For dinner they’ll give you food. You won’t like it, but it’s edible.

—Vanessa, explaining to Melissa what to expect from long-distance buses in Argentina.

There seems to be something in the air that makes people not need to sleep.

Item: Argentinians are reputed to party all night, not going out until 2am or later.

Item: When we went on a tour starting at 7am on Sunday, our guide said everyone else on the road was coming home from Saturday night.

Item: When we went to the airport at 5:30am to catch a 6:30am flight, all the shops in the airport were already open.

Item: When we went to the local ski area, and hiked to the top of the (closed for maintenance) chairlift, and found a little coffee shop at the top, at 6:30pm, it was open.

Item: We have gotten up at 6am 4 days in a row, and 4:30am today for our flight, and still have energy.

All my Apple devices — iPhone, iPod Nano — that I’m traveling with think that Argentina is 2 hours ahead of Eastern time (EDT), when really it should be only 1 hour ahead right now.  (Argentina doesn’t use daylight savings time, which adds an hour to all US times right now; Argentina is always GMT-3, and EST would be GMT-5 but during daylight savings time, Eastern time becomes EDT which is GMT-4.)  How does Apple get this wrong?

(My Windows netbook gets it right automatically; 3 different digital cameras from Canon, Nikon and Panasonic have a manual daylight savings adjust, so it’s easy to get wrong, but once I learned how to take the extra step, they give me the opportunity to do it right.  I don’t see any daylight savings settings on the Apple devices, though.)

In practice, I just had to tell the iPod and iPhone that I’m in Santiago.

Update: Even after the US went back to Standard time in early November, the iPod and iPhone still get it wrong — now Argentina is 2 hours ahead of EST but my iPod thinks it’s 3 hours ahead. So it’s not a daylight savings thing after all — it’s just wrong.

Playmobil Security Check Point

The reviews for this are hilarious; people are using Amazon’s review system for social commentary (to the exclusion of any literal reviews of the product itself). It’s a little hard to tell whether it’s even a real product.

My guess is the product is real, and the reviews are not in the spirit of real reviews; while I’ve got no problem with this form of social commentary I wonder if it’s the kind of thing Amazon would take down once the wrong people notice. For better or worse, the actual toy is no longer available for sale. Too bad; after reading the reviews I sort of want one!

After watching a bunch of aquatic mammals (seals, sea lions, dolphins, and whales) in Patagonia, Vanessa and I got curious about a suddenly obvious question: how do they sleep in the water, when they need to breathe air?

It turns out the answer is different for the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) who spend their entire lives in the water, and the pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), which are technically only semi-aquatic.

Back to the real marine mammals, the cetaceans, the answer is a lot more complex than I’d originally suspected — not only do they need to come to the surface to find air to breathe, but their breathing system is under conscious control (unlike, say, humans). So they can’t ever become completely unconscious and continue breathing; also there are times when they can’t stop swimming without sinking. Instead, they continue swimming while sleeping, and are able to sleep with half their brain and body at a time, while the other half remains awake.

Lightroom loves to lose keyboard focus when you’re typing in iptc fields in the metadata editor in the right panel, especially on slow netbook — select a bunch of images, change one field for all of them, press Tab, keep typing in the 2nd field, a second or two later it’ll decide to commit the first edits and yank focus away from the text field and then apply the rest of your keypresses as LR keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve noticed this bug in LR 2.x and 3.x, and again, it’s especially easy to trigger on a slow Windows netbook.

There are a few US-centric websites that I want to use while traveling, which work suboptimally from outside the US.

Obvious examples are Netflix (watch instantly) and Rhapsody, which probably have license agreements restricting their use to inside the US. If you try to browse these sites from a non-US IP address, they’ll just tell you to go away.

A less obvious example is PayPal; they work from outside the US but tend to paranoia about dirty foreign hackers stealing access to your account. At least, when I logged into my own account from Turkey, I found it locked into “limited” mode, and after I jumped through the hoops to prove I was the real owner and get the limitations removed, then went to Argentina, I immediately found the account limited again the first time I logged in. All in all, it seems easiest to let PayPal think I’m always in the US.

I understand why these sites have these behaviors based on location, but it’s not what I want for me — I’m paying the same fees for the use of these sites regardless of where I am; it seems silly to enforce artificial geographic boundaries on the Internet.

So, I run an http proxy (tinyproxy) on a computer I control in the US, and when I’m out of the US, I proxy use of these sites through that computer.

In practice there are a couple steps to this:

1) install tinyproxy somewhere

2) lock it down so only you can use it; you don’t want random people using it (you might be paying for bandwidth, it might slow down your connection, and if Netflix/Rhapsody/PayPal see too much traffic from it they might figure out what you’re up to and block it). You could try to lock it down by IP but if you’re traveling your IP address will change all the time; you could try to set up authentication but I haven’t bothered to look what authentication mechanisms are available to both tinyproxy and the browsers I care about and whether they’re secure. Instead, I already have an all-purpose authentication mechanism I like, openssh — so I set up an ssh tunnel with a local port forwarded to the proxy port, and I just set tinyproxy to accept connections only from localhost.

3) set your browser to use the proxy. Since proxied browsing relies on me starting the ssh tunnel, might be slightly slower, and in some cases I do want sites to be able to correctly geolocate me, I don’t want this to be the default. I could turn the proxy on and off depending on what I’m browsing, but that’s a pain. Instead, since I have multiple browsers installed, I just leave one set without a proxy for normal use, and another one configured with the proxy for the sites that need it. (I wonder if there are extensions for Chrome or Firefox that allow you to configure per-site proxies?)

What do you do after you’ve watched two movies, drank 10 cups of yerba mate, finished one book, and it’s still daylight?

The Washington Examiner:

“Did you know that the nation’s airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period.”

(Via DF.)

Chance of dying from airport backscatter radiation about the same as chance of getting killed by terrorists.

(And apparently, both can be calculated as less dangerous than the cosmic radiation you’re exposed to while flying at jet cruising altitude.)