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It’s a strange time, this second decade of the 21st century. Something as seemingly innocent as a battery charger can infect your computer with malware, allowing someone else to gather data from it or otherwise exploit it for nefarious purposes. (Too bad, too; a charger that small would be a handy gadget for travel.)

Subject says it all–137 years of Popular Science magazine can now be browsed and searched online. Click here to go there.

I’m trying to log into my YouTube account, and it’s not accepting my password (even though I logged into the same account from a different machine using the same password a few minutes ago), so upon the advice of the help screen I asked for a password reset. Partway through the process I was presented [...]

Thanks, once again, to our friends Richard and Rafael, I recently sampled another one of the mysterious special-edition Pepsi products from Japan. This post is rather late in its arrival since it covers a product which is no longer in production. I confess that I sort of forgot that I had the bottle tucked away [...]

Strange but true: Barbie has a new career as a computer engineer:

Yes, this looks like yet another Photoshop job, but it’s the real deal. Barbie’s 125th career, determined for the first time by public vote, is as a computer engineer. The press release doesn’t say whether she’s in hardware or software engineering; her shirt seems [...]

Here’s a pair of essays that go together nicely: author Charles Stross examining the widespread misinterpretation of the phrase “information wants to be free” and dangers and fallacies therein; and songwriting legend Paul Williams reflecting upon a specific instance of these dangers.

Case in point here.

There’s a nice animation here that illustrates the size of Earth relative to the rest of the known universe. I should say that it attempts to illustrate that, though, since the scales involved are rather beyond our comprehension. Watch it in full-screen HD if you have the bandwidth.
(Thanks go to Chris for this one.)

There’s an hour-long BBC interview with Brian Eno posted here. I haven’t watched more than the first four minutes so far, but Synthtopia described it as a “must see”. If, like myself, you don’t happen to have time to watch it right away you might want to download yourself a copy. The last time I [...]

Today is one of those rare days on which the weather conditions are just right for producing beautiful snowflakes. There is some magic combination of temperature, humidity, still air, cloud formation, etc. that produces big, symmetric crystals that accumulate without damage. Here is a photo of the front step:

Click that photo to see a larger [...]