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In Self Indulgent / Cliched Meme News…
Categories: personal -
Kaposi’s Sarcoma Got You Down?
Categories: photo -
“Scaring the Squirrel out of His Hole”
Categories: other
He hadn’t been living there for no damn six years. I absolutely flushed him out.
Gary Faulkner, the katana wielding Colorado man who was arrested trying to sneak in to Afghanistan from Pakistan while on a mission to find Bin Laden, on why he deserves a portion of $25 million reward.
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“Don’t Worry. Your Data is Safe.”
I took my laptop to the Apple Store to get it repaired. (The keyboard doesn’t work.) After explaining to the guy at the store, he starts taking down my contact info. When he’s done, he says. “And what’s your username and password? Don’t worry. Your data is safe.”
Aghast, I say “But my data is NOT safe if I give you my password!*”
“Uhh….”
“Can’t you just boot off an external drive or something?”
“Well, umm… yeah, but this is how that prefer we do it.”
Sure enough, the Apple form has blanks for username and password.
In the end, I gave them Ming’s password, because really it didn’t matter. I was giving a perfect stranger an unencrypted drive. It does make me think though. After decades of telling users not to share they’re passwords. Not to give them to people saying they’re from IT. Not to trust anyone with your password, Apple is undoing this as part of standard operating procedure. Or maybe I’m just old, and I’m supposed to think of Apple as a parent.â€
* Yes, I recognized the naivete of believing a simple password provided adequate security in this situation.
†My parents never read my stuff. I see no reason to read my child’s.
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BestCast™
Categories: tech
After years of development, Weather Underground replaces NWS forecasts with their own prediction algorithm that incorporates tens of thousands of personal weather stations – like my dad’s – into its forecasts. The algorithm is called BestCast™. The press release talks about 42,000 stations, but I suspect that actual number is a bit less. Wunderground came up with this figuring by summing the total number of stations from each of three different data sets, however a number of stations actually send data to many different sources. For example, thanks to wview, my dad’s station sends to directly to Weather Underground and to the National Weather Service’s MADIS program via CWOP.
Another thing that’s new on wunderground.com (or at least I never paid much attention to it before) is if you scroll down to the “Forecast” section for a location they publish the RMSE for this location both their forecast and the NWS forecast. As a data guy, I find that transparency absolutely wonderful. Also, they link to the predicted hour-by-hour weather for a location (I suspect this is using an NWS model, since it’s reporting for an airport.), and the NWS’s “Area forecast discussion”, which is a conversational and wonky forecast. Personally, I like how it discusses how different models agree or disagree.
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Cryoscope
The Cryoscope by Robb Godshaw is a solid aluminum connected to a peltier, which is in controlled by a computer. The cube heated and cooled to indicate the temperature forecasted tomorrow. The cube doesn’t directly give the predicted temperature, since at room temperature, the metal cube is perceived as cold. Instead, a 73°F outside temperature is mapped to 85°F on the cube, since that temperature was perceived as neutral.
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Jacob Sutton’s LED Surfer
Categories: animation / interactive / filmPhotographer Jacob Sutton filmed snowboarder William Hughes wearing a suit covered in LEDs. By reducing the the aperture, the Sutton removes Hughes from the environment and forces the viewer to focus only on the movements of the rider.
