I rarely watch mainstream news, but it’s been on at hostels I’ve been traveling through and I am amazed by how much attention is being paid to refugees leaving Syria and entering Europe and how little coverage is given to the actual war. Meanwhile, Obama is echoing calls of his predecessor in regards to Saddam, asking Assad to step down. However, not one mainstream source is asking the question that needs to be asked: how do we stop America, the UK and Europe from funding the terrorism in Syria that is driving people from their homelands?
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Last year I was the victim of a break in which involved me losing nearly all of my electronics. I had backups of my data, the import stuff, but since that time I had been using a work laptop for most of my personal work. I later purchased a Surface Pro2 and had it dual booting Linux, but I found the tablet/laptop difficult to deal with. The lack of a sold connection between keyboard and device made it impossible to use while sitting on a couch like a normal laptop. While visiting Melbourne I decided to purchase an MSI laptop that’s typically marketed for gamers, and turn it into my primary Linux development laptop.
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Recently I was the victim of a robbery. Prior to this, I was debating if I wanted to leave my city. I’ve grown increasingly tired of office work, and thanks to some recently accepted publications, I’ve wanted to look into funding to pursue independent research and apply for PhD programs. I had originally thought to continue working for a year while applying for funding and graduate programs. I have no insurance for my stolen items, making the loss somewhat more absolute and has pushed me to the point of my previous option of leaving to work on my own research, regardless of monetary concerns. Although there is a solid methodology behind my decisions, the interpretation of my options in regards to certain probabilistic outcomes can easily be interpreted as a type of fate or destiny.
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I first heard about recovering data from bad hard drives by placing them in a freezer from a web comics. The artist almost lost a lot of his work to a failed hard drive he hadn’t backed up. I’ve had my share of hard drive problems and have kept regular full backups for the past few years, so I’ve never really had an opportunity to try out this technique. But recently a good friend of mine had a hard drive go bad in her five year old MacBook. This seemed like the perfect opportunity, and I was pretty amazed at the results.
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