Kilo Seven

Why are 3D movies darker, with less color saturation than 2D? Because of the polarization filters, and the lower pixel count of the 3D images.   The Boston Globe discovered that Sony's projectors, not originally designed for 3D, have been retrofitted poorly, and the result is that some theaters dare not convert the projectors back for 2D film . Result: Murky images on 2D as well.  If you look back at the projection booth and see two light beams, stacked one above the other, choose another theater next time, because those Sony projectors rob you of a quality viewing experience.

http://kotaku.com/#!5792165/new-nintendo-console-debuting-at-e3-launching-in-2012-more-powerful-than-xbox-360-and-ps3   suggests current gaming consoles, which have been threatened with superior performance by PCs with state-of-the-art graphics cards, may be superseded with new consoles.  Kinda reinforces last month's news on the subject .

Here's a story which warns people about buying Acer and Gateway . Sounds accurate.  I can't understand how any vendor of merit could fail to replace systems with the known defective bulging electrolytic capacitors shown above.

So, this careless outfit, Epsilon, let a huge amount of identity data get stolen .  It ignored warnings months ago . It's already appearing in identity theft, says the Better Business Bureau . Here's a partial list of corporations who gave your data to such a careless outfit, instead of protecting it by doing the job themselves: 1800-Flowers Abe Books, Air Miles CA, Ameriprise Financial Barclays Bank of Delaware, Beachbody, Bebe Stores Inc., Benefit Cosmetics, BestBuy, Brookstone Capital One, Charter Communications, Chase, Citibank, City Market, The College Board, Crucial.com Dell Australia, Dillons, Disney Vacations Eurosport/Soccer.com, Eddie Bauer Food 4 Less,  Fred Meyer , Fry’s Hilton Honors, The Home Shopping Network Jay C, JP Morgan Chase King Soopers, Kroger LL Bean Marks & Spencer (UK), Marriott Rewards, McKinsey Quarterly, Moneygram Ne...

HealthMap is a potentially useful website to keep track of disease outbreak, both animal and vegetable. Here's a US view showing most significant outbreaks (mostly measles, BTW) and there's lots of other views.

Shug is off on a business trip, and so I went looking for flight tracking websites. Found one which is very useful: FlightStats shows trouble spots, and if you enter a flight, shows its location, with a radar map option so you can see weather problems. Lots of other info as well. However, to find if the airplane you're counting on for your next flight is late, go to flightaware.com , enter the flight number, and then click on Track Inbound Flight (circled in red below).

Weary of pop-under ads and general junk appearing when you surf the web? Here's a simple approach to tell your computer that requests for that spamware should go nowhere:  http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm HOWEVER, a warning: Before you do this, make a backup copy of your Hosts file. Adding these blocking entries to your Hosts file works with MacOS and Linux, just like it does in Windows; the location of the Hosts file will be different, and you will use a text editor program instead of Notepad.

I surely do wish bloggers like the one at http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2011/03/28/contamination-in-goiania would check their cipherin' with someone who knows somethin', or at least do the math. Background radiation cited in the eleventh paragraph of that blog post as 0.002 Gy/hr (2mGy/hr) is wrong, very wrong; off by three orders of magnitude. Please, everyone, suspect all the rest of the science in this article because if something so elemental is wrong, what else is wrong? The primary scientific source cited in this post would make anything generating a dose of 2 milliGrays an hour (0.002 Gy/hr) intermediate-level radioactive waste (page 5, the 1988 IAEA report , factoring for w=1 as is the case for beta and gamma at 2 mSv/hr) and require storage in packages ‘with 200 mm reinforced concrete walls’ (page 83, op cit). This post also does not understand the difference between exposure level (measured in Sv, mSv or uSv) and dose (measured in Gy, mGy or uGy). That’s ...

USAPhotoMaps 2.78   downloads USGS aerial photo and topo map data from Microsoft's free msrmaps.com website,   saves it on your hard drive, and creates aerial photo/topo maps with GPS accuracy.   What's New as of Jul 17, 2010 ...   Click Here   Full Install of USAPhotoMaps 2.78 ...   Download Here   (565 KBytes)   (make sure the above date is in Help -About because your browser might send an older version/date from its cache)   Yahoo Group forum   Sample Screen   C source code

Independent radiation monitors across the US and BC .Web page assembled over a weekend by a Portland crew. Washington state department of health monitors . EPA national map of monitoring stations . Realtime observation of a counter in Santa Monica. U. C. Berkeley Nuclear Engineering school monitors . Fresno CA airport . Waterdome at Revilstoke, BC . Clarkston, MI .

