Police make it hard to report things to them.

Last week while on a canoe trip we spotted a minivan crashed in the river, at the bottom of a 30m+ cliff. From the open driver's side door It looked like it had been pushed over the edge, and, judging from the multi-level water stains on the side, had been there for a week or two at least. Still, being good citizens when we got to somewhere we could make a call we phoned the police just in case nobody had reported it yet. They received the report easily enough but then demanded name, phone number, street address, a …continue.

This article came across my desk and inspired me to make a poster. Well, it inspired me to find a poster, but I didn't locate one that resonated just the right way with me, so I made my own.

A portion of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth. Our world is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixels in size, coincidentally right in the center of a scattered light ray, resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.

"We succeeded in taking that picture , …continue.

Thanks to the persistence of Kent Nassen and the generosity of Jeff Wunderlich, the Aurora Text Editor can be downloaded and registered, “…the .bat file command I use to register is: ac -reg “Jeff Wunderlich” “xujcwpkgzngqmqn” 1 Feel free to share it with anyone on the net.”

So what’s the big deal? Well I covered most of it a few years ago in Musing on the Favourite Text Editor (slow link, involves time travel), but at the moment my biggest cause for joy is that I can, once again, select a column and inserting a character or range of characters (useful for turning fixed width text records into delimited text), and filling …continue.

A japanese "Kung Fu Bear" video has been circulating. I got curious about this history of this animal and managed to unearth a few tidbits. I may have some details wrong as I relied on google translate and there are multiple bears talked about on the same page at the Asa Zoological Park (in english).

In September 2002, about 70km(?) northwest of Hiroshima a mother Asiatic Black Bear with two cubs were marauding crops. Unavoidably the sow had to be shot. The surviving 13kg cub was too small to survive on his own and at the request of Hiroshima Prefecture was handed over to Asa Zoological Park for protection where he …continue.

Are users right in rejecting security advice? is a must read, in my opinion. Make sure to set some time aside to think it through and follow links. Favourite quotes:

We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort*

...costs and benefits do not always directly refer to financial gains or losses... Password rules place the entire burden on the user. ... [who] know that strictly observing the above rules is no guarantee of being safe from …continue.

This morning I had to dig up a series of emails and a script from almost 2 years ago in order to answer questions about what I’d exactly I’d given to someone (it was a digital elevation model mosaic). A 3rd party needed to know the specific datatype and precision of the model. I couldn’t remember, I’d long since deleted the mosiac, and since it was only a 1 day project which didn’t require learning or research I didn’t keep any notes.

After spending some time coming empty in the filesystem and not finding the email exchange I fired up Google Desktop Search and located the specific emails and …continue.