this is a tech site and the bay is the tech center, but remember the firefighters and civilians that are actually on site, and not just experiencing a minor inconvenience.

Can I just get a phone that I don't have to recharge every 8 hours if I actually use the thing? More apps, more features, more browsing all means a worse experience because it is a wireless device that I always have to have plugged in for power.

I agree there has to be some middle ground. Completely ignoring it and pretending it doesn't happen doesn't seem right, but we don't need to glamorize it. I used to be a photojournalist and shot pictures of a murder scene at a local college. We had a ton of pictures and the editors and I decided to run one that we considered in the middle of the road from everything I had shot. It was a wide shot of the whole scene at night with detectives and the street corner, and if you looked closely you could see a sheet covered object in the street. It was the person that had been killed, but small and off-center in the frame. Our goal was not to present a grotesque image but to show the scene as it was. A few people complained that it shocked them, and my best answer to them was I am sorry, but I am also glad you are shocked, we all should be shocked that someone was murdered on our campus. We can't just hide the fact that bad things happen, but we can take a minute to sit back and judge how we should present it. Live coverage doesn't allow that to be done.

I get a kick out of showing people the GPS I use for hiking/snowmobiling. It shows my coordinates, and lets me point an arrow towards other coordinates. No maps, no trails, no color, just on 1 inch screen. The battery lasts forever, its waterproof, totally reliable. But people see it and say "ewwww how do you know where you are?" I don't need a big color picture, but most people do I guess, and that is "GPS" for the rest of the world.

From my experience working on a Search & Rescue team I must say someone having the knowledge of how to navigate with a map and compass is pretty rare. Congrats on always having a backup, that is what will save you. I have rescued people that were out on a million dollar snow cat with space-aged GPS and laptops with moving maps, it all turned in to a huge pile of useless crap when it slid sideways down a hill and got stuck against some logs. They had no backup, no other plan. Technology won't save you, knowledge and planning will. Oh, and I was a bit shocked at first... "recoveries" are for dead bodies, "rescues" are for live ones. I hope the USFS wasn't busy doing recoveries all day...

Rumor was they had an HTML5 player in testing that would work in linux. http://www.thechromesource.com/netflix-plug-in-for-chrome-and-chrome-os-is-on-the-way/

A lot of great urban "redecorating" has gone on in the middle of the day. If you do something at night, people automatically assume you are up to no good. If you are dressed like construction workers doing something in the middle of the day, you are just another noisy thing in the way of them getting to their coffee and they ignore you. One of the more famous ones I can recall from my area was in Los Angeles, there is a horrible interchange that gets everyone lost, so a guy made a CalTrans spec sign and hung it himself (http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-real-public-service/). A more recent one was a surfing Madonna mural put up in Encinitas (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/apr/25/surfing-madonna-appears-encinitas/).

Exactly what I was going to say. They were so worried about keeping the device secret inside their disguised case they actually fixed a bug they didn't yet know about.

I have had it running via knoppmyth for a year, which I believe ran Myth .20 and just last week upgraded to Mythbuntu running a .22 pre-release version. It works great as a DVR, and the recent upgrades and changes have made it even better. I don't have many issues at all, and really enjoy the web frontend that lets me adjust my recordings, files, settings and schedules. A few friends have Windows media PCs and one is looking hard at switching over because their machine has gotten no innovation in the past two years while Myth has continued to improve.

Also all the US plugs are going up-side-down with the ground tube up top. It just looks wrong to me after seeing the little screaming face for so many years, but I guess that is progress. The idea being is something conductive fell down against the wall and knocked the plug half out, the first thing it would touch is the ground bar. Safer I guess, but lame looking.

Favorite one I have gotten recently: "Hello, this is a dead heat without my front. I'm employees at at the i'm having a call from building being. If it's the 8 call me back at this is. Thank you. "

The arrows show data traffic as well as voice traffic. It is very nice to see a whole lot of up, down, or both arrows flashing when an app is sitting "unresponsive." You know data is flying so nothing is wrong, just wait and the app will respond when it has the data it needs. The arrows (at least on my 8330) are large for the faster network, and thin for the slow network so I even know when it will take longer because of poor network coverage. I used a Windows Mobile phone for a week and it drove me mad not knowing what was going on with the network data.

Sounds like someone should stop replying to people on slashdot and get to it!