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There is a breaking news story about a group of hacker types that broke into a computer system, obtained some emails (about 200 megs worth) and released that information to the public.  The institution that was broken into was the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, who provided the key data for the UNs IPCC, shows they suppressed evidence that for the last 10 years climate change is not occuring.  They also discussed ways to discredit and silence dissenters who do not agree with the IPCC report or in climate change on various levels.

This is good news because if it is proved true, and so far confirmations are starting to pour in that the data is in fact true, then all of the doom that was predicted for the planet is completely false.  This means that we are not facing total extinction, sea levels will not rise and flood the coastal areas, crops will not die, we will not experience droughts of epic proportions leading to lack of water and food causing wars (why Al Gore won his nobel peace prize, for helping to prevent hundreds of wars over resource exhaustion related to climate change), and more. (continue reading…)

I have an Asus 1000HE eeepc.  I like it, mostly its battery life.  I installed eeebuntu not being a big windows fan and was displeased when I discovered that you could not directly install to a root cryptofs.  I did it anyway, although it takes a round-a-bout method to accomplish.

For those that do not know, cryptofs is a whole disk encryption solution in linux.  It is transparent to the user, aside from having to enter a passphrase (which can be very long) when you mount the disk.  Making / (root) cryptofs requires some modification to the initrd so that it will load the appropriate modules, set up the proper pseudodevice entries, and then mount the disk.  Swap can also be made encrypted making it even more difficult for anyone to get anything out of your system should it fall into the wrong hands.

Unlike some of the other tutorials out there I do not require you to do an intermediate temporary install, this means that your entire disk except /boot can be encrypted in one go. (continue reading…)

The zombies have attacked, infrastruture is down, there will be no more cigarette deliveries made.  How will you get your nicotine fix?  I recently started smoking electronic cigarettes, they are composed of a tip which you add a couple drops of nicotine infused oil to, an vaporizer which heats the oil into a vapor, and a battery.  The whole thing looks like a cigarette, smokes like a cigarette and provides nicotine like a cigarette (which helps my legs, I have RLS and PLMD which about 10% of the population has to some degree).

Smoking can also give away your position due to the odor given off, electronic cigarettes give off water vapor so they do not pose the fire hazard, but also they do not have the odor, as a result no one will be attracted to the smell of them, ensuring at least a little bit of safety.  There was an FDA report that came out, it said that some manufacturers (but not all!) contain some potentially bad chemicals, some contain nothing deemed harmful.  Some have twice the normal amount of nicotine, but most are accurately labeled.  The biggest complaint appears to be the flavors, they come in chocolate, cherry, vanilla and more.  The claim is that they only make these flavors to get kids to smoke therefore the entire industry must be banned.  Its insane logic at best.  Electronic cigarettes do not have a tobacco tax since there is no tobacco, they also do not have tar or about 4000 other chemicals that are present in regular cigarettes, while this is still fewer than normal air, things like carbon monoxide are not present which makes it somewhat healthier. (continue reading…)