FYL'z Brainz

A common question (well, at least I get asked it quite often) is how do you share information both between your own computers/access and with others in a secure manner. Until now, the approaches have been less than perfect and, in many cases, require technical skills and work. Well, Wuala seems to offer a good solution. I confess I just started playing with it but, so far, it seems to do everything with close to no work/inconvenience.

In the past, the typical methods have been:

• Encrypted email using PGP/GPG.

I was looking for, at the moment, an answer to a question about a minimalist framework for doing a web site and have been surprised. I have used Karrigell a couple of times and was pleased. It is easy to figure out and doesn't get in your way. The word micro doesn't come to mind but it would be a possibility.

I did a bit more looking and found a couple of very interesting options, web.py and Bottle.

One hundred years ago receiving your electricity from the electric grid was a goal for everyone. Forty years ago, many people got interested in being independent of the electrical grid. Recently, the idea of being grid-tied has gained acceptance. In this article I am going to propose a new idea which I have decided to call grid-assisted. If this idea interests you, I would like to hear from you.

The concept is simple. It means that you live operating as self-sufficiently as is practical from the electric grid, using it when it is to your benefit.

Do I believe there is free energy available? Or, in more common current termanology, zero point energy? Let me divide that into two parts: Yes, I believe zero point energy exists but I don't know if it can be harnassed. Anything more than that statement requires me to write a book.

While I am not writing any books right now, I do believe that there are lots of reasons one might want to explore free energy. Some people will easily benefit from unconventional efficiency gains in existing systems or be inspired to develop alternative energy sources.

My RBE blog (http://cooltop.rbeblogs.com) had recently made it to the SPAM phase. Apparently that's when it shows up on enough searches that people think it is popular enough for their SPAM. But, it seems the quality of SPAM is dropping.

As an example, here is a new comment that was just posted there. "I seriously learned about a lot of this, but however, I still thought it had been useful. Excellent work!" My assumption is that this is robot spam that picks some random sentences to put together so the post is more than a sentence/varies enough that SPAM filters miss it.

As I pointed out in a previous post, I run a bunch of web sites. All are for sharing information and none are there to just sell things. Some allow public posts or at least comments (like here), One site, http://rbeblogs.com, actually allows you to create your own blog site for free.

The disturbing trend is the kind of SPAM we are being subjected to. It is specifically designed to live off apparent success of a web site. And it is growing.

As soon as you start getting readership, you start to get comment SPAM. Some is blatent and full of links.

Now that the US government has spent huge sums of money on airport security upgrades which have now been proved to not work, good old Capitalism is back. It turns out that you just pay $100 and then you don't have to be groped anymore. No, I am not making this up. See http://endthelie.com/2012/03/16/dont-want-to-be-groped-by-the-tsa-or-go-... for details.

Okay, I guess declares is the wrong word. Maybe whimpers into the position that is more like it.

No, it is not something like a rabbit. It is an Open Source microprocessor system. If you know nothing about it, you can Google a bit or even check out what is for sale at Adafruit. I mention Adafruit because I bought some things from them. They are clearly designed to help those of us who want to play, get started.

Let me try to put this in perspective for those of you who might have been in the Microcomputer game for a while. My first Micro was an SWTP 6800 system.