This journal is actually updated pretty frequently, but most of it is only visible to people I know. Do I know you? Please poke me!

It was time tonight to make bone soup!*

While doing so, I checked the interwebs for bone soup recipes. It was horribly depressing. The ingredient lists all started with, "Purchase three ox bones and one ham bone from your butcher..."

No, no, no.

( Bone soup, done properly (not vegetarian)** )

If you are using Firefox:

• Adblock Plus - load no banner ads, etc. You... you just need this.
  
  
• Flashblock - load flash stuff when you want it. No ads, no secret cookies.
  
  
• Better Privacy - a little more complex. Functionally, recent versions of Firefox have allowed Flash to set its own cookies; as a result, lots and lots of sites use that ( Read more... )

So yes, I (past tense) kept data on my phone, which is a T-Mobile Sidekick. As most people who aren't on Jupiter have heard, they've been having some big, bad problems, which include my data.* Here is a good article. Excellent summary originally courtesy ishaa:

1. Microsoft started a secret smartphone project called Pink
   
2. Microsoft bought Danger, said it ( Read more... )

You remember that thing I was on about, a while back? About how we should look at the security of household robots, because it's important? Well, we finally got that paper published, although it took some doing, and it seems to have caught public attention, however briefly. We made the front page of Slashdot, a Popular Science article, and Science ( Read more... )

So let's say you want to change the size of fonts Thunderbird, or help someone else do so. Furthermore - God help you - let us say you want to increase those font sizes. Because, I dunno, perhaps you live in a world where not everyone in the entire world in every age group has perfect vision. Just hypothetically. I know, freaky! But work with ( Read more... )

I promise this'll just take you a sec:
"Adobe has recently announced a pair of critical vulnerabilities in all supported versions of Adobe Acrobat ... This isn't the first time and we worry that it will not be the last. It's easy to disable JavaScript, and doing so doesn't affect core functionality, so we strongly recommend that you do so. Here's ( Read more... )

This afternoon I gave a five minute presentation on what I'm doing for the security group, as part of a lunch where a whole bunch of people (15 or so) did the same thing. I got disproportionately stressed about it (like I do), but I guess it went all right? I got a couple of good laughs, anyway.

So what have I've been doing? Well, according to ( Read more... )

Currently my research focuses on using AI, robots, and RFID to help elders live independent lives for as long as possible. One of my colleagues (thanks tamiaka!) just sent me a link to the following gadget, marketed for older folk: it finds your keys, and sometimes reminds you to take your meds. Hell, I could use this ( Read more... )

If you got mailed your Washington ballot (and still have it), you can either mail it (postmarked ≤ Nov 4), or drop it in a ballot drop box. It took me longer than I liked to find the →list of ballot dropbox locations← so I'm putting it here.

For physical voters, a hot tip from txgreengoddess: the results page for googling 'where to vote' (no quote marks) has a ( Read more... )