For more of his great work check out his New Orleans gallery.

You can find plenty more on this terrific blog.

CNN has an article on how the US enabled the recent Chinese hacking of Gmail via a backdoor created for US government searches.  So how can you protect your email from hackers, corporations, and governments?  Easy.  Encrypt it.  Here’s how to do it for free:

- Download Mozilla’s Thunderbird and use it as your email client.  It works on Windows and Mac machines.

- Click Here to install GNU Privacy Guard on your computer, open source PGP software. The will allow you to encrypt and decrypt messages.  (You can find the Mac version here.)

- Download the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird. In Thunderbird click Tools, Addons, Install, and then browse to wherever you downloaded the Enigmail file to, to install it.  (Mac version here.)

- Once it’s installed, you’ll see an OpenPGP button in Thunderbird. Choose Key Management, and Generate a New Key Pair. Choose the email address you want to use the key for, and make up a good password with difficult letters, numbers, and characters.

- When you’re done, right click your key and email it (only the “public” half will be emailed) to your contacts. Have them do the same. Then you can send and receive encrypted messages that hackers and spies won’t be able to read even if they get your messages.

What about the important files on your computer? Go get TrueCrypt.  It’s free, and you can encrypt anything from your entire computer to important files only.  That way if your computer is ever stolen or hacked, no one will be able to access anything you don’t want them to.

Links on Page & Google Results Bookmarklet

And a video on the later:

Enjoy!

Really Ugly Dog

Someone emailed me pictures of this very, very ugly dog, and I couldn’t resist…  In case you don’t have enough, here’s another:

One More

Surefire LX2

I rather like high quality, super bright flashlights.  Over the years I’ve had a couple of Inova lights.  They’re built like tanks and are much brighter than your average flashlight.  But recently I decided to upgrade to a Surefire light, widely considered the best flashlights in the world.  Surefire recently came out with the LX2 Lumamax, which is has two output levels, one of which is insanely bright.  My wife took a picture of me shining a friend of mine, and you can see the effect it had on his face:

LX2 Beam

If you shine someone in the face at night…when their eyes have adapted to the dark…they become unable to see at all for a solid 3 seconds or so, and see a serious white spot for a minute or more.  Not only is this an awesome flashlight, but it’s also a lot of fun to shine your friends and family members with.  If you’re about to hit the toilet with your laptop and want to read up on this light, there’s a very long thread/review here at the Candle Power Forums.  I bought mine from Optics HQ, and their customer service was excellent…so much so that I ordered another Surefire E2L Outdoorsman for a family member:

Surefire E2L Outdoorsman

Why the Outdoorsman?  Well, the LX2 is so bright it’s ridiculous.  The Outdoorsman is likely a better choice for those looking for a longer lasting light (Battery wise, the Outdoorsman’s low mode at 3 lumens lasts 100 hours compared to 30 hours for the LX2’s 15 lumen low mode.) that won’t destroy their own night vision when looking for something in a dark room.  But if temporarily blinding people is one of your primary reasons for getting a flight, or you just want a light that’s crazy bright, you can’t beat the LX2.  (If you want the LX2 but don’t want the super bright spot all the time…even the 15 lumen low mode is very bright…get yourself an FO4 Diffuser.  That was my solution for using my LX2 indoors.)  Very, very cool flashlight.  I’ll never buy another non-Surefire light again.

I first blogged about Vibram Five Finger shoes back in May of this year, and posted on the horror of modern shoes shortly after.  These shoes have quickly become the only thing I wear, and today I received the newest model in the mail…the black KSO Treks pictured above and below:

The KSO Treks are only sold in stores, and they’re out of stock throughout the country.  Fortunately though I was able to find them at GSS Gear due to a tip on this awesome Five Fingers forum.  The Treks are made of leather, compared to the synthetic material on the KSO’s, and they’re insanely comfortable.  Additionally, the soles are a bit thicker and have crazy treads as you can see in the picture below compared to the KSO’s:

Really, these treads are crazy:

Since I’ve been wearing Five Finger shoes almost exclusively for the past year, I’ve come to hate modern shoes, which are terrible for your feet.  All it takes is a month or two of wearing Five Fingers to realize how caged your feet have been!  Granted, Five Fingers are not cheap, but they’re the best shoes you’ll ever wear, period.  Not only that, but the Vibram Five Fingers customer service is incredible.  Although I really hate to admit it, I had a problem with my beloved FF’s.  The straps on my KSO’s were fraying:

I called Vibram and they advised me to bring my shoes back to Massey’s where I purchased them, in order to get an exchange for a brand new pair of shoes.  Now that’s customer service!

So go ahead, ditch your crappy shoes and get yourself a pair of Five Fingers!

My last two posts were on alternative energy, and this one kind of follows that theme.  Here’s a free recipe for deep fried Mars bars wrapped in kebab meat.  In the above picture, the tasty morsels haven’t been fried yet, so you can really make out the mini Mars bars wrapped in kebab meat.  Man, that makes me hungry.  Just watch what you bring to read on the toilet after eating this stuff…you might end up tearing out pages when you run out of toilet paper.

I don’t know if the meal or the knife used to cut them is more attractive…

My last post dealt with the need for alternative sources of energy, to save money, decrease pollution, and help slow climate change.  A cautionary post should be added, as the race to develop and utilize alternative energy is not all good.  I took the above picture on a trip to Borneo in 2008, riding in an Iban long boat on a multi day trip deep into the jungle.  Here’s a picture of what much of Borneo is becoming due to the demand for alternative energy:

After spending time in the jungle, seeing the incredibly diverse flora and fauna and the lifestyles of the few tribes still able to live there, it was depressing to see how much of Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo was being deforested to make room for palm oil plantations.  These plantations are wiping out jungle around the world at an unbelievable rate, to satisfy the demand for alternative energy.

The fact is, palm oil and ethanol are worse for the environment when you consider the cost in energy, water, land, and fertilizer to grow the crops necessary for production.  AND, they’re destroying enormous amounts of jungle, driving plants and animals into extinction and producing more CO2 as the jungle is cleared and burned.

While developing GOOD alternative sources of energy is necessary, it needs to be done in a smart manner.  An alternative to oil is no good if it does worse than oil.  While this should be obvious, it’s not being practiced now.   For further reading, here are two great articles from Foreign Policy:

Seven Myths About Alternative Energy

Is a Green World a Safer World?

In our quest to decrease pollution, save money, prevent deaths due to limited resources, and slow climate change, we need to think smart.  Renewable resources like wind and solar are great, but they’ll no doubt have their own problems.  Clearly, the best option for everyone is to reduce consumption.  What’s the point of moving away from oil only to destroy life even faster!?!?