T H I N K

Dear Mayor Ford,

Another cyclist has been killed in Toronto, this time a block from my house. I think it's time to reverse your attacks on cycling infrastructure. Surely you don't want your legacy to be a collection of cyclist deaths, do you?

Sincerely,
Isaac Quinn DuPont

The fan has decent build quality, and is not bad looking, but it's actually quite large (where am I going to put this thing in the winter now!?). It has a nice array of settings, but they are deeply marred by the confirmation sound every time a key is depressed (a screeching buzz); this is especially problematic with the "sleep" function. The fan offers you the option of 30 minutes to 6 hours of sleep timing, but at the end of the timer it emits the loud confirmation sound---easily loud enough to wake you from your sleep if you have the fan in your bedroom. Also, for such a large fan it really doesn't move all that much air--small blower fans move much more (and it isn't any quieter than those). So, skip this one.

Purchased at Best Buy for $79.99

After looking for an encryption tool to properly secure Dropbox and Evernote I decided to take Tao Effect's Espionage encryption tool for a spin. After about 30 seconds of use, I can strongly suggest that you do not use it. I had read on their blog that it was problematic to use Evernote and/or Dropbox with Espionage, which I thought a shame, since that's my main goal. Nonetheless, I decided to try it out. Upon installation I discovered, to my mistaken delight, that it included an "application framework" for Evernote, and even Chrome (but not Dropbox)! I turned on both and then the fun began. Nearly instantly Evernote crashed hard, complaining about a database error. Then, trying to back out my encryption of the Evernote database Espionage went into a CPU lock (spinning beach ball), not stopping until I force-quit the application. Finally, after a restart of my machine I was able to get back in to Espionage and undo its disastrous work. It's a near miracle that I didn't lose all my data.

And it would be blank. There is no tech angle. Seriously. Don't try.

Stanley Fish's recent NY Times post suggests that our limited epistemic net prohibits us from sharing ethics with things that can't communicate their agency, e.g., a tree's desire to keep its fruit. Suspicious as it is with respect to a conception of ethics, it's also an old concern. The Judicium Jovis, written around 1495, tackles this ecological question as well, but complicates the Christian response. Let's call it a Tuesday old-meets-new juxtaposition.

[EDIT: I mistakenly reported that Rdio averaged 40 kbits/s, when in fact it averaged 40 kbytes/s)

Rdio is my current (de jour) music streaming service . I was using Slacker Radio, but I've switched to Rdio and I vastly prefer it. Being located in Canada, the options for streaming music services are pretty limited, but generally speaking I'm quite happy with Rdio (although I get pretty annoyed with the number of albums not available in Canada... probably about 1/4-1/3 of the total I search for).

They're Mad as hell <-- That's PhD students. 

Seriously guys, this Posterous blog has been running intermittently for well over a year now, 

The New York Times paywall has arrived for us Canadians, and it will be arriving stateside shortly. There is already considerable discussion on the Internet about it, and how it is generally fairly easy to evade. For example, of the total 20 free articles/month, any links from social networking sites don't count, and any links from Google are counted seperately to a total of five.

But, there are a number of easy ways to get around the paywall without searching around Twitter for links

1. Cookie blocking or cookie clearing. Yup, New York Times tracks your clicks in a cookie. If you delete the cookie periodically (or block it in the first place) you can read articles without restriction. Choose your favourite Firefox or Chrome extension to help with this.
2. Read on Instapaper (Read it Later or Read it Now). Once you reach your 20 article limit the screen is blocked with a large advertisement asking you to sign up. You can click on links back to the home page, or press your browser's back button, either of which will allow you to browse the New York Times webpage, but any time you click in to a link you will see the text momentarily, and then the advertisement will swoop in and block everything. The blocking, however, leaves the underlying HTML untouched, so if you use a tool that reads the HTML instead of the rendered version you can still get the article. Instapaper's bookmarklet adds a POST form to the page which is used to scrape the HTML and send it back to Instapaper for viewing, so if you use either the Read it Now or the Read it Later bookmarklets you can view the page without problem (in Instapaper's clutter-free rendition of the page).

<Update: likewise, you can use Chrome or Firefox's incognito/private browing feature to remove cookies as soon as the session is over. Just open NYTimes.com in a new private browsing window, and when you are done all your cookies will be cleared.>