The next thing that should be piped into my home is without a doubt fiber optic connectivity via FIOS or someone else. ComcastBusiness cable internet is proving to be quite satisfactory–paying extra for the business-class account means no b.s., no port blocking and English-speaking support if I ever need it (which, so far, I haven't)–but its bandwidth doesn't measure up to the raw speed of fiber.

Fiber Optic Vortex

It won't be solar-powered electricity, that's for sure. We had an engineer from Regrid Power out to do an evaluation of our roof and determined that it's unsuitable in almost every way; wrong orientation, wrong angle, too much shade, barrel tiles difficult to work with.

Our next likely option for energy-efficiency is replacing the rather old standard water heater with a tankless model.

In less than 24 hours all full-power broadcast TV stations in the U.S. will flip a switch to stop broadcasting their analog TV signals and will only broadcast TV signals in digital.

This will make my cherished Casio TV-400 LCD minature color television obsolete. I bought it in early 1990 from a Radio Shack store in a shopping mall near Fort Gordon, GA, where I was stationed for the second half of my Army training. Getting the common room TV tuned to whatever station “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was on was generally not going to happen, so this was my solution.

Since then, the little TV-400 has been useful now and again for baseball games (bring it to the stadium to see the instant replays they won’t show on DiamondVision), for breaking news (brought it to the office on 9/11) and, with the appropriate adapter, as a quick way to see if a given cable-TV outlet was active.

As of tomorrow, all but the final use will no longer be possible, and as cable TV companies gradually move their entire service to digital that one won’t last much longer either. I could always get a government-subsidized digital-analog converter box, but for a tiny portable TV that seems kind of silly.

It still works perfectly and I am loathe to simply throw it away (e-waste recycle it, that is). What would you do with it and why?

If I needed to make a quick getaway and had the resources, I'd head to Macau.

Or maybe Singapore, or maybe I'd just buy an island.

…assuming the jury waiting room has WiFi. Please.

I've had jury duty twice since moving to the Bay Area, once in Redwood City and once in South San Francisco (both San Mateo County). Redwood City in 2002 or so did not have WiFi in their jury waiting room, and it was in the basement of a Cold War-looking government building so no cell signal either. I brought a book. South SF in 2007-ish did have WiFi which was very much appreciated.

A no-particular-order list of stuff I’ve been putting off and hope to work on (at least some of) this weekend.

• Apple firmware password (reverted)
• MarcoPolo
• Floatbox
• Blogger FTP vs. Custom Domains
• Canon Replaces Broken 5-Year-Old Camera For Free
• SageTV HD Theater
• cocoa-sshtunnel
• OnyX
• Butler
• Spruce Up Your Blog
• Photomatix Pro
• Assemble SunPorch patio table.
• Return patio table (doh!)
• Return/exchange garden hose.
• Call back Joe to discuss the possible Winter MA.
• Set up guest room media components.
• Restaurant reviews. Yeah, right.
• Fix MousePad newsfeeds, finally.

A harbor seal pup studies his surroundings as volunteer Stephanie Behasa feeds the seals at the Marine Mammal Center. (Lacy Atkins / The Chronicle)

Click through to read the wonderful article on SFGate by Jane Kay, Chronicle environment writer.

Click any image in the slideshow to see a larger version.