My phone has been ringing on a regular basis with dozens of calls from internet users who are freaked out over the news of all the government-sponsored spying, and desperate for some simple answer that will let them put a stop to it. I have tried my best to be patient with all these callers, but few of them are willing to accept that putting a stop to Big Brother snooping through your personal business will not be a simple task.

A proposal to create a Geopark in the Bosque de la Primavera has been submitted to the University of Guadalajara with the recommendation that the project be presented to Jalisco State authorities. An ad-hoc committee consisting of ecologists, geologists, Primavera Forest Staff and other interested parties worked for two years to create a plan of action which could result in the creation of a Primavera Caldera Geopark and its eventual recognition by UNESCO. The Guadalajara-based committee worked hand-in-hand with Geopark experts living as far away as Iran and China.

Prime numbers are those numbers divisible only by itself and one.  For centuries mathematicians calculated them hoping to make some kind of a breakthrough that might prove them to be useful.  A Mersenne prime is a prime number that is also all ones in binary (3 is 11 binary, 7 is 111, etc.)  Up until the 19th century, there was little use for either flavor of prime numbers, and calculating these numbers was a purely mathematical exercise until cryptographers discovered how to use them to create nearly unbreakable codes.

Ever wanted to home-brew but felt you lacked the equipment and the know-how? Well now you can take advantage of the professional apparatus and expert advice available at the Taller de Cerveza, a beer workshop recently opened in Guadalajara’s Colonia Americana.

Fueled by an explosion of online resources and several popular television shows, family history research is now outpacing quilting and gardening as the favorite hobby of Americans and Canadians.

Regular readers of this column may feel the urge to throw some of my earlier comments back at me, because I did write here that I was going to try to avoid droning on and on about passwords and the need for everyone to use cryptographically strong ones.  Try though I may, I simply cannot escape the fact that passwords are the single biggest issue I am forced to deal with day in and day out.  Often at the end of the day I realize that out of a workday when I should have spent eight hours fixing problems and helping people, I actually passed an hour or two unproductively while someone tried to find some misplaced password.