Turning Pardoned... Better Late Than Never

It's about time!

London (AFP) - Britain on Tuesday granted a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, the World War II code-breaking hero who committed suicide after he was convicted of the then crime of homosexuality.

Turing is often hailed as a father of modern computing and he played a pivotal role in breaking Germany's "Enigma" code, an effort that some historians say brought an early end to World War II. 

He died in 1954 after eating an apple laced with cyanide, two years after he was sentenced to chemical castration for the "gross indecency" of homosexuality. A coroner ruled that Turing committed suicide, though this has since been questioned.

via Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/britain-pardons-gay-39-father-computing-39-alan-000750800.html

Heathkit is Hosting an AMA on Reddit

Heathkit, the former legendary electronics kit company, is holding a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Saturday, December 21st.

Later this week there will be a special "Ask Me Anything" event on Reddit.com where a member of Heathkit's Board of Directors will be available for an hour to chat live and answer questions about our progress and plans.

On Friday 20-Dec-2013 at 8pm EST / 5pm PST (which is Saturday 21-Dec 0100 UTC), please join us at http://www.reddit.com/user/HeathCompany/submitted

When the event starts, a link to it will appear at the top of that page.

There was a survey earlier this year that hinted at a re-birth of the kit company. It will be interesting to see what the new owners of the brand have to say.

How to Change Internet Explorer ESC (Enhanced Security Configuration) in Server 2012

Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration (ESC) is an annoying but important feature. Browsing the Internet from a server is typically not a good idea. Best practice is to use a client machine instead of subjecting the server to the possible security risk that the Internet represents. The next best thing is to block all Internet traffic on the server and explicitly allow trusted sites through ESC.

Best practices and next best practices are great, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Turning off ESC is not recommended, but if you have to disable it, here's how.

A Real Watch Guy Compares a Real Watch to the Samsung Galaxy Gear

I've had my reservations about smartwatches. It took wearing the Pebble smartwatch on a daily basis for a while before I was convinced. Even though I'm one of the converted, I know that these devices are going to be a hard sell to people who wear "real" watches.

A real watch guy has chimed in, and there's an excellent post over on Crown & Caliber where Hamilton Powell compares the Galaxy Gear to a watch that I can only describe as a work of art. The outcome isn't all that unexpected, but Hamilton has an interesting point of view and a beautiful Breguet watch to make the Galaxy Gear look ridiculous... which is always fun.

Google and NASA and Quantum Computing

Back in May Google announced the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. It's a joint venture between Google and NASA to make a D-Wave Systems quantum computer available to researchers and, "...study how quantum computing might advance machine learning."

They recently released a short documentary on the project. It's doesn't dive into the subject too much, but it's an otherwise interesting little film.

The Miracle of Unicode

This video is a brief, but excellent, explanation of Unicode and character encoding.

"...we have something the nearly works, and that is why [UTF-8] is the most beautiful hack that I can think of that is used around the world every second of every day."

How to Disable Website Pinning in Windows 8 Home Edition

Sometimes Microsoft adds things to the new version of Windows that are contrary to the habits users have developed. Website pinning was a new feature in Windows 7 and has been carried over to Windows 8. Luckily, Microsoft usually provides ways to get around things or disable new features.