Folks in the PC gaming industry are creating demos of new gaming 'engines' (the middleware which game developers use to speed game development) which surpass anything a console can now do . At least one console manufacturer is posting new hire positions in console development as well. This suggests that console pricing may drop faster this year than in years previous.

If you've ever wanted to get an amateur radio license course, here's an online study program which gives you 2 years of study time for $30 for the Technician first-level license.

Three free applications have made finding files so much easier on my Windows machines that I feel compelled to share. Nemo Docs (see partial image at right) shows you a calendar-based view of what files you've worked on, in chronological order, day by day. It even separates morning files from afternoon files from evening files.  This is especially useful because, in the absence of any other method for organizing files, we associate files chronologically. Everything searches files by name, quickly, whether or not you've turned on file indexing (which slows down your machine and consumes space, so some folks turn it off). It doesn't search the content of files, but what it does, it does well. Fences (which also comes in a 'Pro' version for a twenty) sets up zones on your desktop and sorts files into different zones based on their type. You can resize and move the zones, title them, and move files over the 'fences' into different zones. If you carry m...

ARRL needs every ham to fax or email letter to keep the House from giving away the 440MHz band. See http://www.arrl.org/sample-letters for specific details to keep your message from being lost in the legislative muddle; don't just send it as you normally would.  Here's a sample letter. It's important to keep the message on topic, civil and respectful to keep congressional staff from mis-labeling the message.   The Honorable ____________________ United States House of Representatives ______________ House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Dear Representative ________:  As a voter in your district and as one of the nearly 700,000 federally licensed Amateur Radio operators across the nation, I ask that you oppose H.R. 607, the "Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011" in its current form.  H.R. 607 was introduced by Congressman Peter King (R-NY) and referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. H.R. 607 proposes to allocate the "...

http://lifehacker.com/#!5747897/how-to-build-a-car-mount-for-your-cellphone-from-office-supplies http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=16992427&postcount=2 http://mechanicalmashup.tv/episodes/episode-28-how-to-convert-a-disposable-coffee-cup-into-a-smart-phone-holder/

EPUB format e-books, the format used by iPads, iPods and iPhones, are just  HTML files with a CSS style sheet , and, sometimes, one or more JPG files (cover plus maps and diagrams) consolidated into a single file with  ZIP compression .  They can be read with the free  EPubreader  extension on any PC, netbooks, notebook or Mac, regardless of operating system, and on Android phones with other free apps .  However,  yBook , free from Spacejock Software, allows you to read other formats as well as to turn a laptop or netbook 90 degrees and read your e-book in portrait mode, as if you were holding a hardback.  So, do you need a dedicated e-book reader (exemplar: The Nook Color ) (transformable into a full Android tablet  )?  IMHO, no. Calibre  for Windows, MacOS and Linux allows you to manage your e-book library as well as convert e-books from one file format to another automagically. And, here's s ix dozen plus SF an...

University of Minnesota researchers have come up with an Internet killer that doesn't require a 'kill switch' at a central, governmentally approved location. Instead, pay your friendly global neighborhood hacker for a botnet of a quarter-million PCs, and turn loose a hacking program to overwhelm the routers which pass traffic between servers and users. Time to start stockpiling now for the inevitable collapse of civilization?

UPDATE: 'TeleTruth' and 'NewNetworks' caved and rewrote the screed. Now, the only remnant of the original lie is the whiny comment, "NOTE: BEAVER CREEK, the ski resort, is supposedly not affiliated with the phone company." They could confirm that if they wanted to, but as long as no one calls them on their irresponsibility, this, as well as many, many other websites, will continue to post lies as truth. Reader, beware. The previous post regarding a farrago of inaccuracy about Beaver Creek Telephone written by some jaspers from New York City, 'TeleTruth', and an ally of theirs, NewNetworks.com, has a response.   I reviewed it, and here's my rebuttal (in Courier ) to their pile of... whatever. Red letters reveal the evidence they don't have the discipline to spell check before hitting 'Send'. On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 21:29, Bruce Kushnick  < bruce@newnetworks.com >  wrote: Thanks for your email And, thank you for a ti...

The Universal Slush Fund: Or How Out of Control is the Government Phone Tax? Why does Beaver Creek gets over $10,000 a line? is just flat wrong in an important area. Please allow me to quote: An example? Beaver Creek is a high-end ski resort which received $11,892 per line. Wrong. This amount is unfathomable when the average local bill, according to the FCC data is $25 a month (the last FCC data is from 2008). Beaver Creek is, among other things, serves a high-end ski resort with the marketing line “not exactly roughing it”. http://www.beavercreek.com/Summer-Site-Home.aspx You're mixing up Beaver Creek, Colorado, the ski resort, with Beavercreek, Oregon , which has the telco in question, four states over and 1,200 miles away. Sure makes your case looks better, in the 'throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks' method of litigiousness, but trying to conflate the wealth of Vail, Colorado with the telecom needs of rural Oregon is just plain wrong. ...

