Geek Stuff category archive

From the Guardian. Follow the link:

Thoughtfully, just as Jabscreen owners everywhere were running out of apps to compare – and, by extension, anything to talk about – the nice droids at Apple Castle gifted them a whole new branch of conversation: the launch of the Jabscreen 4, which apparently is miles better than a regular Jabscreen, although no one can really explain why. Its most impressive feature is this: simply by existing, it suddenly makes your existing Olde Worlde vanilla Jabscreen seem rubbish. How can you enjoy sliding the little icons around on your Jabscreen 3 when you know that if you had a Jabscreen 4, those very same icons would be slightly sharper? The answer is you can’t.

The Jabscreen 4 also functions as an HD video camera, which is ideal for capturing precious moments in your life you’ll want to treasure for ever. You could capture them on your existing Jabscreen, but they wouldn’t be absolutely pin-sharp, and that’s the important thing about memories: being able to make out individual nosehairs. Of course, by the time your HD Jabscreen 4 footage is old enough to qualify as nostalgia, you’ll be viewing it on a Jabscreen 20, so rather than enjoying the memories, you’ll be whining that it’s 2D and odourless and doesn’t let you walk inside the image and rearrange the furniture. Also, it’s full of gross nosehair. Everyone went au naturel back then.

Speaking of nosehair, the new Jabscreen has an additional camera on the front, so you can conduct video calls in which you and a friend stare at each other from an unflattering angle, counting the seconds till this misery ends.

Just as folks often speak without thinking, they twit without thinking. Probably not a good idea when you work for the Department of State.

Apparently, Buccaneer Petroleum just needs to twit more:

Some 75 percent of people surveyed said they view companies that microblog — sending short, frequent messages on sites like Twitter or status updates on social networks like Facebook — as more deserving of their trust than those that do not, according to a survey by Fleishman-Hillard, conducted with market research firm Harris Interactive.

I wonder how many of the participants in this survey don’t twit.

No surprise here.

From El Reg.

When I opened the video, my friend asked whether an iPad can keep your coffee warm. (She also suggests that Iggy is declawed.)

Via Scientific Blogging.

MarketWatch reports:

From the San Jose Mercury-News:

Finally, the big moment arrived. Following a toast from executive director Steve Brudnick, the company’s president appeared on a big screen TV, and launched into a speech long enough to test the fortitude of even the most vibrant, vigorous, vital and, in some cases, virile residents. Now and forevermore, he said, their home would be called Vi at Palo Alto.

Vi.

If you want to stay there, read this first.

Vi is a powerful editor; I sort of know how to use it a little to do basic editing of text files.

Vi illustrates what a buddy of mine once said:

If the maker says the software is easy to use, it won’t do what you want it to do.

If the maker says the software will do what you want it to do, it will be difficult to use.

If the maker says the software will do what you want it to do and is easy to use, he’s lying.

If getting service at this firetrap is like using Vi, I’m staying somewhere else.

Frankly, I find this more than a little creepy:

Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life.

The prototype garments monitor physiological states including temperature and heart rate.

The clothes are connected to a database that analyses the data to work out a person’s emotional state.

Media, including songs, words and images, are then piped to the display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer support.

Imagine, “And now, from UBS, the Underwear Broadcasting System, a rendition of . . . .”

Blogging, apparently, isn’t just for humans anymore. Or at least that’s what Sony seems to think, since the company recently displayed a prototype of a “lifelogging’’ device for cats at a technology show. The device, which is worn on a collar and includes sensors designed to track its wearer’s movements, can be teamed with Twitter to provide real-time feline updates of such exciting activities as napping, eating, and chasing after toys. A sudden change in the internal accelerometer might trigger a tweet along the lines of “I just jumped onto the windowsill.’’ Mattel is planning a similar device for dogs.

Two words. “Litter box.”

I have my own domain address (see email link at the top of the page), a Gmail address which I don’t use much, an AIM (AOL) address that I use for a spam trap, and an username@ISP.net address.

Where do I fit?

Via Mithras.

