Kilo Seven

Update: This Reuters news story confirms a likely shortage of analog TV converter discount coupons. Update #2: They're out of coupons. Update #3: Posts in this series now have easy-to-remember TinyURLs: tinyURL.com/dtv-pdx This post. tinyURL.com/dtv-qanda Q&A on DTV conversion. tinyURL.com/dtv-ready How to tell if your TV set is digital-ready. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE DIGITAL TV CONVERSION Thanks to The Consumerist blog for this diagram. If your set is NOT digital-ready, AND you don't have cable or satellite, you'll need a converter. Call 888-DTV-2009 or go to www.DTV.gov and provide your name and address to get $40-off coupons. Move fast, as coupons could run out . A future blog post will list available converters. Many Portland stations will change their channel assignments. Click on this chart of Portland-area stations, sorted by their network, to see it in a new window or tab with greater clarity. Since the list above shows every VHF station in Metro Portland wi...

A blog entry at the Wall Street Journal Online reveals a giant vaccine and pharmaceutical company, Glaxo, has not fully prepared its staff for a pandemic . If a flu vaccine contractor does not already have 100% of its workforce vaccinated against H5N1, I have to ask, why?

This New Scientist article points to multiple looming shortages in strategic metals and minerals needed for devices now commonplace and important. Similar tensions over supplies of other rare metals are not hard to imagine. The Chinese government is supplementing its natural deposits of rare metals by investing in mineral mines in Africa and buying up high-tech scrap to extract metals that are key to its developing industries. The US now imports over 90 per cent of its so-called "rare earth" metals from China, according to the US Geological Survey. If China decided to cut off the supply, that would create a big risk of conflict, says Reller.

A list of 20 great free programs for Windows all IT folk, and some home users, should consider.

Look at one e-mail send by Bill Gates. After you put your coffee down.

This Scientific American interview confirms what I have known for decades; software is no science.

Got to wonder how long this embarassment to cyber journalism will last. For, there is no University of Northern Oregon, and therefore I do doubt there are any chimps posting on Facebook... Here's the story , and the debunk , for your ROFL du jour.

Here's this year's hockey-stick nullification , more bad science undone by facts. Freeman Dyson 's also actually done some science in dissecting two books on global 'warming' . Both recommended.

After reading a NY Times article on easy smart card ID theft , I decided to go looking for a new wallet to hold my new WaMu-issued credit card with the Fast-Pass/Quick-Pay/Easy-Steal RFID 'feature'. I found a five-pack of RFID sleeves for $25, a $23 wallet (in red, pink, tan, black leather and black vinyl), an any-color-you-want-so-long-as-it's-black wallet for $20, more wallets , and a $10 shield for one card (all prices FOB No Name City, Oregon). If I worked for Halliburton, I suppose I could afford the $95 stainless steel wallet found here . Then, I found a DIY design ... and will test it once I find myself the copper foil I got at the good ol' hardware store for slug protection, and some metal window screening. The more crafty among you will enjoy this source for metal cloth .

5GB of off-line storage is available for free from Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive and 4Shared for off-site backup of your important data, if you need to make files available to other folks, or if you need access away from home and don't want to set up a remote acccess program . It's easy to back up your Documents and Settings folder with the Open Source freeware program, 7-Zip . Uploading the data the first time may take a while, but if you do a differential (everything that's changed since the last complete backup), subsequent backups are much quicker to make, much quicker to upload.

tinyurl.com/5s6x8l

Despite their red robes and shaved heads and the fact they were spending their days in a giant monastery at the top of a windy hill where they were meant to be in dialogue with God, some of the 15 monk disciples had cellphones — Nokia cellphones — and most were fancier models than the one Chipchase was carrying. One of the disciples asked to look at Chipchase’s phone. “So he’s got my phone and his phone,” Chipchase told me. “And as we’re talking, he’s switching on the Bluetooth. And he then data-mines my phone for all its content, all my photographs and so on, which is absolutely fine, but it’s kind of a scene where you think, I’m here, I’m so away from everything and yet they’re so technically literate. . . . ” From an NY Times story on how Nokia studies who's buying cellphones for the first time, and why.

Interesting list of services to help your cellphone do more in the   NY Times technology pages .

Mrs. KiloSeven has advised the 15 y.o. Samsung guest room TV Has To Go , due to the high-pitched audible from the flyback transformer. So, I am starting to mull over the updated list of what Sears has (as they owe us a kilobuck for reasons too esoteric to mention here) and starting to read HDTV Buying Guides . What buying guides have you found useful? Any thoughts on choices?

Canada's Financial Post has an excellent article with links to 27 (yes, twenty-seven) other articles on the same subject. This artcle zeros in on mud-core samples off the lower mainland of British Columbia, and with that evidence in hand, then correlates known solar variance with their findings. It goes on to recap the theory that low solar output allows more cosmic rays more cosmic rays become cloud-chamber-like nuclei for cloud formation the kinds of clouds formed reflect heat and the earth cools. So, even though the amount of energy sent our way from the Sun decreases a little, there's a greater influence on Earth's climate as a result of that solar variance. The author finds his skepticism to the very political science trumpeted by Algore and the Kyoto gang is not alone in the scientific community: In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did ...

