For those who build or fix their own computers

A bit of therapy.

Early computers, polar vortexes and Emma Watson

Antikythera mechanism expedition begins search for missing fragments of world’s oldest known computer and more.

My Year As an Abortion Doula

My Year in the NRA

More megaquakes can happen.

An excellent male contraceptive.

Sign of the times.

Polar vortex a sign of global warming.

Internet trolls.

Emma Watson, UN's Goodwill ambassador

From manatees to cats with the Ukraine in between.

Manatee migration

13 Webcomics that make you smarter.

Growing black holes eating stars

The end to upside down or up USB plugs?

Neither male nor female?  Good news.

Quote of the day: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.

Technology's Man Problem.

What is feminism?

Btw, even Carter doesn't think Bush won the 2000 election.

Kitty collapse.

Nom nom *bzzzap* nom *frittzzzz* ...

Crazy ants are attacking your electronics!

Puzzled cats are puzzled.

North Korea prepares for war ... with somebody.  Anybody?

This is why Congress is broken, the Republicans want to stay ignorant about anything Obama offers.  They will refuse to do anything he suggests.  The teabaggery party has won.

How to deal with angry bees.  Killer bees or not.

Bees instinctually target the eyes, nose, ears and face. If you lack a helmet and veil, the bees will sting your repeatedly in the head and upper trunk, and at some point this will cause your eyes to swell shut and then you are in big trouble. If you are blind, escaping these insects is difficult or impossible, and the likelihood of you running into other objects or falling down in addition to being attacked--goes up. This is how people sometimes die in these confrontations. They get stung repeatedly in the face, the flesh swells around their eyes, they are still being stung repeatedly which hurts like hell and is scary, and they run into a wall or tree, or fall over items in their path and hurt themselves, or knock themselves out, meanwhile more bees appear, just to sting the person, while they are down and unable to get back up.

Saving Britain's heritage...by losing Shakespeare's house.

How does an anti-virus program work?

A chart that helps define the different conservative branches.

Creating a superbug one antibacterial soap at a time.

A testament to love.

Sunday drive through the blogosphere

China isn't the only one producing questionable drugs:  Bad pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, lies. Industry-funded trials are too common, can't be trusted -- and bring pills to market that likely don't work

State EPA plans to list BPA as harmful

Procter & Gamble Must Scrub Carcinogen Dioxane From Tide

Climate change..  predictions are a lot worse than imagined.

A pet fox.

A Belgian's experience traveling in the US.

If abortion is made illegal... women will have illegal abortions.

What's going on with the banks?

Fondly remembering Mussolini... and forgetting how he ended up.

Farmers who don't give in to monocrops.

Our DNA will become our own computers.

Crafting a homemade book.

Best and worst and things in between...

What the second amendment is actually all about.

How to treat PTSD.

And I thought fuzzy caterpillars were cute!

Imagine if you were stuck in a room with a blank computer and a floppy....

Making the 'War on Terror' forever unwinnable..

The best photos of 2012.

Finding buried treasure in the U.K.

Saturday Caturday

GetBackToWork Day...

How to track a stolen laptop... and help with a drug bust.

A woman's place in the world from first to last.

Gene therapy restores the sense of smell in mice.

We won't go to war if Israel attacks Iran?



Tom Tomorrow.

Bernie Sanders.

Commieislamofascistic explanation of what socialism actually is.

Cyber wars

  Security researcher: I found secret reprogramming backdoors in Chinese microprocessors

  Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say

Sorry about that...

Went on vacation and found my laptop refused to work with the rental's wireless system.  Talk about withdrawal symptoms....

So I'll start with what I'd like for the squirrels in my vegetable garden...

FYI

Trojan Feigns Failures to Increase Rogue Defragger Sales

HA!

What animals are really saying:



How to make your shopping cart suck less.

How many times has your computer crashed?

And why do the car manufacturers assume that computer software won't crash in your car... and make you crash?

Toyota problems 'caused by faulty software' says Steve Wozniak:

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and a Toyota Prius owner, has suggested that the "unintended acceleration" problems affecting Toyota's cars may be caused by faulty software.

