What is Internet Filtering?

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.

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New at 123ish: My top kitchen gadget tips

Wait, what? After all the blogging for all these years about science fiction, horror, paranormal, Linux, all this geeky freaky stuff, I’m going to write… KITCHEN TIPS???

Yeah, just once. See, Mrs. Penguin and I raised four kids, who are now experiencing adultness in various degrees. So that’s some 20-something years feeding a household of six (not counting live-in chums, visiting relatives, couch critters, and the occasional cat) on a freelancer’s budget. And nobody complained! At least, not to my face. I must have done something right.

It’s so shockingly out of character for me, I might just try it again some time.

 

You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!

Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!

Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:

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IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art

So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.

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The Top Five Most Remarkable Commemorative US Coins

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


Commemorative coins exist in a strange twilight of monetary policy. Three committees of Congress oversee the decisions for whom and what gets commemorated, namely, the Committee on Housing, Banking, and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the House; and the Citizens’ Coin Advisory Committee. One can well imagine the kinds of spirited debates that take place as everybody pushes their own pet project.

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Strategic Money: Coins And Currency Of World War II

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


More than any other conflict in world history, World War II was a battle of wits. It started with cryptographers fighting the first international “hacking” war in attempting to break the German Enigma machine code; it ended with the scientific race to develop and deploy the atom bomb.

In between, each nation involved challenged its brightest minds to hatch the most advanced schemes to come out ahead – and the money of this era reflects that struggle in its historic record.

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Notable Collector’s Silver: The Peace Dollar

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


It was the very last circulated silver dollar ever produced by the US Mint. It’s not a particularly expensive series to acquire – the key dates do tend to be pricey, but the series is so much shorter, after all, and nothing like the complexity of Morgan dollars.

But it has an astounding story to tell.

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4 Proven Secrets to Finding Hidden Value in Your Collection

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


Any serious collection eventually gets its own maintenance and upkeep hassles. You make an inventory system, it gets too cumbersome, you invest in software for it, you need binders and slabs and holders and boxes and labels… Eventually you want it insured, at which point you’ll want to know (if you hadn’t wondered already) what the whole collection is worth, in total.

Well, here’s some handy tips to better appraising your collection, via spotting the hidden values in some items which you may have overlooked. Because finding out that it’s worth more than you thought it was is like finding free money…

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The Saga Of The 1933 Gold Double Eagle

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


The Royal Canadian Mint recently completed melting down over two hundred thousand gold coins, after selling what they would to collectors. The coins were $5 and $10 denominations unearthed in a vault at the Bank of Canada, which the Canadian government simply decided it was time to fire off.

This brings to mind the melting of United States gold coins, in particular the 1933 Gold Double Eagle – and why it’s a fascinating saga that still drags on today.

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Five US Mint Oversights You Probably Didn’t Know Exist

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.


We like to think of US Mint personnel as intrepid perfectionists. These are people whose ties are tied with the same knot every day and who come to a full, complete stop at every stop sign, right? But the fact is, they’re human like anybody else. They make mistakes. there’s quality control measures in place of course, but the quality control people make mistakes.

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