TechRepublic 's adopted me as a digi-pundit, complete with ugly masthead pic. ROFL away. OMG IF U CN RD THS U R BSTD Milan make me buy more, me like Microsoft’s Milan? Does Palm see the Vision Thing? Let’s see with the Foleo. $100 laptop debuts in Uruguay. Can you hear me now (from 5.5 miles high)? AdSense ad-heavy sites swept away in Google late spring cleaning. Anti-spyware bill sent to Senate, passes House. Diamonds: Girl’s best friend / Evidence of global cooling? Information wants to be free, including air ticket prices. Motorola mobiles send Linux handsets stateside Quicker Quicken profits. Another strike against DRM: Amazon weighs in for better digital downloads.

For the cost of the long distance call (a portion of which, by agreement, custom and law goes to the terminating phone company), this itty bitty Iowa telco gives you free conference calling . Calls can be arranged either ad hoc , or pre-booked over the web , at no charge to you. This turns cellular companies and long distance carriers, upset at losing their slide of a very lucrative market (profit margins of 29,000% are not unheard of among phone comanies for specific services) into psychopathically rapid wolverines, and the attack lawyers are circling, only their fins showing above water . Of course, you know what to do if you calls are blocked; change long distance companies. This website gives you the information you need to make an informed choice about long distance resellers .

The virtual economy is growing apace. Now, there's a VISA card for World of Warcraft : Priceless.

Here the Register interviews two smart lads who are ready to take over every Windows Vista machine their software touches . Hmm.

Bake coal w/ waste heat from a nuke plant, get Carbon Monoxide AKA ' coal gas '. Sequester the radon, other radioactive nasties and heavy metals found in coal (which is why people die of cancer downwind of coal plants, and why coal kills many times more folks than nuclear power). Add more Hydrogen, electrolized from water with nuclear power (the oxygen gets liquidized, and goes to hospitals or industrial processes). Voila! Low sulfur diesel fuel, and jet fuel , using a plant designed by a Vancouver WA company . Can you say, "Energy Independence?" With a two hundred year worldwide coal reserve , we have some time to think about the next step in energy , which is what Japan is now planning to test .

It's over at Operation Dice Drop now.

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Operation Dice Drop was just Slashdotted .

Z iggurat Con, where R.P.G. isn't just a Rocket Propelled Grenade , needs your help. UPDATED 4/21 & 4/22: A message from SPC Amberson, ZC's chair, suggests a deadline for shipment to Ziggurat Con by Military Mail (and the general restrictions on what can be sent ): Saturday 26 May for Express Mail Monday 21 May for Priority Mail - (much cheaper than Express Mail) 9 May for Media Mail - Parcel Post takes about 2 months, so if you ship via Parcel Post, there's little-to-no chance of arrival before the con. Here's a postal rate calculator ; use 09331 as the destination zip code. He added: We have been so long without books, dice and such that whatever you can send will be appreciated. I think it would be best to let you know what games are actually scheduled for the event. This way you can decide for yourself what you wish to send. The best way is to send by US Postal Service (we don't get any other deliveries here). Sunday - 1200-1600 1. GURPS 2. Shadowrun 3. ...

Philo T. Farnsworth , the inventor of practical television, whose genius you've relied on to watch mind-numbing network TV, was a polymath and inventor of many other things; one was inertial electrostatic confinement , which he turned into an early (i.e., not generating more power than it takes to run) nuclear fusion reactor. Starting in the middle of Tuesday's Mail, the esteemed First Blogger has started discussing Dr. Bussard's refinements of the Farnsworth Fusor . Sadly, after Bussard blew up his lab (always a sign in physics you've done something interesting ), he asked to rebuild, but DOD won't renew funding . Here's the Executive Summary with links to more details, i.e., a NYT story (2MB PDF) discussing Bussand and others , a small (1.5MB PDF) paper, Should Google Go Nuclear? , a lengthy paper (4.6MB) presented at last year's International Astronautical Congress , a streaming video of a presentation at Google HQ , and a few pix of apparatus along...

free WiFi router from http://www.fon.com/1yearold/

C|Net reports : The official search for James Kim and his family in the Oregon backwoods was plagued by squabbling among police agencies, confusion, indifference and mistakes, a government report released Thursday says. The OSSA entire report is worth reading , as is this letter to the editor ( 'If it matters to Oregonians, it's in the Washington Post' ) from Kim's father about media interference in the search. Ask your state representatives what they will do to make sure existing, adequate and competent basics are followed when this happens again.

Greg Schultz , a Kentuckyian and techie, found this bon mot : Windows XP Home did indeed come with a backup utility...it just wasn't included in the default installation. However, it could be found on the Windows XP Home installation CD in the folder \VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP. Something every home user should do: BACK UP YOUR DATA.

