As the Yes Men shift the focus of their projects to climate change, we’re seeing some very good and very funny things. This is a (hoax) press release from the Yes Men purporting to be from the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s integrated right into the design of the Chamber’s site, and all the links lead to Chamber pages. The only tip off is that the URL isn’t the Chamber’s. (If you click on the navigation links now there’s a special warning that you came from a hoax page, but the damage was done.) This press release corrects the Chamber’s stand on climate change, the Chamber of Commerce itself was none too happy about this and released their own press release clarifying their stance.
Summarily, the Yes Men rightly made the Chamber look like idiots, and drew attention to their odd, backwards policy on climate change.
I have been between jobs for coming up on two months now and I have taken advantage of this free time and the beautiful Vermont autumn by walking around a lot. Hiking is a good way for me to come up with fifteen great ideas an hour, and I have been focusing lately on houses. I have always had an interest in architecture and I am looking forward to building my own remotely situated house somewhere in the next few years. My friend and former employer JS built himself a small cabin out in the woods in upstate New York that he lived in while building a house for his family, I take that as inspiration for this whole business.
The current plan is wide and ever changing, but the basic idea is to be really, really far away from other people, get a shipping container or two from the Port of Boston (word on the street is they’re going for about four grand plus transit costs), and set up shop in those while I build the dream house. The main conceit: seasonal walls. Indoor space becomes outdoor space in the summer time. The black fly aspect hasn’t been thought through yet.
I also get to think about all the times in my years of looking I’ve come across individuals and families inventing tremendous solutions for heating, cooling and powering their homes and businesses efficiently and off the grid. I am not sure how I came across this particular site, but Dr. Tom Chalko of Australia has come up with some very, very good ways to build a house off the grid at maximum efficiency for not very much money. One of these great ideas is the conversion of a chest freezer (as pictured above) into a refrigerator. It’s considerably more efficient than a stand-up refrigerator, which is good for people off the grid and people just looking to replace their aging, inefficient refrigerator. The energy savings are so remarkable it will pay for itself after a few years, if you still pay for electricity, that is.
Other great, inexpensive ideas Tom has implemented include straightforward reflective solar heating, insulating windows with bubble wrap (it’s really cheap, really efficient, and looks good), geodesic greenhouses that withstand substantial winds, a really cool heat pump/geothermal heating system, and a common sense way to improve the efficiency of your woodstove.
I knew there must have been some reason I went to college. For just about anyone with an *.edu email address, you should be able to score this deal from Microsoft on Windows 7 Professional ($29.99 is a touch less than retail…). It’s not clear if this is just an upgrade or you can do a clean install (I suspect the latter), it’s also not clear if it’s a download or a disc. If it’s a download, you should be able to convert it to a bootable DVD, according to the Internet. Also available from that site is Office Ultimate 2007 for $60, and Vizio for $60.
Some will be wondering why anyone would care about this, but a few people I think still use Windows so it could be useful for them. Apple has promised Boot Camp support for Windows 7 by the end of the year, so that’s something. My Sony VAIO netbook that I loved dearly won’t charge any more, so no Windows 7 for me, for now.
I just wrote that I get way too many things to believe from AG, but they’re usually in my email inbox. Today the post office box had yet another good thing from AG, a July 4th New York Times (”liberal” is an inapt adjective). AG met up with Yes Man Jacques Servin (nee Andy Bichlbaum, Ray Thomas, etc.) in Los Angeles for an event promoting the Yes Mens’ new movie The Yes Men Fix The World at the Hammer Museum. AG managed to pick up a couple NYTs and sent one on to me. The best thing that has come in the mail in quite a long time. Thanks bucky.
The London Review of Books is the only subscription I keep up to a paper newspaper or magazine, and Mary-Kay Wilmer, the editor, is one of the reasons why I’m so insistent that it keep coming. Here’s a good Guardian piece on her and her new book, which isn’t (very unfortunately) coming out in the States until April 2010.
[Photo from the Guardian article. Guardian article via AG, who sends me so many wonderful things every day I can't keep up with them]
While I was reading about Snow Leopard’s old version of Flash, I also learned that Snow Leopard doesn’t preserve your screensaver/energy saver password protection settings from Leopard. If you upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard rather than doing a clean install (or possibly if you did a clean install and then migrated settings from your old Leopard installation), you’ll want to check your preferences on this.
Chester Wisniewski of Sophos writes:
My screensaver password lock was disabled after upgrading. Another change to my security settings without notification or permission? Some changes are necessary and difficult to migrate, but PLEASE tell me about things that affect my safety when using my computer.
Odd thing for Apple to overlook.
I just learned Snow Leopard installs a ~9 month old version of Flash instead of the latest version. So, some important security patches aren’t in the Snow Leopard release. I confirmed this for myself on my own installation just now and updated accordingly.
Check your version of Flash at Adobe’s site here (the newest is 10.0.32.18). Download the latest version from Adobe here. I first heard of this from The Cult of Mac, who talked to Graham Cluley of Sophos who writes more here about why this is important. Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team acknowledged the problem on their blog here.
UPDATE: Apple updates the old version of Flash in the 10.6.1 update here, or through Software Update.
From a few days of testing and regular use, Snow Leopard is fine. Noticeably faster, takes up less space on the drive, and plenty of pleasant surprises feature-wise. No important applications broke in the transition. Amazon now has it for $25. I might be annoyed if this was a $100 update but I’ve almost forgotten the $30 charge (with free overnight from Apple).
And, you don’t need 10.5 installed on your drive. I had 10.5 installed and the 10.6 disk tried to upgrade 10.5. I didn’t want that. I booted from the 10.6 DVD, wiped the drive and installed a fresh copy of 10.6 without incident.
And, there is a great new mountain wallpaper.
Another OS X discovery.
If you try to run TextEdit as root in OS X by typing ’sudo open /Applications/TextEdit.app’ you will get ‘open’ running as root, not TextEdit. TextEdit will run as the user you issued the command as.
Instead, try ’sudo “/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit”‘ and you’ll have TextEdit running as root.
[Adapted from something by user gatorparrots on Mac-Forums.com]
I got a new old MacBook the other day and installed Snow Leopard on it as soon as the disk came in the mail this past Friday. It’s weird to be back on a Mac.
Anyway, at some point the procedure for enabling the root account changed. In Snow Leopard, you open Directory Utility in /System/Library/CoreServices. Click the lock, enter an admin password, and Enable Root User in the Edit menu. Enter your root password, click the lock again and you’ve got root.
Apple makes this hard to find on consumer Mac OS X because it’s almost always a bad idea to have your root account enabled. It’s a big security risk. You should be able to do whatever you’re trying to do with sudo.
[via Snow Leopard Tips]