2. Blog

World from Space, Over the Year

World from Space, Over the Year
This NASA moving image, recorded by satellite over a full year as part of their Blue Marble Project, shows the ebb and flow of the seasons and vegetation.

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Plead the Fifth

A reminder that the odds are so stacked against you, you probably should just plead the fifth (i.e. stay silent) every time you have to talk to the cops. It’s a combination of more crimes than the (US) Federal government can count (and thus the very real possibility you’re committed a crime unknowingly), plus the ability of cops to take your statements out of context and spin them against you. Plus, you avoid the possibility of a providing a false confession — confessing to a crime you didn’t commit, sometimes just to get the cops to leave you alone.

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Problems with PRISM (and the need for Privacy)

Recently, American Edward Snowden exposed a ton of information about what information the US government, via the NSA, is collecting off the internet. The NSA, naturally, had given anything but a straight answer. It seems the NSA program exists in some form, but many details remain murky. No matter, Edward said he wanted to have a discussion about surveillance, and perhaps privacy, and that is what this post is really about.

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Alberta Yellows — Photo 100 — Project 365

Alberta Yellows — Photo 100 — Project 365
Alberta is amazing for its landscapes. Much of it is flat, and combined with roads surveyed before anyone lived there on even mile spacing, you can get roads that seem to go on forever. This picture was take in October (Thanksgiving weekend, actually) and so the grass was basically dead but the snow had yet to come, leaving this beautiful palette of yellows.

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Push a Hg Repo to GitHub

So the scenario is thus: There is a project that I want to contribute to that is a Mercurial (Hg) repository (or ‘repo’ for short). I’ve taken a liking to Git; GitHub in particular with their new and beautiful Windows frontend. So how do I take a remote Hg repo and push it to GitHub. As follows (the following assumes you have a Ubuntu box available to play with, although I imagine many Linux machines would work the same way):

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Waterfall — Photo 98 — Project 365

Waterfall — Photo 98 — Project 365
Still in the National Parks between Banff and Jasper, I found this waterfall. The effect I was going for here was one of fluid motion - by setting a (relatively) long shutter speed (a tenth of a second, in this case), the motion of the water is captured. At the other extreme, with an extremely fast shutter speed, you can freeze a waterfall, making it look almost as if it had turned to ice in an instant.

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Wild Rose — Photo 97 — Project 365

Wild Rose — Photo 97 — Project 365
The wild rose is Alberta’s provincial flower, picked by the schoolchildren not long after the province’s creation in 1905. The flower is beautiful, but I rarely see it in the city. I was extra excited to find one of this size and open like this.

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Tiny Bridge — Photo 96 — Project 365

Tiny Bridge — Photo 96 — Project 365
Bridges are usually seen when standing on them or sometimes beside them, but rarely straight down like this. This is taken along the Icefields Parkway, about halfway between Jasper and Banff, looking down from a roadside lookout.

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