How do you ensure a decent supply of potable drinking water at low cost?

In Butte, Montana , Montana Tech students have come up with an interesting solution: They rigged up a water treatment process that can be attached to and operated on the back of a bicycle . The device currently costs $1000 and weighs 50 lbs, which puts their system within striking distance of being a cost-effective mobile solution. That's good news for drought stricken areas like parts of Texas, which are so hard-up for potable water they are even turning to recycling water from toilets to ensure they have enough to drink.

Ubuntu keeps working on optimizations of its controversial UI, and they haven't all been equally liked. This one, too, is sure to cause some controversy: They've removed the ability to choose whether the buttons go on the left or right side of a window .

That's not necessarily an option that everyone cares about, but those who do, care strongly about the now-removed feature. From the AskUbuntu forum:

It seems that Canonical went the totalitarian way and ordered that users should not be allowed to change the buttons position (you can find more technical details of this change on the bottom of this post).
As for now the only way to have windows buttons on the right side in 14.04 is to switch from Unity to the Gnome Flashback session (what I personally recommend). More details on how to do that are presented below.

That is, the days of being able to make this personalization to your config, once easily handled either via the gconf-editor command line tool, or the equally comfortable command: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close" have drawn to a close. Hope you like Ubuntu's choices, everyone: they're the only choices you get!

What's the best computer you ever owned? Step aside with your Core Duo, son, and make some room for the gentleman who wants to tell you about his Commodore 64 . Or Sinclair ZX . Or DEC Terminal .

Retro computing is hotter than ever, attracting the interest of a whole new generation who takes interest in the machines of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. You may have missed the Retro Computing Fair in East Philadelphia last month, but that doesn't mean you're out of luck. Roswell, Georgia is hosting a Vintage Computing Festival next month, and museums dedicated to classic hardware are springing up everywhere, like this one in Ramsgate, UK. Most of them are the product of their passionate founders who have opened up their personal collections.

Can't make it anywhere? It's still not too late to play some classic Commodore 64 games courtesy of a Raspberry Pi and some clever emulation.

That's the thing about bits. Eight of 'em should've been enough for anybody.

Good news everyone! I hacked away enough at the code base this weekend to make it mildly presentable. Weighing in at 814 kB, the download shouldn't stress your connection too much. :)

So, if you are interested in installing it yourself, go to http://pipecode.org/ for the installation instructions and the download tarball. The GitHub repository has also been updated.

This is either the age of social networking, or it's not. It's either the future, or it's already a has-been. What the heck is going on?

Forbes has printed a thoughtful article on why Google Plus has failed to thrive . The Atlantic has written a piece suggesting Twitter is on the decline . Facebook's interest among teens seems to be slowing, while their "page reach" is down by 50% .

So, what's going on? Is it because, post- Snowden , everyone is tired of being spied on? Has everyone moved on to cooler platforms? Has everyone ditched social networking and gone back to Usenet ? Is it possible, as one author suggests, that privacy is now overtaking sharing on the 'Net? Or has everyone just found something more productive to do, like work in the garden?

[Note: this article has been cross-posted nowhere else. :) Want to comment? Here's the place.]

Noted and well-respected theoretical physicist Steven Hawking discusses the potential of advanced artificial intelligence in a recent article published in The Independent. He frames the discussion in terms of "incalculable benefits and risks." Although even the original article is fairly superficial, it raises a good point for discussion: how can we learn to understand and prepare for the implications of this technology today? And who are the thought leaders who are asking (and answering) the right questions about this powerful science ?

Over the past few months I've been successively spending more and more time working on developing a computer game. Now, it was hardly noticeable at the beginning, but as time has gone on, I've been having more and more trouble remembering things. Sometimes it's in my every day life, like, I forget where I'm going, but more often than not, I'll be working, and I'll switch between two files, and then completely forget why I did or what I'm doing in the new file.

Has anyone had this problem? Or do I just have a case of programmer's-island-fever?

Privacy Badger, a new tool from EFF to combat online tracking and spying, is in alpha release and looking for testers:

EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger . Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today.

Interestingly, the announcement of the alpha release of Privacy Badger came the same day that news broke regarding Yahoo's decision to no longer respect users' "Do Not Track" browser settings.

Privacy Badger , which is based on the Adblock Plus code, is available for Chrome and Firefox . The source for each is available on github and any bugs found should be filed against the relevant Chrome or Firefox repositories.

[This story is also being discussed on Soylent ]

Extremetech reports :

After being continuously inhabited for more than 13 years, it is finally possible to log into Ustream and watch the Earth spinning on its axis in glorious HD. This video feed comes from from four high-definition cameras, delivered by last month's SpaceX CRS-3 resupply mission, that are attached to the outside of the International Space Station. You can open up the Ustream page at any time, and as long as it isn't night time aboard the ISS, you'll be treated to a beautiful view of the Earth from around 250 miles (400 km) up.

The active video camera is connected to the ISS Columbus module via an Ethernet link, and then beamed down to the ground. From there, it looks like the video feed is combined with the current ISS-to-mission control audio feed, and then simply uploaded to Ustream . It's an impressively simple (and cheap) setup.

In the Snowden era, it's pretty clear that the Internet as a worldwide communication medium that would permit activists to securely communicate and disseminate information has not been effective: governments appear to be surprisingly and increasingly effective at clamping down on, censoring, controlling Internet information as well as using it to track down dissidents. Mobile telephony isn't much better as it's a related technology that suffers many of the same ills as TCP/IP with regard to anonymity. So the privacy gurus are turning to a technology you'd probably forgotten: Ham Radio .

Airchat, they call it, and it's got a few characteristics that make it very interesting and useful . The group states:

The goal of the project is to communicate directly, without using Internet or cellular infrastructure. ... We traded bandwidth for freedom, simplicity and low cost.

It's not a fast protocol, since packet data over audio channels is necessarily low bandwidth. But its promise to offer real anonymity is a big deal. And not surprisingly, these enterprising hackers are having fun with it. For starters, to anonymise communications and handle encryption and error correction, the system uses a packet they call the Lulzpacket .

Curious? go check out the code for yourself on github .