It’s old, because Ted Stevens was still a Senator, but it’s one of the best explanations of net neutrality, United States corporate version, that I’ve seen.

Via Mosquito Blog.

This has to be the lamest piece of spam that’s slipped through my filters in a long time.

They didn’t even bother to spoof the “From” field convincingly. It came from “alpinecom@btinternet.com” via a Yahoo account in the UK. You’d think that they at least could have made the “From” (which has nothing to do with the actual route of the email) to read From [ISP Name].

Attention Webmail User:

Today, 29/05/2010, we experienced an email outage. No email or address contacts have been lost, but you may notice some of your stored email and address book
contacts are temporarily unavailable. Our technicians are working hard to resolve the issue, and your email will be completely restored within the next 48
hours. We apologize for the inconvenience. Email update . 29/05/2010: Because of the recent email outage, you may notice that some emails from 2/3/10 are
temporarily unavailable. Our technicians are working hard to restore these emails. Your email and contact list will be completely restored as soon as
possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.
To complete your Account Verification process, you are to reply this message and enter your Username and Password in the space provided below, you are
required to do this before the next 48hrs of receipt of this e-mail,or your mail Account will be de-activated and erased from our Database.

Username: ( )
Password: ( )

[ISP Name] Internet.

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A warranty replacement.

Read the whole story at Geekazine.

Installing and bringing a network drive on line (30 minutes), then blogging about it at Geekazine (the rest of the afternoon).

Users need to understand the tools they are using:

It was the one click of a button that changed Ashley’s life. A click on her iPhone that exposed her half-naked photos to the world.

You see, Ashley used an iPhone application called Quip to send a topless picture to her husband who is serving in a warzone overseas. But Quip had a massive security flaw.

It works by storing pictures to a server. The flaw allowed users to type in any five letters or numbers and someone else’s picture would appear.

In October, thousands of pictures went public.

mistermix has an excellent post at Balloon Juice comparing Apple and Google in their approaches to world domination.

He’s not necessarily a big fan of either one and sets out his reasons quite clearly, but his post is especially notable for its excellent description of Apple’s walled orchard.

The walled orchard is one reason I shall never purchase an apple that I can’t find in the produce department at my local Farm Fresh. I refuse to feed the beast.

What persons keep forgetting is that it was persons my age and older who invented the damned thing.

From the Guardian:

A malware attack is being spread via Twitter using “zombie” accounts to push a site which claims to link to a fun video.

Using the tagline “haha this is the funniest video ive EVER SEEN!”, and a wide variety of Twitter hashtags, the website instead uses a Java exploit to drop a keylogger program and a banking Trojan (which will search your hard drive for any banking details and watch when you log in to online banking sites) on Windows computers that visit it.

It is a small victory, but it is a victory nonetheless:

The high court in 1997 upheld the 1992 law that obligates cable television companies to carry local broadcast stations. But Cablevision said circumstances have since changed and the monopolistic nature of the cable industry has been replaced by vigorous competition.

The justices rejected Cablevision’s appeal without any comment, siding with the FCC.

A U.S. appeals court in New York last year upheld the FCC’s decision to require Cablevision’s cable systems on Long Island to carry WRNN, a station from upstate New York that broadcasts mostly home-shopping programing.

Part of the bargain when cable companies came on the scene 40 years ago was that they would have to carry local television stations, because television is not just entertainment, but also a public service. (I know that’s difficult to believe; television seems to have turned into pubic service interrupted by murders and fantastically stupid (un)reality shows, but even today, when there is a blizzard or a flood, most persons turn to local television news to find out what’s going on.)

This was because many persons feared that the cable companies would simply ignore the local station, turning instead to “super-stations” (like WTBS and WGN).

The fact that now many persons have choice between cable from a cable company, cable from a telephone company, and satellite television does nothing to reduce the possibility that any one or all of them might decide that carrying local programming costs too much.

In this case, one might say, “But a home-shopping station? Oh, come on.” But the issue is not the content of the station; the issue was local programming versus national programming.

We cannot depend on corporations to make decisions based on the public good. If we could, no one would have ever heard of Glenn Beck. Just look around.