Linkfest: Onion, Backing up, etc.

Quick Link Dump.

First, a lot of fun articles from the Onion:

Also: Dan Simmons talks about the appeal of Wendall Berry. Berry’s rules for new technology (as enumerated by Barbara Kingsolver):

  1. The new tool should cost less than the one it replaces.
  2. It should be at least as small as the one it replaces.
  3. It should do better work.
  4. It should use less energy.
  5. Ideally it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
  6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence.
  7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
  8. It should come from a small shop that will take it back for repair.(And most important, in Barbara Kingsolver’s opinion . . .)
  9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Eric Raymond on why porn is so bad . In short, male insecurity and powerlessness cause them to iconify females into untouchable and artificial poses.

Baratunde on the problems with facebook :

The Facebook apps explosion has been talked about in many places. The apps have definitely made Facebook a more interesting place, but app notification is becoming spam-like. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten the notification “8 of your friends have added the Deez Nutz application” only to be followed 24 hours later by “200 of your friends have removed the Deez Nutz application.” A day later, I get another notice, “John Smith would like you to Suck on Deez Nutz. Click here to install the Deez Nutz application.”

Baratunde has a hair-raising story about losing his backups. His backup method is far more sophisticated than mine. Mozy, RAID, etc. I’ve noticed he’s using gmail/Google Docs for his documents which makes a lot of sense as well.

teleread discussion about men and reading books.

Ever wonder what those XP stoperror messages mean? I’m troubleshooting one right now. Frustrating and scary.

Scott Dunn reports that PC users are rife with out-of-date plugin applications. To check whether your own system plugins are current, follow this free link on the Secunia site. The results are sobering: apparently Flash, Adobe Reader, Java don’t cleanly uninstall older versions of software when upgrading.

Holy cow, I have 4 older installations of java on my machine (plus one new one). I’m reluctant to uninstall because I know applications have dependencies on specific java libraries.

Update: I tried updating my quicktime software, and it caused my system to crash. Way to go, Apple! (Warning: it looks like you have not yet installed iTunes. Do you want to install it now?)


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