Specific to the idea of lending your computer for someone's use, one idea that's missing here is a TrueCrypt encrypted system partition with a decoy partition as well. Set up a web browser and some basic functionality in the decoy partition where nothing at all happens. Or, barring that, keep all your activities on an…

As usual, Lifehacker is perfectly in sync with what's on my mind. I was looking for this a couple of days ago to make a time lapse from several thousand images of 4 robin eggs hatching in our back yard. I ended up using Yawcam to screencap the webcam every 10 seconds, then a free utility called jpg2avi to create the…

@Whitson Gordon: I would rephrase terabitten's comment thusly:

It might just be me, but the more of these "shake the hell out of it to do something" apps I see, the more I think that when it comes to incredibly tiny, powerful, precise and expensive computers (i.e. Android phones, iPhones, iPads, etc) I want to be violently shaking them as rarely as possible.

While I've never had to remove a Zip Toggle, I like that they would actually be relatively easy to remove (and let drop down into the wall of course). Molly's are metal on the outside and need to be crushed and pushed in (or ripped out through a HUGE hole :-) Since the outside of a zip toggle is not load beaing at…

Zip Toggle is a brand name for the first of these type of anchors I ever used a few years back. McMaster calls them by a generic description, but yeah, I always call them Zip Toggles.

Another thing to keep in mind with the indexes is if you use LH fave TrueCrypt for one volume but not the system volume. An index of the contents of the entire TC volume stored on the unencrypted system drive sort of defeats the purpose. :-)

I'd definitely concur with Monoprice. As to the discussion below about drywall anchors, though, rather than the screw-in type, which can definitely pull out, I would HIGHLY recommend Zip Toggles. These are similar to toggle bolts except they stay in place without the screw (meaning you put them up FIRST, then you can…

@Whitson Gordon: Exactly. I was thinking that a plastic cap that covers the whole hitch would be perfect. Protect the lock mechanism from road grime/water/crud but also conceal the fact that you're concealing something. I think they sell hitch covers like that.

Wow, that must have been awful! I mostly flew American over the years. I can recall one time when I volunteered (because I had an easy alternative flight on another airline) but never a single involuntary bump. And if the story's numbers are accurate, there were only 65,000 involuntary bumps last year out of more than…

Agreed. And just to clarify, I don't have a problem with any of this. I think the negotiation process wherein the gate agent starts trying to buy off volunteers is one of those pure economic marketplaces that we rarely see, especially in air travel.

In my experience (roughly 2,000,000 flight miles over 25 years) an assigned seat doesn't guarantee you boarding. I've seen an agent come onto a flight and instruct someone to get up out of a seat that they'd been assigned because they were being bumped. If there are not enough volunteers then the airline decides who…

I'm not familiar with the new rules, but as a frequent traveler I know that involuntary bumps are rare. The bidding that the gate agent does when they know they're oversold is to get people to *volunteer* to take a later flight. Only if they don't get volunteers do they forcibly bump someone. As the article points…

@Andrés Suárez: Not familiar with this and it's not on my current machine. I assume it's post-XP?

@defcon2: Might be. As an XP user with no plans to change :-) the ping is my usual choice.

@flinx1: I believe it's there just for the pause effect. There's no built-in pause command in Windows for use in batch files, so some of us who love the command line use the ping function to insert pauses. The w 1000 waits 1000 milliseconds as I recall.

@GK: And full of iron to boot! :-)

Oh, no, I get it . . . I'm just saying that I'm already doing enough "keeping things out of landfills" and I think she'd prefer that I start thinking about how to ensure we're not putting hardworking landfill workers out of business. :-)

Very cool idea. I won't be able to participate since I'm not keen on explaining to my wife how the new box of broken geekdom arriving quarterly is actually good for the environment :-) but it's a very neat idea.

@Keter: If you *really* hated to be a party popper, I imagine you wouldn't have been one though, right?