This is why I am leery of municipally provided wifi.

"This is how a government-filtered internet looks."

"...here is a screengrab of the Swissinfo.org site as seen from the Tunisian perspective. It is a fake 404 page, implying that the site doesn't exist."

Man don't kid yourself nobody thinks that a clown packs

Normally, I don't like webcomics. All that business with anthropomorphic animals is pretty much yawn city for me. It's like the newsprint comics pages, except with geek humor and and anime drawing style. I may as well be reading "One Big Happy", except with SysAdmin foxes or something.

The one (1) that does keep me coming back is Achewood. Here is a little article about it, which contains the great quote "Achewood fans are as committed as junkies, but many seemingly intelligent people are confused or even upset by the offbeat hilarity. Where do you fit in this taxonomy? Maybe a quick trip to the classic "Oh No I Grew Pubics" will clarify the matter."

Here are a few of my favorites:
Cilantro Ape Ceviche
Black Reeboks
Harlequin Costume

Half the fun of Achewood is the blogs that the characters keep, those are worth reading too.

Land of the free?

It's turning into a damn police state, I tell ya.

On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "papers" whenever a cop demands them.

Her story.

On her first day commuting to work by bus, the bus stopped at the gates of the Denver Federal Center. A security guard got on and demanded that all of the passengers on this public bus produce ID. She was surprised by the demand of the man in uniform, but she complied: it would have meant a walk of several miles if she hadn't. Her ID was not taken and compared to any "no-ride" list. The guard barely glanced at it.

When she got home, what had happened on the bus began to bother her. 'This is not a police state or communist Russia', she thought. From her 8th grade Civics class she knew there is no law requiring her, as an American citizen, to carry ID or any papers, much less show them to anyone on a public bus.

She decided she would no longer show her ID on the bus.

Is this acceptable to you?

Thx: Hit and Run

1.21 GigaWatts!?!?!?

The thrilling conclusion to my laptop battery recalibration! Can you stand it?

10:26a Turned on with full juice, er, 84%, after everything loaded. Also, as soon as I turned it on, the battery indicator LED lit orange. It should be green, I think.
10:32a 55% Hooked up external USB hard drive (my mp3 player) and began playing music, using the laptop to power the player via USB.
10:35a 45%
10:39a 26%
10:41a 18% Low battery alarm.
10:47a 5%
11:04a 5%
11:20a 5% I begin to suspect that the problem may not be the battery as much as the XP Power Meter software and it's ludicrous predictions of remaining capacity.
11:48a 2%
11:54a 1%
12:26p 0%
12:29p Dead

That's two hours of battery life -- 1:45 after the Low Battery warning messages appear! Though, it occurs to me that playing mp3s doesn't seem to require much processor utilization. At least powering the external USB hard drive takes some juice, right? FWIW, the mp3 player battery was dead when I hooked it up.

I imagine that running the wifi card will use up that juice quicker. But for now, I am definitely going to leave the "Auto-Hibernate at Critical Battery Warning" turned off.

I'll be sure to let you know how my battery life fares under actual use, in excruciating detail (isn't that what a blog is for?).

Daaaaaai... sy, daaaiiisssssy, telllll me y............

So, I'm trying to recalibrate the battery on my laptop, because it won't hold a charge at all. It will start flashing critical as soon as I unplug it.

I turned off all the power management functions in XP, and let it sit there.

Here is a handy progress chart of the times that I happen to glance at it whilst beavering away on my work desktop:
100% 2:14p
64% 2:23p
29% 2:32p
11% 2:37p
4% 2:51p
4% 3:27p

I think it lies.

I put in a music CD, hopefully spinning the drive will suck up some juice.

2% 3:40p
0% 4:00p (though Total battery power remaining reads as 1%)
0% and 0% 4:22p
Dead 4:28p

Finally it shut itself off, and won't turn on at all. I will recharge it overnight, and see what kind of battery life I get tomorrow.

Thx: Lifehacker

Assuming you get there early enough...

The $378 HP notebook computers that Wal-Mart will be selling on Black Friday are already showing up on eBay. That's enterprising.

Here is the original story from Engadget, note that the price has been reduced from the earliest news. On the Wal-Mart site, see the green "Huge in-store savings! Friday Nov. 25" for the actual ad.

The bidding hasn't topped $355 yet. Are the bidders hedging, waiting to see if they can score one of their own? Will the bids top $378 before Friday morning?

Thx: jaXed

It's those hairshirt, mudhut types again.

It's coming up; the day after Thanksgiving.

The xmas shopping season's Black Friday?

No, Buy Nothing Day. Where we get reminded by Adbusters how unhappy and unsustainable we are.

I like this take better:

Buy Nothing Day celebrates the decision not to consume. But most of the world lacks the ability to make such a choice. Rather than promoting guilt for being wealthy and healthy, we ought to empower the less-fortunate members of our world to become as wealthy as we are. The poor of the world must speak out against such elitist paternalism--they have nothing to lose but their poverty.

Thx: Scott Hughes comment on this Lifehacker post.

You will be astonished by what I will tell you

Statist fairytales.

"Not long ago the European Union was given regulations such as these," Father Houpette says. "With this new constitution everything will go like clockwork, just like in your club."

[involuntary shudder]

Thx: Hit and Run