From 15 Minute Lunch:
Last weekend I put an exhaust fan in the ceiling for my wife's grandfather. After a bunch of hours spent in The Hottest Attic In The Universe, he had a ceiling fan that ducted to the side of his house.
While my brother-in-law and I were fitting the fan in between the joists, we found a 1977 JC Penney catalog under the insulation. It's not often blog fodder just falls in my lap, but holy hell this was two solid inches of it, right there for the taking.
I just added a Christmas, 2008 album to the Friends & Family section of my gallery. These are pics from our trip to Charleston to spend Christmas with Heather's family. You'll need to login to see the album. You can register if you don't have a login.
Heather & I are in Charleston, SC with Heather's family for the holidays. We flew out of Denver on a 2:30pm Continental flight to Houston, then on to Charleston. Later that day, Continental #1404 crashed on takeoff leaving Denver for Houston at 6:18pm, injuring around 40, but no deaths. Continental regularly flies from Denver to Houston, so #1404 was probably not the next flight of the day. Still, it feels a little like a "close call" for us. On our flight they were asking for volunteers to take a later flight since they had overbooked. I wonder how many of the passengers on #1404 had voluntarily taken it as a later flight?
If you need another reason to hate annoying animated banner ads, a paper published on Monday shows that that the worst sites require your computer to use an additional 11 watts of power handling the animated ads. So these banner ads contribute to global warming!
The study was not exactly rigorous, but the animated banner ads, based on technologies like Flash, clearly use an additional amount of power.
The study went on to try popular ad-blocking technologies like Adblock Plus and NoScript, and found that these reduced the power consumption to the same level as if the ads didn't exist. Scare-mongering advertisers claim ad-blocking will will cause the Internet to fail. But now you can reply that you're using ad-blocking to save the planet.
[via The Register]
Last night we had our first significant snowfall, about 1.5 inches. The picture below is from our deck this morning.
Last night we had Cheryl over for dinner, and planned to do some hot tubbing. There was not a forecast for any significant snowfall, so I was surprised when I went to fire-up the hot tub, and turned on the outside lights to see snow. It was pretty cool to be in the hot tub with snow falling outside.
There was still snow around tonight, but I expect it will be mostly melted by tomorrow.
You know this speeding ticket isn't going to end well, but I never saw that coming!
I love failblog.org.
Google Earth just released an amazing Ancient Rome layer, showing Rome at it's peak, around 320 A.D. At the time, Rome was around 1 million people. The layer includes over 6700 buildings, including over 200 high detail buildings.
Truly amazing.
I just uploaded pics to my gallery from a May 2008 trip to Charleston, SC. Yes, I'm a little behind. :-)
Very clever. [via Techdirt: Coffee Shop Advertising Via Its Free WiFi ID]
… reader Jon, alerts us to a story of a cafe in Holland, called CoffeeCompany, who is constantly renaming its WiFi SSID name with gentle reminders to buy something. Among the names being rotated around:
OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree
It's a cute, and probably somewhat effective way to get the folks hanging out in the coffee shop to feel good about buying something at the shop though, the cheapskate claim might piss off some.
Did you know your color printer is probably spying on you? Most pages printed in color include "secret" yellow dots. Groups like EFF have "decoded" some of these, and found in every case that the dots include the serial number of the printer, and the time the document was printed.
Most likely, the US government secretly asked printer companies to include this tracking data in a misguided attempt to fight currency counterfeiting. But the problem is that anyone, not just the US government, who knows the secret code can use it against others. For example, the Chinese government could track dissidents who unknowingly print flyers on these printers, thinking they were anonymous.
The threat to anonymous free speech posed by these secret dots is too large to let the US government and the printer companies off the hook for their secret agreement. Yes, there may be risks to currency counterfeiting, but the solution is not to put anonymous free-speech at risk. The solution is to design currency to resist copying. In fact, most currency now cannot be copied due to watermarks, and very very tiny details. So even if these yellow dots made sense 10 years ago, the no longer help reduce currency counterfeiting, but they continue to put at risk those who need anonymous free-speech.
