A long long time ago I had Verizon FiOS installed at my home, and with it they supplied an Actiontec router and wireless access point. It worked reasonably well, but it needed a power cycle every now and then and any custom configuration was difficult. I could never get it …

When I was growing up, I loved making paper airplanes.  I also used to spend a lot of time at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.  One time when I was there I saw a kit full of amazing looking plans for planes.  They were "Whitewings" model kits, and I …

(Alternate title: make booting from an ISO image in OpenStack useful)

If you have access to a server with plenty of disk space and CPU that supports the same hypervisor your cloud uses, it’s relatively easy to create an OpenStack machine image.  You can also pretty easily do this …

This is not the first time I've said don't watch TV, or don't sit at work.  But this new article from NY times references some new studies that make the dangers of lethargy all the more vivid.

"Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the …

It's absolutely amazing what big pharma gets away with, but it seems like so few people are aware or the least bit concerned.  We might never know how many people Merck & Co. killed with Vioxx (maybe half a million?).  The more you read, the more you find one scary story …

Now THIS one definitely sounds appropriate for a blog with "conspiracy" in the title!  I've been collecting a bunch of related stories for several months now with the intention of turning it into a blog post.  Sadly I've had way too much other stuff to do lately, so I thought …

If you have kids, you probably love playing with them and making things together.  One of the best things you can do for them is to encourage imaginative play, and few things enable imagination in a young mind better than a nice lump of play-doh.

After experimenting with several different …

[EDIT 20120-05-13: You can follow these steps (though by now they're already fairly outdated), and end up with a mostly functional home phone system connected to a free Google Voice number.  It will break often, as Google makes changes, and your Asterisk box needs updating, and who knows what else …

This David Foster Wallace speech (read here, or watch here) is one of the most inspirational things I've ever read.  It's great to be reminded to be mindful, to be aware of those knee-jerk reactions and consider whether or not they're completely off base.

"The point is that petty, frustrating …

The harder someone tries to sell you something, the more suspicious you should be.  Why don't more people realize that?  When something is truly great it sells itself.  When it doesn't, throw marketing at it!  Got milk?  Seen a McDonalds add lately?

If you've ever wondered why food makers switched …