Dropbox's Arbitration Opt-Out

I strongly recommend opting out of the arbitration clause in Dropbox's updated TOS. The most succinct explanation is here, so I won't rehash it.

Dropbox Opt Out.

Also, trust no one. Dropbox is not the same as a backup service.

Happy Helpers

BREAKING: South Carolina legislators are debating a bill that will cut all state funding to the University of South Carolina in reponse to several assigned history textbooks that refer to enslaved African laborers prior to the War of Northern Aggression. 

"There needs to be academic debate," said Rep. Larry Smits. "There's plenty of evidence out there that these workers were actually called 'Happy Helpers.' President Pastides needs to force these professors to teach the controversy and assign books that refer to plantation owners as what they were—job creators."

The bill is expected to fail on a technicality. During the debate it was revealed that there are no state funds to cut.

*one hour later* 

OK, y'all.  I did try to make this obviously satire. If only the real article linked at the bottom wasn't so crazy, the satire wouldn't seem so possible.

Locavore

"Local" and "homegrown"
Are not antonymous with
Rotten to the core.

Some Urban Design Links

These are a few (just a few, so you don't get overwhelmed) examples of visualizations in urban design for my MART 210 class. They're very different from each other, there's no single way to do it.

     U6 Photomontages - Photo-Realistic Visualisation and Photomontages - Other Projects

     Rethinking the Streetspace: What's Next? | Planetizen

     ArchNewsNow

     Illustration, Visual Analysis, Animation & Interactive by Focus 360

Remember, your job is not really to be an effective urban designer. Your job is to show that you could create the visuals for an urban designer.

Always Already Too Soon

I'm just going to re-link to this post every time there's a massacre. Which will probably be very frequently.

It's all part of the plan.

First, everyone should tacitly agree that right after a major or minor massacre is too soon to consider the balance between important second amendment rights and pervasive, toxic gun culture.

Second, have a random gun massacre a couple times a week.

And presto! We never have to think about it, and the lobbyists and the industry keep getting their cash. They're job creators, after all, and that's the most important thing.

BONUS: you can get extra points after a massacre if you say we should be talking about mental health, not weaponization... but only if you have a record of obstructing the biggest expansion of mental health benefits ever.

Outsmart TouchID?

The TouchID sensor on my iPhone 5s is a pleasure to use, but I did share the experience of fingerprint ID losing accuracy over time. Since signs seem to point to it being an issue of using the sensor different from the initial training session and diverging over time, I tried out an idea.

You can store 5 prints in TouchID, so I used all five slots: right thumb, right forefinger, left thumb, left thumb again, and right thumb again. My idea was to saturate TouchID with as many different variations on my own thumbs as I could pack in. Tips, edges, overlaps, angles, you name it. 

Don't do that. 

Accuracy tanked. When it could ID me, it took a long time, but more often it would fail out and I'd have to use my passcode.

I retrained it with one slot only for each print, this time trying to access the sensor like I do in casual use. Accuracy is super fast now. I'll check back later and report on whether it feels like it's deteriorating in a month or two.