You're not going to believe what happened to my car this time

I think it's fair to say that my car, a 2000 Toyota Corolla, has not led a particularly lucky existence. The day after I moved to Maryland for grad school... the window was smashed and my brand new CD player stolen. Then some vandal smashed the tail light for no reason, a few months later. Then all was well for a few years, until I got rear-ended on a highway off-ramp, smashing the bumper and severely damaging my touring bike which--as luck would have it--was being carried on the back of my car. (On the plus side, the guy who hit me was totally a nice responsible guy, and his insurance took care of everything.) Then, in the last year, I've had two more windows smashed by random vandals.

So, when my roommate walked in yesterday evening and asked, "Dan, have you seen your car lately?" ... I got pretty worried.

Grudging props to Mac OS

So, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple are basically the only tech companies that I really loathe.  Microsoft and Sony are pretty much irredeemably awful.  Apple does some cool stuff (hint: not iPod) but they're surrounded by such an insufferably smug attitude and I hate the frickin' Steve Jobs personality cult.

Anyway... I'm at my grandparents' house for the weekend, and they have an iMac connected to a DSL modem.  No router.  So how the heck am I supposed to get my notebook online?

Make your own electronic book

Ever wanted to make your own electronic book?  No?  Me neither!  But then I found an out-of-print book at the library, which I really wanted a copy of.  Here's how I scanned it and cleaned it up into a nice usable document, using my desktop computer running Ubuntu.

Large file hosting: try ADrive

Often, when I'm skiing or on some other excursion, I take large numbers of photos and want to distribute them to other people. So I need a web host that offers a lot of storage space and high download capacity.