Recovering from more hard drive woes

Yes, I’m still using the same nonereliable hard drive that resulted in frequent beach balling. On Sunday, it had some more surprise alligators in store for me and decided to render my hard drive unbootable by corrupting the file system journal used to recover from sudden crashes/loss of power. My first instinct was to run the Disk Utility repair feature on the drive, but this was a no-go because, firstly, I was using Filevault 2, Apple’s full-disk encryption software.

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Schmidt's on in China (and Hollywood)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposes new US copyright laws that requires ISPs to remove offending URLs from the Internet on the grounds that this is censorship. Would he say the same thing if someone leaked Google’s search algorithm(s) onto the Internet? Maybe not, considering Google’s support of censorship in China — at least until they were the target of cyber attacks had a change of heart.

In an ironic twist, he also supports the rights of Hollywood to fight against pirates saying, “Their business models are threatened by theft”. Why ironic? Last time I checked, large swathes of Google are powered by copyright violations. Hello, YouTube! Or even some of its digitization projects.

Edit: This post is short, but tangentially related to a long paper I’m writing that I hope will be interesting. Fingers crossed!

Life on a shoestring: Part III — Food

No, this is not a post about eating peanut butter and bread or becoming a vegan or freegan to save money. This was supposed to be a longer piece, but… well…

Canada, as a whole, is awash in food. Not only are we facing an obesity epidemic, but we have the luxury of eating more food just so that we can or ought to go burn it off at the gym. Yes, many of us are quite sedentary, but for those of us that aren’t, if you had to limit your daily physical energy expenditure to 500 “leisure” calories, what would you use them for? Taking a walk? Playing an instrument?