AT&T's cellular network in the Atlanta area, at least here in Gwinnett, had been intermittently down for over a half-hour. Completely down—no data, no voice. No word from AT&T, of course.

UPDATE: Outage reports from stranded customers are coming in from all over Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and D.C.

Due to an increased number of spammers and hackers, I'm afraid I'm increasing security on TuscanyCircle's front door. When logging in, you'll need to pass a CAPTCHA. Should be straightforward. If you don't like the selection, you can request another via CAPTCHA form, and you can even choose an audio version. To make up for this annoyance, I've also extended the login time (how long you stay logged in). Visit the site at least monthly, and your login session should remain active, on any given terminal, for over 3 years. » read more »

When TuscanyCircle goes offline, I am in the habit of updating Twitter about its status. If TuscanyCircle is ever usurped or shut down by government enemies (to America, to liberty, to truth), I will update one or more of Twitter, Google Buzz, Blogger, or Bambuser (live video)*. » read more »

WorldNetDaily's videos, in their latest format, are apparently nonfunctional in Firefox and Safari. (They work in Chrome.) I alerted them to this problem and will let you know.

Apple has long been hated by yours truly for its totalitarian attitudes, to say nothing of the sophomoric attitudes of its typical, ignorant customers. I've also bashed most of Apple's products, Mac excepted, for being inferior in capability, even if sleeker in physical design. The fourth generation of iPhone, though, takes the cake. » read more »

TuscanyCircle has had https capability for a long time. Https encrypts all the information passing between TuscanyCircle and your browser, insuring any interception (by bad guys) is rendered useless. It's currently enabled only for logging in. However, it can be turned on for all of TC. Would you like this? » read more »

AT&T's wireless data network is offline in the metro Atlanta area (at least), less than 24 hours after the same thing happened in Florida. Early reports are suggesting all of data (web, email, MMS) as well as SMS and even some voice networking are nonfunctional. If I were a betting man, I'd say it was gross incompetence on AT&T's part. » read more »

This article reveals that digital copiers are a major security risk that nobody (except, I suppose the manufacturers) knew about. My jaw hit the floor when I read the following: "A CBS News investigation last month found that nearly every digital copier built after 2002 stores an image of documents copied, scanned or e-mailed by the machine on hard drives." » read more »

A couple of years back, my family ditched Windows and went with Apple computers. Since then, I have had a number of conversations in which I mentioned this choice. One of the most common responses I have heard is, "But Macs are so expensive!" » read more »

Thanks to Google Translate, TuscanyCircle is now available in over 50 languages, but only on the web (not RSS*). In the right column, I've added the Google Translate widget which does the translation. It seems to work relatively well. It will leave untranslated those things it doesn't recognize, of course. Mousing over blocks of translated text will reveal the original English. This new tool just saves readers the step of copying-and-pasting text into Google Translate directly.

*Google Reader supports translation of RSS content.