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We have been looking forward to this day just as much as many of you. Our inboxes have been flooded in recent weeks by people asking us to stop teasing and finally announce a release date. Thank you all for your excitement, here is your answer. § Yay! As it stands in the beta version, exported ePubs will validate.

One of the great features of Mac OS X is having Time Machine backups of your data. Time Machine can work with an external hard drive plugged in to a USB port, or it can operate over the local network. I have a laptop that spends most of its time on my lap. An external hard drive is just inconvenient. I also don’t want my backups to happen only when I remember to plug the drive in.

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015, researchers disclosed a new SSL/TLS vulnerability — the FREAK attack. The vulnerability allows attackers to intercept HTTPS connections between vulnerable clients and servers and force them to use ‘export-grade’ cryptogrpahy [sic], which can then be decrypted.. § This all traces back to the Clinton administration. The US government wanted decided that cryptography was the same as military weaponry. This led to an export ban in which US designed crypto apps couldn’t be sold outside the US borders.

I’m bad at groceries. I don’t keep an updated list, and often forget the list when I go shopping. One thing that seems to elude me is pancakes. I continually forget to put pancake batter on the shopping list. Not that it would do much good. I’d probably forget the list anyway. So when I saw someone mention National Pancake Day on Twitter over the weekend, I planned for it. The restaurant chain IHOP promotes this as a charitable event, with funds raised today going to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals charity.

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases. The list: I don’t care what you think. I didn’t ask you. No doubt you thought that was terribly clever. You’ve attempted logic. Not all attempts succeed. One should not have that many errors in that few characters. Either your educators have failed you, or you have failed them.

In my continuing adventures with the PogoPlug V4, I decided to get OpenVPN working. The install was easy enough, but getting the configuration correct turned into a literal project—it has it’s own GitHub repository. My VPN provider of choice is TunnelBear1. I started with them about a year ago because of their free service. The free accounts get 500 MB of data transfer per month. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get me out of a data emergency.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. The goal for this week was to push out 1000 words per day.

Ally tugged at the stethoscope around her neck and smoothed the stolen lab coat. The gray industrial carpet was hard under her feet. The tile floor of the crossing hallway was a few yards ahead. She looked at James. “Which way?” In the hallway a few people walked by with morning coffee. The lingering caffeine in the air taunted them. James glanced at the emergency exit sign on the wall. The blue scrubs hung loosely on his shoulders as he pulled on a surgical cap.

Amazon shipped me the PogoPlug V4 faster than I expected. It landed on my doorstep this afternoon. It’s a little bigger than I thought, but not by much. I also ordered a couple of add-ons: A 8GB tiny flash drive A miniature 802.11n wifi adapter ArchLinuxARM can only boot from the top USB port. That’s why I bought the tiny flash drive. I wanted the lid to close. The wifi adapter won’t see action for a few days yet.

It’s not here yet, but I think this might be a fun project. I just ordered a PogoPlug V4 for $19. These are now discontinued.1 The company has given up on the hardware and moved to a cloud-based product. It looks like it might be a Dropbox-wannabe. I’m not sure. I also don’t care, because I’m going to set it up to run Linux and have a nice little home server.