Kip Hawley

"Kip Hawley continues to harass his fellow Americans with an absurd theater of ID checks, shoe removal, and now Ziploc™ 'security'. Meanwhile, serious security concerns are ignored: air cargo is not screened and there is still no point-to-point baggage matching."

Flu, hernia, or police more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda

HSBC have a go at other banks for increasing security

"HSBC has criticised competitors using two-factor authentication, claiming that such tactics encourage hackers to target banks that haven't implemented similar measures." Link "Banks that have chosen to beef up their authentication systems are exposing unprotected rivals to attack, the financial services group claims" - Guess who haven't implemented a more secure system? HSBC.

The mess that was / is Rover?

The brand that was Rover belongs to BMW currently and the company was half bought by two chinese firms (one owning design rights to the 25 (now around 11 years old), and the 75 (now around 8 years old), the other owning MG - ie MGTF - both companies are owned by the Chinese state.). Now Ford want to buy the name "Rover" from BMW to "protect" the Land Rover brand.

Nobody is really interested in the 11 year old Rover 400/45 because it was long overdue for a replacement and was based on the Honda Accord and there are obvious copyright / design rights issues.

Slate.com

Slate - an interesting news, politics, culture, blog website with an interesting splattering of religious material. (including blogging the bible)

Apple announce ITV (and other stuff)

Erm yeah, Apple announced a load of stuff yesturday, such as new ultra small mp3 players, and updated nano's and ipods etc. Mainly fairly boring. Apart from a new device called iTV - surely Apple realise that ITV already exists? And you'd think that since apple are so protective of their own names such as 'POD' - surely they wouldn't go round nicking other people's names? Maybe it's just a prototype name anyway...

New iPod Shuffle here. £55 for 1gb.
New iPod Nano here. £99 for 2gb, £169 for 8gb.
New iPod here. £189 for 30gb (11mm thin), £259 for 80gb (14mm thick). Includes gapless playback, new games (inc Bejewelled, Pacman, Tetris etc!) Games can be added to older ipods.
New iTunes 7 with video. Free download.

Free Computer Maintenance

So when was the last time you made a complete backup of all your data? Or when was the last time you scanned your computer for viruses? When was the last time you scanned for spyware, adware or other stuff? When was the last time you updated windows? are you running WXP with SP2?

Free Virus Solutions: AVG, Anti-Vir, Avast
Free Spyware/Adware Removers: Ad-Aware, Spybot, MS Defender
Windows Update: here.
Free Backup Software: Setup automatic backups

From today's Metro: "Police called to a stable found a naked man covered in olive oil and oats being licked by a horse. Alfred Steven told them he was living out a lifelong fantasy. The 69 year old from Santa Barbara, California, was charged with trespassing, animal cruelty and sexually assaulting an animal."

I guess the next time he's where-ever-old-poeple-hang-out could be a bit awkward. It might sound a bit like this:

Eve: So hows life? OH GAWD don't look now, it's Alf!
Elsie: Er, why, what's wrong with Alf?
Eve: Don't you know!? He feeds horses oats!
Elsie: ... so what's wrong with that?
Eve: He uses olive oil!
Elsie: ... do horses dislike olive oil?
Eve: No! He's naked covered in olive oil and oats making the horses lick him!
Elsie: Oh!!!

Anyway, is it really cruel to feed a horse oats?

Old skool baby. Fisher Price PXL 2000

Link - "Back in 1988, Fisher Price introduced an insane video camera for kids. Crafted in thick rubber-coated plastic, it shot horribly lo-fi videos on audio cassette tapes. If you've ever seen the original Game Boy camera - it's a lot like that."

beta blogger, blogging at work, video, apple

blogger have a great article on blogging in the workplace. microsoft, dell, and other large corporations have welcomed blogging* (excluding apple, who hate the internet and all apple fan sites), yet posting the wrong stuff (even when working for microsoft) can get you fired like this guy. thankfully there are some ways to address the issues 1. is to host your own blog on your own server and make it private, or 2. wait till the new version of blogger is out (currently in beta) as it has the ability to make your blogger invite only. other new features include the ability to categorise posts so for example this post could be categorized as "Web Tech", while other posts could be categorised as "US / UK Spelling differences", or "Apple" etc. Annoyingly you can't be logged into both beta and normal blogger at the same time. Check out a beta blog I've just setup here.

blogger ends there article with this:

"If you end up getting yourself fired for blogging, deep down you must have really wanted out of that job. If that's the case, keep blogging. With your newfound status as one of only a handful of people in the world who have been "fired for blogging," you should be able to grab some headlines. Fan those flames! You could wind up on Oprah with a million dollar book deal. Theoretically."

* I wonder, by the time we all have blogs, whether we'll decide that reading and writing is boring and watching and speaking is much better, and we'll all migrate to youtube?

PS - Apple announced some new imacs and mini macs.

nine million

there are 9 million children who are refugees. 9 million. what does that even mean as a number? the entire population of london, homeless?

Australian Police Confused by Commodore 64

The kidnapper who held captive a woman for 8 years used a commodore 64. story here. police say they are finding it difficult to get the data off the computer, and may face data loss. the article doesn't mention the fact that commodore 64s use external means of data storage, ie. tapes, etc. but surely the police will have figured that out? boingboing don't seem so sure...

Message to Dell

"Can you address the issues we are still facing daily with GX270s (and some GX280s) with bulging capacitors - probably 50% of our current PCs out of over 3000 are GX270s - currently for every single PC we have to phone up, spend half an hour diagnostics with dell for them to arrange a motherboard replacement - in each instance we (myself and the Dell tech) knows that the problem is resolved by a motherboard replacement - this fixes 100% of the GX270s we've had problems with, yet this is taking hours of productivity (per incident) away from the staff we support and from us as IT support technicians - surely there is a quicker solution to this problem?"

This message is regarding faulty capacitors used in Dell Optiplex GX270s (and GX280s): More info here. and was posted to dell's official blog.

Link

Water bomb exploding in slo-mo.

Stop Junk Mail, Spam, and Telemarketing Calls

Stop junk mail: www.mpsonline.org.uk, or email optout@royalmail.co.uk (a postman has been sacked after informing his customers of this service!)
Stop junk phone calls: www.tpsonline.org.uk
Stop junk email: www.dma.org.uk