ModeNomad

So there’s this guy, Benny the Irish Polyglot. He’s got an angle where he tackles a new language several times a year, aiming to get to a moderate level of fluency in the target language within an approximately three-month period. He’s not quite that rigid about his timing, but that’s the basic idea. Rather fittingly, the site where he blogs about these projects is called Fluent in Three Months.

I’m pretty sure I’m the last guy on the planet to notice the changing state of things with Delicio.us. There I was happily using the Firefox extension that created the cool left-hand pane of my stored bookmarks one day and then, a single automatic Firefox extension later, and I’m told that I’m out of the Delicio.us extension business. The underlying Delicio.us service still exists, of course, but only as a Web-based interface.

Plato quotes Socrates framing the question for the first time we see it in print, something along the lines of: “Why would someone who knows that A is the best thing for them to do for themselves do anything other than A?”

Since ModeNomad runs on Drupal, it’s a trivial matter to support reader comments. Indeed, comments is turned on by default when Drupal is installed, so you’re actually adding a couple of steps to the setup if you don’t want comments.

I guess you know you’ve gone slightly over some kind of edge when public radio starts sounding to vapid to listen to. But there it is, I’ve sort of given up on my local WHYY. On the other hand, force of habit means that I still switch on the radio next to the sink when I’m doing dishes or otherwise working in the kitchen. Just now, this led me to The Burning House.

If your house was burning, what would you take with you? The general drill is that you answer the questin and you accompany it with a photo of the stuff.

If you need to clean a few thousand emails that you’ve let pile up out of your email account, the bespoke tool for it is Mailstrom. It’s in an invitation-only beta right now, but you can request access at Mailstrom.co. It does stuff you could of course do yourself using search, but in a much, much cleaner, simpler interface. It also means you hand over account access to a few guys you’ve never met. Which worries me, but first let’s talk about why a normal, friendly guy like me would have five thousand emails in his inbox in the first place.

I think I prefer to live in a world where social engineering is shockingly effective. I prefer an open world to a shuttered one.

There’s just oodles of deep creepiness lurking in this story about this past summer’s social engineering contest at the Defcon conference.

Somehow I got myself sucked into the (tiny) universe of tiny houses. By tiny houses, I mean houses that have real people living in them full time, but that are extremely small by current American standards. Twelve feet on a side in some cases, seldom much longer than a couple dozen feet on the long side in any case.

You know what's kind of annoying about the state of blogging these days? Well, ok, it's a long list, but *one* thing is the way that entries tend to be "need" to be a few paragraphs long. So a guy can have a reasonable insight, like, say, that you should treat your time like you'd treat a budget, and you can get it in exactly one line like that, see implications for your own life, but he feels compelled to blather on, explaining the obvious with no additional insight, because that's what fills the page.

There’s a problem—and I wonder if it’s not an intractable one—lurking in rush to embrace Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Obviously, security is an issue. But it’s more than an issue. It’s an enterprise security breakdown waiting to happen. An article at Dark Reading touched on this: