San Jose Earthquake 4.3 – Surviving Earthquakes

USGS reports 4.3 magnitude and depth of 4.8 miles or 7.7km. No tsunami warning associated with this event.

Our world is not asleep, it’s not a rock. It’s a living breathing monster. San Jose Was struck at the time of writing about two hours ago by a 4.3 Richter scale magnitude earthquake.

What can we do to keep safe?

Prepare and keep a survival kit at home, in your car or at work. Contamination of water can be problematic, and loss of power hits the modern civilisation pretty hard. A survival kit is also never wrong for other emergencies, hurricanes, Tornadoes. Not that I’m trying to paint a terrifying picture here, You’ll probably be allright.

However, It’s not a bad idea to stock up on survival gear. In fact it’s first on CERI’s* list of what to do in an Earthquake.

(*Center For Earthquake Research and Information)

PREPARE YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY NOW

• Have an earthquake survival kit on hand.
• All family members should know how to turn off gas, water, and electricity.
• Plan family emergency procedures, and make plans for reuniting your family.
• Know emergency telephone numbers (doctor, hospital, police, 911, etc)
• Anchor heavy objects to walls (bookcases, wall units, mirrors, cabinets, etc.)
• Never place heavy objects over beds, and keep heavy objects lower than head height of shortest member of family.

Get a survival kit from CampingSurvival.com, or a similar store.  Better safe than sorry…

(You don’t see that many webpages with a design centered around dirt and rocks. It’s really quite refreshing. And i like the shovel )

Phantom Alert, Speed camera warning system

Police Hate Them. Drivers Love Them. New Invention Uses GPS to Locate Police Speed Traps. 100% legal.

Phantom alert is a database of locations in North America where “enforcement cameras” are placed. Similar systems are available for Europe, and probably the rest of the world. Loading the database onto your GPS in your car gives you alerts whenever you are approaching a speed-camera or red-light camera that is placed along the roads.

This alert has several benefits. One, You will probably slow down. Two, you will not get a ticket, Three, You will probably feel great because you feel you are “cheating the system” and sticking it to the man.

“The system gives you enough time to correct any dopey thing you’re about to do,” said Brooklyn subway conductor John Carlson, 49, who bought the software from Pennsylvania-based PhantomAlert last year, and said it “absolutely” has helped him avoid tickets.

Any complaints from law enforcement towards this technique can only come from one source.

Money.

If that is the case, then the government is not trying to save lives with the speed cameras, they are trying to make money on tickets. So be observant on the debate to follow.

Here is how it works:

Download it here. Click here for more videos and explanations

Help! The New Skype Window is Huge!

After installing Skype 4 I almost fell out of my chair. The new skype was huge! It was taking up half my laptop screen.

I fiddled around for quite some time to get it back to the way the old skype was.

Here’s the easy way to do it:

• In the top right cornerof the new Skype window there is a row of 4 icons.

• The leftmost icon in this row looks like two windows slightly overlapping.

• Click this icon to separate the chat window from the contact list. These can now be individually resized.

PHEW!

Why skype made that sort of stick-it-all-together-in-one-cumbersome-lump approach default choice I will never understand.