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From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: a guide to Surveillance Self-Defense. Surveillance Self-Defense is a digital security guide that teaches you how to assess your personal risk from online spying. It can help protect you from surveillance by those who might want to find out your secrets, from petty criminals to nation states. I’ve got some reading and some configuring to do this Thanksgiving break.

Went to see Robert Zemeckis' "Here" in the theater. It wasn't easy, but I generally liked it. Here I blather on and on about it with some good links to things related.Currently Listening: Alan Silvestri “This is Here”Reply via email

Red Fern Booksellers, Salina, KS (Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)Regular followers know that I can be swept away in any bookstore and perhaps inclined to exaggeration. Trust me when I say that Red Fern Booksellers is not beautiful, it is truly gorgeous. The work that owner Harley H. and his team put into this space is impressive. As he told …

Very excited to share that applications are now open for the speculative fiction work/shop! This five-week program is for anyone who feels stuck and unfulfilled in their work and who wants to open up some space to imagine different futures. If your work feels like it’s at a dead end, if you’re struggling to imagine what comes next, if you want space to think both differently and in community—this is …

It looks like it might be a fun kit to build. I recently found a couple additional laser cut wooden kits that deserve another look. This will be my second item listed under the new label of boat.

Peanuts fans have had a number of podcasts to listen to over the years. Currently, there’s Unpacking Peanuts (working its way through the Peanuts canon four months per episode), Talking Nuts (working its way through the canon one month per episode), and It’s a Podcast, Charlie Brown (focused on, but not solely about, Peanuts in animation.) In the past, well, the AAUGH Blog Podcast was around for sixty interesting largely-book-themed …

Alfred Cotgreave, shown here with one of his library inventions, the “Long Reacher” for getting books from high shelves. Alfred Cotgreave (1849-1911), born in Ecclestone, Cheshire, invented the Cotgreave Indicator, a proto-digital method of telling library patrons which books were available for loan and which we out. It’s a large rack holding little tile-like containers. “Each slot contains a tiny ledger (like a notepad) with a reference number, linking to …

It's the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, which means that (as longtime readers know) I will be preparing a chocolate pecan pie, as I do every year. The recipe is here, and I've been making it the same way for nearly thirty years, so I think I can put this one in the "reliable" category. That's it at right! I'm also in charge of preparing the turkey around …

This is the title of my new draft paper on SSRN. Here is the Abstract:This Essay explores the most remarkable constitutional argument ever forgotten. In 1871, Representative William Loughridge dissented from a report by the House Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee rejected a petition by Victoria Woodhull claiming that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave women the right to vote. Representative Loughridge replied with a defense of women’s suffrage that …

In Akashi, Japan, the seaside HiPoPo PaPa restaurant boasts a rather unique bathroom. Longtime restaurant owner Koichi Miyanaga built this aquarium bathroom way back in the 1980s, though design firms all told him it was impossible.According to Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, Koichi DIY'd it with a carpenter buddy and a glassworker buddy. It took them four tries to get it right (one of the early versions cracked under the …

There are a handful of flashlights/torches with the flexible Anduril user interface (UI) that are suitable for light painting photography. Undoubtably the smallest is the 14500 battery format Wurkkos TS10 SG, with the throwy Luminus SFT-25R LED. This review takes a look at how the TS10 SG performs for light painting photography and general purpose use. Disclaimer The Wurkkos TS10 SG was purchased with my own funds. Product links in …

Weekly, Regional Policy Director Dan Reed and DC Policy Director Alex Baca will share with you an action you can take in the immediate future that has the potential, sometimes great and sometimes small, to increase the number of homes in our region, decrease the trips people take by car, make all of it safer, and not screw people over in the process. This week: it’s one year of Do …

Today, I wanted to share a little Web Component I made for expanding or collapsing all of the <details> elements on a page. Let’s dig in! Why do you need this? Over on the Lean Web Club, I host a massive, searchable collection of courses and tutorials on a wide range of front-end topics. I originally just had them all as one giant list, but the page got comically long …

You are asking, “Where are you? Are you okay? Are you still blogging?” In TikTok parlance, “Great questions. Let me tell you.” First, this standard TikTok pattern is one I find really interesting. It fills in he politeness / nicety gap that has become common in the last decade or two, where people jump into answering questions. This nod to thanking the person asking encourages questions and puts people at …

[vaccines] The Impact of Vaccines … Astonishing infographic showing the effectiveness of vaccines against common diseases across time.