I was watching last night’s Daily Show today and the guest, Mitchell Zuckoff, was promoting his book, Lost in Shangri-La, about the rescue of some plane crash survivors in New Guinea during World War II. Some airborne soldiers parachuted in first and cleared off a patch so some gliders could land. Eventually they flew everyone out on gliders, which Zuckoff said was done with rubber bands, so I envisioned them building a giant slingshot and shooting the gliders into the air. I knew gliders were used on D Day, towed behind airplanes from England, but it was a one-way mission to land troops and equipment together in fields rather than spread out like paratroops would be. I didn’t think they could take off again especially since there was no runway, just a clearing. I found an interview with the commander of the rescue mission where he said they snatched the gliders up and everyone got out okay. Then I had to look up exactly how you snatch a glider up. It turns out they would tie an elastic tow rope up on some poles and a plane would fly in very, very low with a hook lowered that would catch the tow line and yank the glider up into the air. There’s even a YouTube video:
Property Assessment
Several years ago Dekalb County voters passed a freeze on property value assessments. So since that took effect, my house and land have had the same assessed value each year. Since the crash of 2008, however, property values have gone down, even in my snooty neighborhood and the freeze was only supposed to stop increases in assessments, not decreases. But this has never been reflected in my assessment, which has remained frozen . . . until this year. I got a notice last week that the value of my house and land has dropped 31.6%. The last time the assessment changed was back in 2006. The oldest form I could find was 2001, and the new value is 17.6% lower than that.
Wikia
When I started the Flashlight Wiki (now getting 100-200 visits a day), one of the sites that would turn up when I searched for “flashlight wiki” was a flashlight wiki on wikia.com. I had read an article about Wikia that it was a for-profit version of Wikipedia with fewer rules about subject matter. It is a good place for fans of TV shows, video games, etc. to go into endless detail about a subject, which Wikipedia would not allow.
CHDK
Today on one of the flashlight discussion areas, a guy had taken some macro photos of a flashlight he had taken apart. Someone said that if he used a Canon camera, he should use CHDK, which allows you to create RAW images and add a lot of features to your camera. Well, I have a Canon camera. And one of the things I would really like for it to do when I’m taking pictures of flashlight beams (shining them on a wall to see what tint, brightness, and beam pattern you get) is to turn off the automatic white balancing that the camera does. If I have a flashlight with a cool white, bluish beam, the camera will reduce the blue color and make it look more white. If the flashlight has a warmer, more orange, tint, the camera changes it to make it more white. So I end up with two pictures that look the same even though the tints are very different. I can shine both lights at the wall, which helps some, but often the camera will exaggerate the differences, especially if the tints are fairly close. So I’d like to be able to turn that off, but the only way I can figure to do that is some process where you take a picture of something that is totally white in order to set your own white balance. And I don’t know if that is stored or if you have to do that every time you want to take a picture.
Master Password
One nice feature of Firefox that I started using on my laptop (I had been using Sea Monkey as my browser on my desktop until this week when I finally switched to Firefox) is the master password which you enter once and then it will keep track of all the different usernames and passwords for most sites that have them. The problem with the master password is that a lot of times I leave the browser open and then the computer goes to sleep and I don’t think about it anymore. Now if anyone were to break into the house, all they would need to do is open my computer (I don’t have a Windows password) and they could get into all of those sites if I had left the browser open. Most of the really secure sites don’t work with the master password, but it works on enough sites that I wouldn’t want someone to be able to do that.
So I thought it would be good if the master password would expire or time out after some amount of time, but there doesn’t seem to be an option for that in Firefox. A search found an extension that will do this, but just a little more digging found that Firefox can do this on its own through some config settings. I didn’t even know about config settings, but you can get to them by typing “about:config” in the URL bar.
Once that page opens you have a long list of settings. There is one setting called “security:ask_for_password” that is the master setting. If you set it to a value of 2, then you enable the password timeout. Then you can go to another config setting called “security:password_lifetime” and change it to the number of minutes you want the master password to work. The default is 30 minutes, which I figured wasn’t enough, so I changed it to 150 minutes. I don’t usually use the laptop in the morning, so by the time I leave the house it has been 8 or more hours since the laptop was in use. With 150 minutes, I might only need to enter that once at night and it will stay good. It’s easy enough to change later.