@jupiterthunder: A few that are popular in our house...

My favorite default setting - rename the WiFi network's broadcast name (the SSID) to something really offensive. In the past I've used "XXXpornclickhere" and "f***off" as nice neighbor-friendly offerings, which tend to deter people from trying to even click it, let alone connect to it.

@joe.glass: hold down the rest button for 30 s., then it'll set back to factory defaults. A pain, because you have to edit all your settings again, but better than a bricked router.

Sorry what now? They're claiming 5 guys and chick-fil-A are "classier" than Sbarro and Subway? Them's fightin' words!

@David Simpson: ASK PABLO (over on treehugger.com) had a really nice write up on this, including all the various carbon emission comparisons. I think the bottom line was something like this... use an electric kettle for 1 cup at a time, but for more cups (3-4) use a regular kettle on a gas range.

@dgolant: You know those little felt pads that are meant to go on the bottom of furniture legs to stop them scratching the floor? Well, they also work great on the back of picture frames, to hold the frame out from the wall and stop the diagonal hanging you're talking about. It also stops the frame from scratching…

The other way to do this, is just to hit the local home salvage yard and buy old wood to make stuff from. In my house we always have a stock of old bits (baseboards, shelves etc) that have been torn out of closets and other places, and have a nice aged oak look, which can then be machined into something new, but…

This sounds like a terrible idea. The whole point of cooking the rice slowly in risotto, is for it to gradually release the starches, so you end up with a nice creamy sauce. With pasta, you want the opposite - the pasta itself should remain slightly firm. Having it partially disintegrate into a creamy mess is not…

@relyk5: Agreed - is there seriously anyone out there (apart from maybe your granny) who doesn't use adblockplus?

@monsterblues: Yes, but if its anything like previous implementations of netflix in WMC, then I won't be touching it with a 10 foot pole. After working fine for a month, I began to have every movie hang during buffering, or start and then slow down to a crawl. I ended up uninstalling the plug-in and just going back…

@virgilstar: apologies if my remark offended anyone, that was not its intent. Rather, I was merely trying to make the point that often call center staff use false names, and it can help to find out their real name, as a way to make the conversation more personal in nature. This is psychology 101 and has nothing to do…

Tell them they're being recorded (if your state allows call recording).

Want bees? Just buy an old wooden house and it will come with plenty of holes and old nests (don't ask how I know this).

So to correct the headline... Get a very limited selection of mediochre e-books, one per week, 5 in total, pre-determined by B&N. This is not a "coupon for a free e-book" - that would be redeemable for any book. This just refers to 5 specific books. Fail!

This type of attitude in academia / research would promptly get you nowhere - sitting at the bottom of the heap while your peers get all the grants with your ideas. In R&D industry (pharma) it's likely to get you fired.

How much space does this need? The SSD in my netbook is not so big, and the page you link to merely suggests "under 20GB should be OK". I was hoping for something that might fit in, say, 5-7GB.

Couple of notes from an HD — SSD swap on a windows PC...

Nice, and (for a change) no box of tissues!

Fires in the summer, when it's been hot all day, and you're downing beers just to stay cool? No thanks.

Iwould argue the thing that's killing netbooks is ultra-portables. Why buy a netbook, with a small HD and a crappy 1.6 GHz processor and typically 1-2GB of RAM, when for about $200 more you can have a fully fledged PC (2GHz, dual core, 3-4GB RAM, 120GB HD) in the same sized package (thin, light, 11" screen)?