The comments, from one of the most respected figures in computer technology, will heap more pressure on the manufacturer, which is fighting to defend its reputation for reliability.

As Toyota tries to resolve issues with "sticky" accelerator pedals, The Times has learnt that the company is also conducting an internal investigation into alleged problems with the brake systems on the Prius.

Under direct instructions from the Japanese Land and Transport Ministry, Toyota is examining 13 instances since December 2009 where the brakes have failed on new Priuses sold in Japan and the United States.

We used the Cash for Clunkers program and now have a keyless car. (Don't have to get the keys out for anything except locking it... how lazy are we?) It bothers me they think this is an improvement. (In case your key battery dies or gets wet, there's a hidden key within the remote and an override that needs screw drivers and a clip to pop at the gear box.....) It's going to be one more thing to break and adds big bucks to any repairs.

I'd rather have less bells and whistles and more traditional car mechanics.

Blog sprinkles

To help you figure out why billowing smoke is coming out of the computer tower vents...


click to embiggen..

And speaking of fires, California could use this information from Bryan of Why Now? The real hazards of wood ash after a burn.


Look forward, not back! There's nothing to see or learn from, really! No investigations are needed!

Steve Benen muses that Obama must really hate Bush:

I've been trying, however, to think about this from Obama's perspective. Bush left him with a generational economic crisis, an abysmal job market, a budget mess, a war in Iraq, a deteriorating war in Afghanistan, an nuclear-armed and unstable Pakistan, a nuclear-armed and nutty North Korea, a warming planet, a collapsing U.S. auto industry, an ineffective health care system, a massive debt, an absurd national energy framework, and a nation that has lost much of its global prestige.

Ready to dive in and start getting the nation back on track, the president is told, "Wait, before you tackle this to-do list, we have to deal with the consequences of the previous administration's alleged war crimes, too."

It's no wonder No Drama Obama prefers to turn the proverbial page.

I still wonder what happened to Riverbend of Baghdad Burning.

Matt Taibbi:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Cell phones are rotting our brains!

One man's trash.... makes a neat house!

Too many pennies!

Mentioned in comments somewhere:

The Chemists Drinking Song
Words by : John A. Carroll (inspired by Isaac Asimov) Tune of : The Irish Washerwoman

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Sodium citrate, ammonium cyanide,
Mix 'em together and add some benzene,
And top off the punch with trichloroethylene.

Got gassed up last night with some furfuryl alcohol, Followed it up with a gallon of propanol, Tanked up on hydrazine 'til after noon, Then spit on the floor and blew up the saloon.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Powdered aluminum, nitrogen iodide, Chlorates, permanganates, nitrates galore, Just swallow one drink and you'll never need more.

Whiskey, tequila, and rum are too tame. No, the stuff that I drink must explode into flame, When I breathe and dissolve all the paint in the room, And rattle the walls in a ground-shaking boom.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Go soak your head in a good strong insecticide, Slosh it around and impregnate your brain, With dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

Just let the mothers at the Mom And Me group have at him.

And ... ew? ....

Orlando, FL (AHN) - The unknown animal found inside a can of Diet Pepsi drank by a man from Ormond Beach, Florida last July was a frog or toad, the Food and Drug Administration has confirmed after testing the product.

Cyber terrorism

Is just in its infancy:

WASHINGTON – The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange.

An early analysis of the malicious software used in the attack found its targets also included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained attacks.

The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attack. It was not immediately clear who might be responsible or what their motives were.

The attack was remarkably successful. Some of the affected government Web sites — such as the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service — were still reporting problems days after it started during the July 4 holiday.

But it's growing up fast.

Games you do not want to play against a computer

The computer will win.

Don't think even a firewall can stop this virus

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Belated April Fool's?

The Conficker worm awakes!:

The Conficker worm is finally doing something--updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday.

[snip]

The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, according to Trend Micro. The software is heavily encrypted, which makes code analysis difficult, the researchers said.

[snip]

The worm disabled security software and blocks access to security Web sites. To check if your computer is infected you can use this Conficker Eye Chart or this site at the University of Bonn.

Nice of you to notice

Most electronic voting systems can be hacked, CIA expert says.

So where the hell have you guys been the last eight years?