I have a thought, but I'm not well equipped to model the economics of it. I want to investigate it further.

When your cell phone can't be trusted - maybe the NSA has put on a virus, or another app - then you're in trouble. How can you be sure your data is not being modified? One way that Google and Apple accomplish this is through cloud sync. If your data is synced to the cloud, it can be modified, but it goes via Google or Apple, with logging included.

I just tried to implement cgroups on an Ubuntu machine. It was the most horrendous experience. In the hope of helping others, or myself in the future, here is some of what I've learned. A lot of Googling around and trial and error was needed. The most valuable resource on the web (which is still not fully helpful...) is at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups.

I just made two cool bash functions for use at work. One checks if a Debian/Ubuntu package is present and installs it if it isn't. The second takes a string bash command and echos it before running it, exiting the script if there's an error.

I'm an environmentalist, so I like the idea of reducing consumption. It's almost an axiom of economics by now that eduction leads women to have less children, thus reducing a nation's consumption.

But at some point, all nations will be developed. China's citizens are now "getting their car", and soon there will be millions more from Africa "getting their car".

I maintain a Drupal website with several hundred files in the /sites/default/files folder. It's a big mess - they're unsorted, many are no longer referred to, and so on. That's another topic.

I was wondering if there was a way to make future links nicer. People accessing the website or sharing links to files on our website don't want to type "sites/default" - that's stupid!

I feel like I tell lies as a part of my job in social work. With more frequency than I'd like.

This is more pronounced at the summer camp I work with, since we work with children. I'll talk about that, but I experience a similar feeling of "I'm being patronizing right now" when working with adults at my workplace.

At camp, we lie to campers for many reasons.

When I was in grade 12, my entire class went to a leadership camp day. We did team building and group exercises. I'm not sure what kind of leadership I did. The student council stayed behind for 2 or 3 more days to do more leadership training.

Now that I'm a camp director, I'm responsible for staffing a leadership camp of my own. For two weeks a summer, 16 teenagers learn to be leaders. They do team building, a canoe trip, and learn a lot about the style of leadership Jesus used.

I've used Ubuntu on a daily basis since version 8.04 in 2008. I used to follow the new releases religiously, reading up on the new features and getting excited. I used to install beta versions, then moved to installing the version on the day it came out, then to waiting a month after release. Nowadays I use LTS releases only and I wait the extra month.

I've been trying to access the Canada Post Sell Online API (if it's even still called that, in 2014) and I'm having lots of trouble. I'm using an Ubercart module (uc_canadapost) and it doesn't seem to work or something. It looks like you used to get a Merchant ID when you used Sell Online, and with Canada Post's new APIs you get a username and password as your API key.

It took me a good 2 hours to figure out how to successfully use curl to access the REST API. I'm now going to document the examples of successful curl commands that have actually worked.

I have a problem with moral outrage. 

On the one hand, I often believe in the causes people are outraged about. On the other, I get so sick of the way they treat the causes as God's own truth. Let's pick an example cause: people being angry because they want a higher minimum wage.

I think the best salespeople truly believe in what they're selling. So it's a good thing that people really believe that there should be a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, the argument that a higher minimum wage would lead to less jobs has its merits too.