It has started again. Another ‘privacy protection notice’ has been spreading virally on Facebook. People are told that by posting the notice they are protecting their personal data from unauthorized use. Sound like a good idea? Problem is it is crap.

When you signed up to use Facebook (or any service) you agreed to their terms and conditions and nothing you can post on your profile can change that.

This seems to get passed around every few months and people fall for it every time. Can you send a letter to your mortgage company saying “Although I have agreed to pay you $800 a month, I have decided that I will be paying you $600 from now on.”? What makes people think they can agree to a legal notice and then change it to fit their needs?

Want to make sure your data is not used? STOP POSTING IT ON FACEBOOK!

Only one day after posting my top Raspberry Pi projects I came across this on Hack A Day. Eric Erfanian has created a four part series on how to set up a mesh network using Raspberry Pis with Wifi dongles. I have been playing with this as a side project, but Eric has gotten much further than I had.

While it does not solve all my issues, it certainly is a great starting point.

The Raspberry Pi is a $35, credit card sized computer that was created so that kids could learn programming. One of the coolest things about the Pi is that it has a set of general purpose input/output pins (GPIO) that allow you to communicate with items outside of the computer. This allows hackers to build some pretty cool projects.

Here are ten that I am watching closely:

Camera Pi

David Hunt is a professional photographer who has embedded a Pi into a Canon battery grip.

This opens up all sorts of cool functionality including wireless tethering, image backup, remote control, time lapse shooting, and on-the-fly image conversions.

Welcome to the new Ape Boy Monkey Girl blog. My name is Chris Rockwell Breshears and the goal of this blog is to document my experiments in electronics, code, pinball and art.

I am in no way an expert on any of these topics, but love to always be learning something new. Feel free to comment how dumb or wrong I am on any subject, I am always looking for a better way to tackle a project.

The blog is published with nanoc which is a publishing system that outputs static web sites. It is much different than Word Press or other blog engines in that there is no content management actually done within the system. You write the pages in simple markdown format, and the code on your local system compiles it to static pages. While you lose the dynamic functionality, you gain speed and security since there is no code or database that is required to run. For most blogs this is a prefect and simple solution. I did run into a few roadblocks using it and I will write more about those later.