7:26 2015/7/23 Reykjavík, Iceland, 1:26 MST: I am sitting on the airplane getting ready to leave from Reykjavík for Stockholm right now. We have another little kid behind us on this flight. I am hoping to not sleep this flight so that I am closer to Stockholm time (we will be arriving there at 12:30 local time). We will see how that goes.

I am on an Icelandair flight right now writing this post. We are about an hour and a half into the flight. We were able to check in online, so we ended up being fairly early to the airport, but it gave us plenty of time to eat a lupper (Lunch/Supper) at Panda Express. We are currently somewhere over the US still but I don’t know exactly because the flight map is not working for me. Right now I am waiting for the flight attendant to come and ask if we would like drinks. Right now she is having trouble scanning a Discover card for the people in front of us, so it is looking like it might be a while before we get our drinks…

My family and I are going on a vacation! We will start with a cruise on the Baltic Sea, and then we will spend about a week and an half in England.

I will be maintaining this blog throughout the trip. I will try and write a post every day (though it might be a few days between when I actually post while I am on the cruise as internet connectivity is limited). I will be posting to both this blog and our family blog: basheracademy.blogspot.com. This blog will only contain posts from me, whereas the family blog will contain posts from my sister, Hannah, as well.

There is a concept in calculus called Continuity. Basically, if you have a graph without any holes (x values for which y is undefined) or vertical asymptotes (I’m not going to try to explain), it is continuous. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple is bringing Calculus to the table with Continuity. (Just in case your head has been in the sand for the last couple of months, Continuity is a feature in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite that makes it easy to move to a different device and work on the same thing. No calculus required.)

Currently, there are only two kinds of phones. Smartphones and dumb phones. I don’t think that these terms are descriptive enough. Take, for example, the iPhone versus the $14.99 flip phone you can get at Walmart. Obviously, the iPhone is a smartphone and the flip phone is a dumb phone. Now take a phone in the middle of the pack maybe one with a slide-out keyboard but no internet. Where does it fit? Does it qualify as a smart phone? Or is it a kinda-dumb smartphone? Well, my opinion is that that is a dumb phone. Where, then, does the little flip phone come in? Does it get put into the dumb phone category with the phone with the slide-out keyboard? No way! It is a much dumber phone. But that still doesn’t answer the question. Where does it get placed on the ladder of phone categories? Let me propose a new rung on the ladder. A very low rung… Introducing… The idiot phone. Yes, the idiot phone. With this new phone categorization, the problem of how to categorize a flip phone is solved.

One of the most annoying things about the RPi for most of us is that it was built by Brits. Here are a few of the ramifications of this fact:

1. By default, the trash can is called the rubbish bin. I don’t know about you, but I don’t normally throw things into the “rubbish bin”, I throw them into the “trash can”
2. I don’t want to use British servers with British language repos when I use sudo apt-get update etc.

How do we make the RPi recognize that we aren’t Brits? Well, we need to change the locale to en_US. Here’s how to do that:

Editorial: iOS 7 shows how Apple is leading mobile computing

When they stop complaining, it will be a sign Apple isn’t innovating.

• Appleinsider Editorial

This is one of the best pro-Apple, anti-Everything else posts I have seen. It’s probably very biased and I cannot comment on the historical accuracy of all of the claims made in the article, however I will say that it is a good read. (It’s a long article so it’s a good lunch break read, not a coffee break read.)

This post is for people who have a Raspberry Pi (RPi for short) and want to control their RPi remotely, from a Windows computer on the network.

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY YOUR USE OF THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THIS POST.

This guide makes a few assumptions. First, you have installed Debian Linux (or similar) on your RPi. Second, you know how to use the command line to install software and execute a few other commands. If you meet those criteria, you should be able to follow this guide.

Yes, you saw that right, I am going to actually put Chrome and IE (Internet Explorer) up together and see which one comes out on top. First however, I must say that I have a bias towards Chrome, however, considering Chrome has 46.60% of the market share 1 (as of January 2014), I am definitely not alone on the Chrome bandwagon. But to the comparison part. Here are a few things to think about…

up and an average of 1.1 Mbps down.) After the trial, my family decided (on my recommendation) buy the 4 year family plan. The family plan made much more sense than anything else because we have 5 computers in the house that need to be backed up.

Here are some CrashPlan features that I really like…

• Backup Sets

  I have a lot of photos. More than 80 GB to be exact. The photos that I have are priceless to me (especially the ones of our trip to Vietnam and our recent cruise to Europe). Because of this, I wanted my photos to be backed up before my program files and the like. I was able to achieve this goal by creating multiple backup sets (one backup set with all of my important stuff and one with everything else) and setting the priority of my important stuff to 1. CrashPlan also allows you to set other things such as backup frequency.