links for 2009-02-27

When it comes to money, the best defense is a good offense. The best way to avoid fallout from the national economy is to take control of your personal economy. By developing smart financial habits, you can remain calm even in the midst of a financial crisis. (Well, mostly calm, anyhow.)

11 Ways I Cut Down on Grocery Bills

Below is a list of some of the most helpful sites out there including opencourseware materials, free libraries, learning communities, educational tools, and more.

You can configure any Linux system to automatically log users out after a period of inactivity.

Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first

I'll be there in another couple of months. I'm scared.

Series of instructables postings on privacy and remaining unnoticed.

HOWTO protect your online privacy now that the Senate repealed the Fourth Amendment?

Cthulhu fonts

A First Ever Look Inside The Defcon Network Operations Center

Petascale data-centers in Nature

DHS: HOWTO stop (other governments') creepy spooks from reading your hard drive and email

HOWTO Make a perfect cup of coffee

Best Microscopic Images of 2008

Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times.

Superstruct is an opportunity to imagine how we might solve global problems, if we can solve them.

Greg Conti -- a West Point instructor in computer science and information war -- has taken a long, hard look at the amount of information Internet users explicitly and implicitly disclose to Google and the results, collected in his book Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? are sobering.

Leveraging — or borrowing — has been cited as one of the contributors to the financial crisis. Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains how the move to deleverage — or reduce debt — is prompting wild market swings and concerns about deflation.

Wanna cook a pizza at home, but are unwilling to cut up your oven so that you can get the self-clean cycle to run up to 800 degrees to get the crust just right? Try Heston "Fat Duck" Blumenthal's technique: stick an upside-down cast-iron skillet under the broiler, crank the heat up to max for 20 minutes and lay a slab of pizza dough (even the gunk from Domino's will do) for a minute and a half.

UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of university and general computing research.

Aerial shots of London by night

Security isn't just for Windows users. Those running Mac OS X need to be concerned about making sure their computers are secure. Ars offers this handy guide to keeping your Mac locked down tight.

Analysis: IT consumerization and the future of work "IT consumerization" is one of the more unwieldy buzzwords to come down the pike in some time, which is a shame, because there's definitely something to it. Here's a look at three factors that contribute to the IT consumerization trend, and at what this trend may mean for the future of how we work.

A talk about "the impact of IT consumerization in the enterprise, and about the shifting boundary between the professional and the personal."

Most computer-based biology research develops mathematical models that accurately describe a specific aspect of biology. Arguing that this forces every new bit of modeling to reinvent the wheel, a group of researchers has developed little b, an open source programming language designed to make biological models reusable.

Although the US biomedical research endeavor might appear to be in great shape, it faces some significant problems. The rapid doubling of the NIH budget started during the Clinton administration was followed by several years of flat funding, and this has exposed structural cracks in the way that we're training and employing researchers.

Internet users appear to take the concept of privacy online seriously, but their actions don't follow their words very well. AOL surveyed a thousand online consumers in the UK in order to get a feel for their understanding of privacy issues on the Internet and found that while 84 percent said that they would remain tight-lipped about personal details, even more ended up forking them over without any hesitation.

... a new report by a group that has studied the role of IP in the biotech industry reveals that many of the same issues (along with a few unique ones) are causing problems in that field as well. The report provides a series of recommendations, many of which could just as easily have arisen from a study of a different industry.

Sometimes you don't need to know everything about wireless to secure a home or home-office network; you only need to know what's important.

Although there are no clear cases where a biological computer will outperform standard silicon, a biological computer may be useful for detecting the state of other biological systems, and it may find uses in diagnostics or environmental sensing. A potential step forward for biological computing was just reported in Science, where researchers describe logic gates built from RNA, a chemical the helps run the basic metabolism of the cell.

The résumé is dead. Long live the résumé!

This is just a cool tool....

Each time a new genome gets published, the paper comes equipped with a remarkably precise statistic on the number of genes that appear to be lurking in the organism's DNA. Those numbers are produced by automated gene prediction software; two new papers perform a quality control check that identifies some of the errors this software is making.

US science output (as measured by peer-reviewed publications) is in decline relative to Asia, although the US is still strong in many fields. The economic downturn may affect science output worldwide, however.

IT is the ultimate thankless job—when an organization's IT organization is performing optimally, nobody notices, and when it isn't, the IT department is the target of complaints and the butt of jokes. A consortium of academic and industry partners hopes to change this by turning IT from a cost center and something of a necessary evil into a "value center."

How cool could this potentially be?