I’ve been running parallel wifi signals at home for a while, just to monitor who is actually in the airspace and trying to get on my networks, but this clever beaver has gone a few steps further and created a whole new way of seeing the world for people who try and connect to his signal:
My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun.
Very cute and harmless although, since it’s based on MAC, it’s not hard for the neighbors to bypass the access controls with only a slight modification.
I suppose a “don’t tread on me” message might be a little more effective since it would give a clear(er) message to people. I can just imagine the neighbors knocking on the door and saying “dude, did you know your wireless is all messed up?”
A San Francisco Based 40 foot custom boat “Mureadritta’s XL” that did
the Pacific Cup SF to Hawaii race was on its way home yesterday when they were hit by a whale 500nm north of Hawaii.
The crew was in contact with the owner via Sat phone. They tried stuffing the hole with sails and wrapping the outside of the boat with a jib to stem the flow but were not having any luck.
They eventually decided to abandon the boat on Tuesday morning. They were picked up last night around 8pm by a ship then transfered to a fishing trawler and are expected back at Honolulu on Friday.
All sailors are safe and un injured. They had all the proper safety gear EPIRB etc. Very lucky crew.
Lucky? I think proper planning was probably more relevant in this story since hitting a whale and sinking 500 miles from shore seems like bad luck to me.
Interesting that innovation has made sailboats lighter and stronger, and personal rescue equipment more reliable and comfortable, but there really is no open water hull-patch kit available yet. Stuffing the hole with sails sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie where people patch the hole in a space station with their pillows. Didn’t Heinlein write about that too? I wonder if there could be a better way, like pushing an umbrella-like device through the hole that could expand and then seal against the hull to stop the leak at least to the point where a sump could keep up with the flow. Probably too expensive to make it worthwhile to develop and test since the threat (being hit by a whale) is low and the asset value (of a sailboat) is only marginally high. I had my share of dangerous experiences sailing across the Pacific, but fortunately the only whales I saw kept their distance.
A snafu on the Google servers led to an exposure of another product about to be released to the public as a beta:
Writelys index page briefly showed an introduction to GDrive (as illustrated in the screenshot), then linked to pages available to Google employees only on the Google VPN.
Weak security, and scary foreshadowing of the safety of the product itself, or guerilla marketing?
Ooooh, I want one of these in my neighborhood. Check out the awesome stats on the engine:
Particulate Matter (PM) reduced by 90 percent over the cleanest diesel buses now in Metro’s fleet
Carbon Monoxide (CO) reduced by 90 percent over the cleanest diesel buses now in Metro’s fleet
Hydrocarbons (HC) reduced by 90 percent
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) reduced by 40-60 percent
Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) reduced by 50 percent
When Washington state mandates biodiesel (B5?), there is likely to be even more emission reductions. Ok, the next question for me is why the “big heavy box” design is still around. What if they took old airplane fueselages that are doing nothing but gathering dust and repurpose them for public transportation? They are light, strong and probably far more efficient. If they rode high-enough you wouldn’t even need bumpers on the fueselage, just the chassis. I’ll see if I can doodle something into an example.