The mind boggles. And there's at least one nude Wi-Fi beach: Florida's Haulover Beach . Shirley Mason, the executive director of the naturalist Beaches Foundation, says she sees people using their laptops all the time. Or, so sayeth WIRED .

A security breach in Google's Gmail and other services has been fixed. Deep cleansing sigh of relief , as Gmail is my brain nowadays. Why? It's nifty; here's a ten-point explanation why .

The ">NY Times has a habit of removing articles two weeks after posted, so don't dawdle to read ">this article on security exploits within Windows Vista . A sploit for IE7 is also cited, as well as the elevation insecurity risk within the Vista beta. Not having Vista myself, I can't comment on this exploit; the one 30-day beta I did try this summer was attractive, yet plagued (as early betas often are) with hindrances (as First Blogger Jerry Pournelle noted, it required user permission, annoyingly, far too often).

Charlie Stross, most excellent author of the unthinkable and unspeakable , has a weblog article deserving of your consideration . Here's a snippet: The point is, someone with access to fresh Polonium 210 (read: less than a year old, hot from the reactor) decided to use it to bump off an enemy. And the terrorism alert status hasn't risen a notch? Pull the other one. Anyway, to the point: this wasn't simply an assassination. There are any number of poisons out there that would do the job painfully well but much more rapidly, and without the same scope for a diplomatic incident. Likewise, a bullet to the back of the head would have worked just as well (as witness the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya ). What this is, is a warning: "we have the capability to detonate a dirty bomb in central London any time we feel like it, so don't f*ck with us". (Just take Polonium and add a little TNT.) (Ed. note: Or, ANFO .) Who the warning is from, and who the intended r...

Robert X. Cringely, doyen compu-columnist for PBS , reports on a hidden e-mail problem at Earthlink: They're losing up to 9 messages out of 10 , found as a result of a friend's testing: He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail. Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain . (Emphasis mine.) Gee, you don't suppose they expect we actually want the e-mail ser...

Pending the availability of a security fix, Microsoft advises users "not [to] open or save Word files that you receive from untrusted sources or that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources." Can Micro$oft be considered a 'trusted source' any more? Here's the advisory from Micro$oft they own selves and from The Register . Meanwhile, want security? Download and use OpenOffice , which is free and virus free.

UPDATE 2: SF Chronicle final story with the best graphic of the area yet seen . UPDATE: C|Net's obit . Sadly, the body of James Kim was found today. SMS text transmissions to his cellphone were traced to the search area, which led to finding his wife and their children where their car had crashed . However, the cellular reception in that remote area was so poor that it would not sustain a voice call. Wilderness experts advise you, do NOT leave your vehicle when lost. This was a sad example of that wisdom. For more on how SMS will work, when cellphones don't work for voice, see this explanation . I've used it to communicate with folks out on the tundra near Barrow whose satphone batteries were running down, and knowing how it works could save you .

A photo set showing the area where James Kim is lost, including a searcher lowered from a helicopter to see better, dangling from a rope in mid-air. Panel two, if you zoom in, shows the helo from afar. Photos courtesy the Oregon State Police .

This morning, when I Googled the route from Glendale off I-5 to Gold Beach , it sent me over the same unplowed road the Kims were lost on. See photo, below. Folks, NF means National Forest, BLM means Bureau of Land Management, and Oregon is NOT the place to take those roads, except during high summer, unless you've got a ham radio transceiver and you've filed a 'drive plan' with someone reliable who know where you're going and when you will check in. Period. Don't count on a cellphone, despite the USA Today clueless suggestion, for the majority of Oregon's land has no, repeat, no cellular coverage. Don't rely on the low-power, crippled-design FRS or GMRS handy-talkies; get a real radio with real range , and learn how to use it (no more Morse Code requirement for your first license !). Here's an update and another on the Kims: James was reported by his wife to have left their car Saturday, December 2nd, at 7:45 a.m. in attempt to obtain help. ...

The Kim family and vehicle, minus Kim himself, were found this afternoon, and airlifted out. If I read the press releases correctly, somewhere between Merlin and Agness . The search for James Kim continues .

BoingBoing reports former TechTV product reviewer and current C|Net editor James Kim is missing along with his family while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest. James, his wife and two children left last week on a road trip. They were last seen in Portland on Saturday November 25th, where they visited with friends, before driving off in a silver Saab 900 wagon, California vanity plates DOESF as per Red Dixon's blog . OSP released photos of their type of silver Saab 900 wagon and have another press release with details posted at PDXINFO.NET . A SAR (Search and Rescue) mission is now underway . A tip center has been set up at 1-800-452-7888, and the San Francisco PD is also taking calls at 415-558-5508 during normal business hours and at 415-553-1071 after hours.

Here's an amazing explanation of why Longhorn/Vista took so long to reach market and why it's going to be a dud. An entire team of people working for a full year to code the shutdown menu . Sheesh.