... or rather, Dust in the Laptop ( Read more... )

He changed the world with good design.

Who could aspire to a better epitaph?

When Your Obedient Serpent says "hoopy", he's not making a Douglas Adams reference.

A hoopy task or process is one that requires jumping through hoops: before you can perform the task, you have to perform another task, which in turn requires another task, and another. It's a highly gradable adjective: a process can be "a little hoopy, but worth ( Read more... )

The Kno: A giant double-screen tablet to replace giant textbooks.

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

Kno Movie from Kno, Inc. on Vimeo.
I'm not much of a tech-fiend or an early adopter. My usual reaction at the Shiny Tech Toy of the Minute is, "huh, that's kinda cool", but it's seldom if ever "OMG I GOTTA HAVE IT ( Read more... )

I just realized this morning that I have always and consistently been a technological iconoclast, as far as my choice of computing environment.

My systems have always run AMD processors, with the exception of the 8088 I had for less than a week before upgrading it to an AMD 286.

That machine also ran DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS; after a year or two ( Read more... )

Arrrgh ( Read more... )

Duke University Shuts Down Their Usenet Server

USENET started at Duke, back in 1980.

This is a Sad. I met my wife on the USENET group alt.fan.dragons.

Edit: Please note that, as far as I can tell, USENET is still active on other servers, as is a.f.d. But still, let's hoist a glass.

Vulnerability found that allows PDF documents to run arbitrary code.

There's no hacking, cracking, or exploits here: this is just using features built into the format.

I just opened the test file using Adobe Reader under Ubuntu 9.04, and nothing popped up. This seems to be another Windows-Exclusive feature, brought to you by the fine folks in ( Read more... )

Question for the Hive Mind:

I am using Ubuntu Linux 9.04.

I want to simply hash up a text file, so I can just push a button or enter a short password to unlock it. This doesn't need to be bulletproof; when I was running Windows, I used EditPad Lite's ROT-13 function for the same purpose. It does, however, need to be portable: I want to be able to ( Read more... )