I ran across the following rule many years ago in what looks like a student paper (PDF link) by a fellow named Bernie Thomas and posted on the SANS site. SANS is a security training organization. For sites where minimal security is a criterion, I tend to favor using this rule as it's generally easy for me to remember. For high security, I rely on 1Password to generate hard-to-crack passwords. However, I can only use 1Password on my MacBook at home, and cannot easily access its stored information on my Windows PC at work. Therefore, I prefer having a simple password-creation routine that I can use to access low- to minimum-security sites in both locations.
Drought on the Mississippi
After several years of drought in North Carolina, we've enjoyed a relatively mild and wet summer with only a few counties experiencing even mild drought. But the rest of the country is suffering. The Atlantic Magazine presents a disquieting set of NASA satellite images of the Mississippi River: the first image from 2011 shows a Mississippi swollen by storms and the second, from this year, shows the drought's effects.
One definition of stress is not accepting that things are the way they are. In other words, wishing things were different.
The Old Adventures of Superman
Apart from Stevereads and the Ihnatko Alamanac have to say on the matter, I have paid no attention to the DC Comics reboot of its entire line of superhero comics. So when I see references to it in the mainstream press, I pay a little more attention.
The latest news is that Superman and Wonder Woman are now going to be the ultimate power couple. (The Guardian article has good links to related sites if you want more info.)
Writing Lois Lane out of Superman's romantic mythology just seems ... weird. Like setting Tarzan in Alaska. How can you turn your back on over 75 years of all that history? I'm sure they'll bring Lois back in somehow, and this lets the new writers cut loose on creating some new mythologies, but still ... There's something mysterious and seductive about an alien humanoid with godlike powers falling in love with an aboriginal female of a primitive species. Call me an old curmudgeon who hates change.
That said -- today's classic reading on the topic is Larry Niven's hilarious essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," and that title tells you everything you need to know. The gross-out implications almost write themselves, don't they? Sit back, relax, and prepare to snort into your morning coffee.
Pop Songs are Sad Songs
My key pop music memories primarily imprinted themselves on my trembling consciousness at after-show theater parties when I was an undergrad in the early 1980's. The hot items were Michael Jackson (back when he was good), J. Geils Band, Van Halen, Wham!, Pat Benatar, and tons of other bands whose names I don't know but whose songs were pounded into my head by Pop-40, MTV, other music video shows, and all the rest of it.
How to unwrap a CD
When I first saw an Asheville CD store saleskid flip open the hinges of a CD case to remove that annoying sticker from across the top of the lid, I was gobsmacked. Once I saw it, it seemed so simple -- why had no one ever shown me this before? Why had I not been able to figure it out on my own? (Part of my surprise being that I'm a notorious rules-follower and it's obvious, isn't it, that you don't take something apart unless someone told you it was OK?) The Proper Discord blog posted a great little video tutorial on how to unwrap the cellophane packaging from various types of CD cases. It's little bits of knowledge like this which makes life on the Interwebz worth living.
Hat tip to Kirkville
If we really want to understand our fellow human beings accurately, we must allow them to surprise us, to contradict what we think we know about them. Like good scientists, we should cling to our theories about people only loosely and always be willing to revise them in light of new data.
Jailbreaking my Kindle Touch
To get screensaver images of my choice onto the Kindle Touch (the one without the special offers) required several steps:
- Jailbreaking the Kindle Touch
- Installing the screensavers hack
- Gathering the images
- Formatting the images
- Grouping and renaming the images
- Transferring the renamed images to the Kindle Touch
I won't go into exorbitant detail on how I did what I did, but this post will pull all the steps together into one place so I have a record of what I did in roughly the order I did it, in case I need to do it again, God forbid. I also throw in a few stray observations along the way.
Kindle Touch screensavers
The Kindle Touch (non-ad supported) comes with 20 attractive gray-scale screensaver/wallpaper images.
They're fine, but after a while, I wanted to see some different images. One of the reasons I got the ad-free Touch was so that I wouldn't be assaulted with an ad every time I picked up my Kindle to read something. I returned the ad-supported Kindle 3 because -- among other reasons -- although I can take ads in magazines, I didn't want to see them in a book -- not even an e-book.
The web is full of Kindle-supported screensaver images that I would have preferred to see on my device, but Amazon doesn't allow me to customize the Kindle in even that harmless way. And this annoyed me.
So I took matters into my own hands, did a bit of hacking on my Kindle over the weekend, and now I have a pool of about 200 attractive, varied, and unusual images I can use as screensavers on my Kindle, as the following gallery shows. Tomorrow, a post on how I did it.
