DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Back in September, security guru and common-sense advocate Bruce Schneier recommended that US citizens renew their passports before the end of the year. The reason? To avoid the risks of the new RFID passports, initially slated to be rolled out by January 1.

Schneier described potential consequences of carrying around a radio transmitter in one’s passport:

The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

I called the Passport Agency earlier this month to ask whether they’d begun issuing RFID passports yet. I was told that the main Passport center in Philadelphia — the one that all mailed-in renewal requests go to — had a warehouse full of the old, non-electronic passport jackets that they would need to use up before rolling out the RFID model.

That’s good news in at least two respects, the less obvious one being that the government had avoided sending tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of perfectly useful passport jackets into the local landfill.

The Agency representative couldn’t tell me how long their stock of radio-free passport jackets would last, but she speculated that they’d still be issuing them for at least a few weeks, and likely past the first of January. So, despite the fact that my old passport wouldn’t expire for four years, I sent in a renewal request two weeks ago.

Today I got my new, radio-free passport in the mail. RFID hax0rz can kiss my analog butt, at least for 10 more years.

If you want to avoid the frog-march of progress, start at the passport renewal page at the Dept. of State website. You’ll need a pair of passport photos; I recommend Fedex Kinko’s. Most offer Passport photo services. You’ll probably also want to pay the extra $60 for “expedited” processing, to jump your application to the head of the line.

But you may want to call the Passport Agency first, because at this point your attempt to be one of the last people to get an old passport might lead to being one of the first to get a new one. Call 1-877-487-2778 and ask to speak to a passport agent.

Tell me this isn’t the dumbest thing you’ve heard all day.

The California Condor was so close to extinction in the mid-1980s that the remaining 22 (!) were captured, bred in captivity, and have been slowly reintroduced into the wild.

Yet they’re still highly endangered due to lead poisoning: hunters shoot big game in condor territory, leaving carcasses behind. The carcasses are full of lead bullet fragments. Condors eat the carcasses, and the lead, and then die.

So on the one hand, the government is willing to spend a pile of money ($40MM) on condor breeding and monitoring, but not willing to give the re-released birds a fair chance at survival, e.g. in 2005 the Fish and Game Commission rejected a petition to phase out lead ammunition.

I’m not a hunter, but I understand that alternatives to lead ammunition exist. Why not ban the lead? If we care enough about not letting the condor go extinct, surely we can face down the NRA and whoever else is fighting the ammunition phase-out. Nobody is trying to ban hunting… just the lead bullets.

More info at SaveTheCondors.org and the new Get the Lead Out campaign, courtesy the Center for Biological Diversity.

They’re not having a very merry Christmas at NoKa Chocolates.

A writer at dallasfood.org put together a 10-part expose and smackdown on the exclusive chocolatier, determining after extensive research that NoKa staff are simply melting down and repackaging $34/lb Bonnat couverture to make their $2080/lb NoKa chocolates.

In the process, the author coined* an amazing new word: sneetchcraft. In case you don’t have a two-year-old, this is a reference to The Sneetches, the Dr. Seuss story in which Sneetches with stars on their bellies feel superior to the Sneetches without. The story is about racial discrimination, but the point of the metaphor is that the packaging doesn’t improve the product. In an ironic twist, photos suggest that NoKa is actually damaging the chocolate while putting the virtual star on its belly.

I think NoKa will go the way of Milli Vanilli. Nobody likes to be deceived, even if there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the product.

*Is the word “sneetchcraft” original with the dallasfood.org article? I think it is; Google turns up only 52 references to it as of this writing, all of which point back to dallasfood.org or to Seth Godin’s blog post about the series (which is where I learned about it).

Unable to withstand the allure of Rogue Amoeba’s MacSanta promotion (a 20% holiday discount on dozens of great OS X applications), I took some time this morning to test-drive an app that promises to help Get Me Organized.

(This is no small feat. A year and a half ago I purged my desktop. I loved the spartan appeal of it, the austerity of blank space. For about a month. Then the convenience of fast access buried my good intentions under 87 icons, a couple of which were folders containing yet more disorganized items that resisted proper filing. Like I said then, my clutter is recursive.)

The organizational app that had caught my eye is EagleFiler. It puts a 3-panel browser interface onto any folder of documents, providing a common navigational and viewing mechanism for disparate document types. It provides grouping, tagging and searching features as well, allowing the user to impose additional layers of organization and accessibility not normally afforded by the filesystem.

I have a folder of 8 years’ worth of work documents that are not as accessible as they could be… and the idea of storing them all under one UI, with tagging, definitely appeals. Currently I need at least four apps to view these documents: Preview (images and PDFs), OmniOutliner (I’ve used an outliner for all my note-taking, list-making, and project planning, dating back to Dave Winer’s re-release of More 3.1 in 1999), OpenOffice (Word and Excel docs), and BBEdit (text docs). EagleFiler could replace them all, and the Finder too.

Except that it doesn’t. At least, not yet. It thinks my OmniOutliner documents are folders. It can’t display the outlines, nor can it display OpenOffice spreadsheets (.ods), nor Excel spreadsheets (.xls), nor the contents of compressed tar (.tar.gz) archives.

I have no doubt most of these file formats will be supported by EagleFiler in the future, but at the moment, the app can’t display the 20% of documents I use the most. So for now it’s not a good fit.

Reeling from this letdown, I started shopping for a new task timer. I’ve been using BK Task Timer, which bothers me for three reasons:

1. It seems to have a terrible memory leak; e.g. I recently noticed it sucking up 150+ MB of RAM.
2. It’s slow; bringing the app to the front takes over a second, and starting the timer takes 2 more. On a dual 2GHz G5. WTF?
3. The “no frills” interface is hard to love. There’s so much Mac software that looks cool. This does not. And I have to look at it a couple times a day.

Unfortunately, everybody who makes task timers ends up writing invoicing applications too. So the timer apps get bloated with client data and expense records and a bunch of features perfectly suited to freelance developers and designers who juggle a dozen clients at once — in fact those are the guys writing all these bloated timer apps. I just want to put time into a couple buckets so I don’t inadvertently work 12 hours a day (one of the risks of telecommuting).

I scanned a half-dozen timer apps, downloaded the two that seemed least likely to suck, and within moments eliminated both. Sigh.

Firefox had been giving me the spinning beach ball of doom for weeks, every time I downloaded a file. Whether a 5k GIF or 50MB FLAC, the browser hung for 30-40 seconds before finally popping the Downloads window open.

You’d think it would take a pretty serious computing challenge to redline two 2GHz G5 CPUs, but no — just try downloading some album art from Google Images. Apparently there is some kind of CPU-cooking fractal math in the progress-bar code in the Downloads window. Or maybe Firefox is calling into the SETI@home project on the sly, scanning a few parsecs of some remote slice of the universe for intelligible radio signals before ultimately beginning the admittedly pedestrian task of saving a few hundred bytes of image data to my hard drive.

Thanks go to Karl Pietri for suggesting I click the “clean up” button in the Downloads window. Erasing the past year’s worth of download history cut the download startup time from 30+ seconds to a reasonable .05 seconds.

More info, and a screenshot, can be found here: Firefox Download Clean Up