People with grapefruit-sized brain tumors will be pleased to know that — currently, anyway — prolonged cell-phone use just might be responsible for the tumors’ appearance.

Well, ’til the industries fund another report that says, “Nope. Must be sunspots.”

News Item: Long-term mobile phone use raises brain tumor risk: study [ Reuters ]

I recently decided to resurrect Diablo II and its expansion pack. After installation to my laptop, however, this remarkably explicative error popped up:

Unrecoverable internal error 6f88c2af

Funny . . . it didn’t hurl obfuscation at me when I ran it on the desktop ‘way back when.

A visit to battle.net led to people with the same problem, but no immediate solution.

The issue is the video on my Thinkpad; despite the fact that both it and the Diablo II video test think it can handle DirectX 3D.

It can’t — at least, it can’t handle how LOD deals with the 3D.

Selecting 2D instead fixes the problem — whatever it is — and is a heckuva lot faster than uninstalling and reinstalling D2 and LOD (again).

Too Cool for School Dept:

Performancing for Firefox — a Firefox plugin — enables Firefox aficionados to post to their blogs
. . . all their blogs . . . with centralized civility.

Built-in support for Technorati and de.lico.us, too.

What is it about babies and computers?

My first daughter could — without any parental aid — de-ball a mouse before she learned to drool.

Before she talked in sentences, she managed to kill beyond resurrection the computer it was attached to . . . just by typing gibberish at the keyboard.
My son, a few months past his first birthday, tonight managed to put Windows . . . the entire operating system . . . sideways. I didn’t know it was possible . . . much less how to replicate it . . . ’til I researched it.

You have to get a few menu levels deep into the video card driver software to accomplish this. Attempting to correct the issue while the display is sideways confuses sincerely; making sense of the mouse pointer’s movement becomes challenging, even when you adjust its position to match the display’s direction.

It’s currently fixed, and he’s disappointed. I suspect both of these states are temporary, at best.

A) In Wien, Austria.

B) In Berlin, Germany.

C) In St. Petersburg, Russia.

Answer: D) Indiana, USA

Read about where the Nazis got their ideas. Salon.

. . . but I think I understand this.

(from Criativo de Galochas)