I have good intentions of starting to give talks at my small town's local library on safe internet browsing, privacy issues, and any topics that I get requests for. I bought a $200 HP Stream 11" laptop to get up to speed on Windows 8.1 since I only use OS X and Linux. I am pleasantly surprised at how much I like this laptop! The display is pretty good, the keyboard is also OK, and the no-fan design is nice. It works well with a second 1080p external monitor also. I ordered the laptop directly from Microsoft: their "signature editions" come with no crap-ware; just Windows 8.1 and nothing else. The shortcomings: Only 32 GB of solid state disk space. After installing Ruby, Java 8, IntelliJ, git command line tools, Pharo Smalltalk, Chrome, and cloning several git projects I have about 11 GB free. Slow CPU. For using Pharo Smalltalk this is no problem. It is a small problem for Clojure development. I use IntelliJ with the Clojure plugin for editing and have a lein r...

I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I am not going to make new year technology predictions, but I do have a few comments on what technology I am using and what I expect to be using this year: First, I am surprised at how much Microsoft technology I am using. This started last spring when for political reasons I wanted to stop using Dropbox (I did not like their appointment of Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors). At the time, I could not find a good Dropbox replacement but after getting a Microsoft BizSpark business development grant last fall, and very much liking the Azure services, I recently decided to take another look at Office 365. It turns out that for the same $100/year I paid Dropbox for a terabyte of storage, with Microsoft I now get for the same cost one terabyte of cloud storage per family member and everyone in my household also gets Office applications and use of the online Office tools (that run really well in Chrome with Chrome apps). The versi...