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39 mile point to point three days two night thru-hike.

My DutchWear Hammock and The Hammock Gear RainFly setup.
This is my favorite setup on trail were trees will be available.

A weekend on the Long Trail.

Christmas 2017 Shipping Deadlines for Online Shopping.
The holidays are fast approaching and if you've slacked on playing Santa, you're in luck, because there's still time to get your gifts delivered to your loved ones in time for the holidays. But don't procrastinate too much.




Below we've created a list of shipping deadlines for a variety of carriers and popular online retail stores. We'll update the list with new retailers and cut-off dates on a daily basis, so make sure to check in frequently. 

Amazon has posted its holiday shipping deadlines online. Non-Prime members are going to have to pay for timely delivery after Dec. 16, but Prime members enjoy free shipping right up until Christmas Eve.

Volkswagen executive tells judge he was “misused” by VW.
In a letter to the US federal judge who will sentence him on Wednesday, former Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt wrote "I must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or ‘Dieselgate'."

Schmidt is one of the most senior executives to be charged in the diesel emissions scandal that rocked Volkswagen Group in late 2015. The scandal broke when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused VW Group of installing illegal software on its diesel vehicles that would suppress the emissions control system while the car was being driven under normal driving conditions, thereby giving the cars better performance.

Schmidt, who was 48 at the time of his arrest, was in charge of emissions compliance for Volkswagen cars sold in the US during the years that VW pushed its "clean diesel" vehicles with emissions-defeating software. In the aftermath of the scandal, Schmidt left VW and returned to Germany, but he was arrested in January while on vacation in Miami. In August, the executive pleaded guilty to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the US government and violate the Clean Air Act, and making a false statement under the Clean Air Act.

The plea agreement stated that Schmidt could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison and face a fine between $40,000 and $400,000. He also may be sentenced to up to four years of supervised release.

Kasten launches to simplify data management for container apps.
Kasten is a new startup that emerged from stealth today aiming to help companies better manage their data in an era of containerized applications.

While software containers are great at providing a portable, isolated, and lightweight execution environment for applications, they’re not as good at working natively with applications that need to maintain an internal state. Kasten’s software, K10, helps with this by tracking data on a per-container level and allowing customers to set up rules for how it should be managed.

K10 should help fix several of the key problems with managing data with containerized applications, including compliance monitoring, backup, and migration.

For example, customers using Kasten’s K10 software could save a record of a multi-container application, including all of the associated data, then migrate it to another environment managed by Kubernetes (an open source system for orchestrating multi-container applications) with a few clicks.

Feds shut down allegedly fraudulent cryptocurrency offering.
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday announced that it was taking action against an initial coin offering (ICO) that the SEC alleges is fraudulent. The announcement represents the first enforcement action by the SEC's recently created cyber fraud unit.

In recent months, the SEC has been wrestling with what to do about ICOs. US securities laws impose a number of requirements on anyone who offers new investments to the public. ICOs—in which a company offers the public cryptocurrencies that could appreciate in value the way Bitcoin has—look a lot like securities offerings. But most ICOs have ignored the SEC's requirements.

At the same time, the SEC is aware that new cryptocurrencies could become an important source of innovation. And some experts argue that many new cryptocurrencies—those that serve a useful function beyond their potential to grow in value over time—are not securities, legally speaking.

So the SEC has proceeded cautiously. In July, the agency fired a warning shot. It announced that a 2016 fundraising campaign had run afoul of securities law, but that the SEC would decline to prosecute those responsible. The hope was to get the cryptocurrency world to take securities laws more seriously without doing anything drastic.

Five Nights at Freddy’s pizzeria simulator opens its doors.
Five Nights at Freddy’s has always been about murderous animatronics and jump scares — but what about the pizza? You can’t have a cursed Chuck E. Cheese’s-like restaurant without pizza. Today, developer Scott Cawthon stealth-opened the doors to his newest horror game: Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator. It’s available for free on Steam.

This new addition to the FNAF franchise has an innocuous pixel art aesthetic. On Steam, its description reads: “Presenting a fun Five Nights at Freddy’s adventure with a lighter touch for the holidays, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator puts you in charge of developing your own restaurant! Design pizzas, feed kids, and get high scores!”

Yeah, right.

The Pizzeria Simulator is the seventh game in the franchise. In all of the other titles, you’re tasked with thwarting animatronic characters — such as the titular Freddy — as they try to sneak up on you and subject you to a fiendish fate. The most recent game is FNaF World, a role-playing game spinoff. Cawthon withdrew it from Steam last year but said that he would still work on it.

Qualcomm announces 'always connected' Windows 10 mobile PCs.
Video: New ARM processors for mobile devices tailored to AI and VR

Qualcomm has announced the introduction of Windows 10 on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mobile PC platform to create "always connected" laptops with up to Gigabit LTE connectivity.

We've become used to rapid speeds on our smartphones and tablets, always-on connectivity, cool usage without fans or overheating, and generally acceptable battery life. However, this experience is not necessarily reflected in our laptops and hybrid devices.

These days, if a laptop claims to have 15 hours of battery life, we often cut that by half in our heads. Power-slurping applications can cause burning laps, we are often required to wait during startup and closing down processes, and without a constant network connection, we may be forced to rely on insecure mobile networks when on the road.

The iPhone X isn't the best iPhone you can buy, Consumer Reports says (AAPL). Hollis Johnson

CryptoKitties shows everything can — and will — be tokenized.
If you’re following the crypto space, you’ve probably heard about CryptoKitties over the last week. The Ethereum-based cat-trading game launched last week and quickly became the highest spender of gas, bringing Ethereum to a new all-time high number of transactions. Currently, more than 10 percent of the network’s total transactions are created by players who, combined, have already spent millions of dollars worth in Ether on digital cats, clogging up the Ethereum network worse than most ICOs do.

The company announced today that it is increasing its kitten birthing fee in order to slow down the transaction rate.

The slowdown doesn’t worry me, however. Ethereum is a nascent platform and its scalability issues will be solved. Efforts like Plasma, Sharding, Swarm and Raiden are underway to help the network handle the higher throughput needed to run large scale systems.

Although it’s cool that we now have the next generation of cat pictures for the next generation of the Internet, that isn’t the real takeaway here. This is a great example of how everything can — and will be — tokenized.