Tech Republic has reviewed the Coby Kyros and found it a decent buy at $150 .

Here's a chart showing bolt and screw types , also available as a downloadable PDF . Handy thing to know.

A ZDnet blogger opines this is The one security tool every Windows user should know about - the Enhanced Migration Experience Toolkit . It blocks the execution of program code at memory locations that should contain only data, such as the stack or the heap, preventing a common hacker's trick. It also mitigates against common tricks that hackers use to exploit flaws in code, by blocking common “heap spraying” techniques, by validating exceptions before calling an exception handler, and prevents attackers from jumping to predictable memory addresses to exploit vulnerabilities in code.

Got an iPhone? Rely on the Alarm app? Well, a bug makes all alarms in 2011 fail if the alarm is a one-time event. The link shows how to work around the bug.

Appears that Borders has admitted they are in deep financial trouble . If you have a Borders gift card, it's a wonderful idea to spend it *now*. Why does this happen so often? Because of IRS rules, validated by the Supreme Court, without benefit of Congressional approval. which stress the need to turn over inventory that forces booksellers into borrowing money, and make it very difficult for booksellers to hang onto old inventory.

The Digital Reader explains how to separate the good tablets from the bad . Worth your time if you are thinking about e-book readers and iPad alternatives.

$105 Android tablet. $105, delivered.

Interested in removing your data from Internet identity search sites like PeekYou ? Read this Wall Street Journal article on data scrapers .

I wish I didn't trust this essay on the true cause of joblessness .

The Atlantic has an article on a medical researcher who specializes in analyzing the quality of science in medical research. Worth a read.

The British website Kings of War has an absolutely wizardly idea to solve the Afghan problem; peacefully phone bomb them. Fill Afghanistan with smartphones, provided free for the recipient providing a biometric registration (so we who who has them). Since they're digital, Echelon and similar systems can automatically listen in and flag conversations with news about Bad Things and Bad People. It plays to our strength, not our weakness (our concern for the lives of our troops) and also provides us a propaganda channel to the rest of the population, and if it helps us liberalize Afghanistan, all the better.

Here's a mind-blowing visit to a website which sells stolen credit cards and personal identity info .

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1719&tag=tr-left lists ten websites which help you confirm or deny the red-hot urban myth Aunt Minnie just sent you in a breathlessly excited e-mail. Whether you tel Aunt Minnie how to check before forwarding is, well, up to you.

Data usage for a smartphone user

(Regarding his 6/03 #4 story on Countdown). Dear Keith: You've been misled. Obama's Energy Advisor Carol Browner (an English major and lawyer) is not well read in nuclear devices, and neither is Michio Kaku (a theoretical physicist, not a weapons effect physicist, and a very political scientist with a pronounced hysterical anti-nuclear bias). I wish you had chosen a credible source, such as an academic from the mining schools in Colorado or New Mexico, if no weapons effect expert (e.g., Cary Sublette, easily found by checking WHOIS.NET for the owner data for nuclearweaponarchive.org ) was available. Our atomic tests http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Effects/UndergroundEffects.html show that drilling below 400' the ocean floor, emplacing a 100 kiloton device and exploding it would not result in a crater, and below 1,200' the surface of the ocean floor would not even create a surface bubble. See http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Effects/sm_c...

I have a question I'd like to ask of techno-seniors: Which Linux apps (besides the obvious, those labelled as magnifiers and such) would be superior for Seasoned Citizens? Which distro has the best interface? Saw this ad (below) in Readers' Digest and it led me to wonder how much better Linux could be for folks who are new to PCs.  The price of a rebuilt PC at FreeGeek is appealing to folks who know they're not making any more money and must live on what they've earned in a lifetime of work, and the anti-virus, anti-spyware, updating, and general stability of Ubuntu-Kubuntu-Lubuntu are far superior to Windows, as is the Ubuntu Software Center.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html Will a day go by _without_ a Facebook privacy breach?

Tabbed browsers, like IE7, Opera, Firefox and Chrome are wonderful things, but dangerous if you use Facebook, for that social networking business is now shoehorning business apps into your profile if you do so little as log into Facebook then visit another site while Facebook is still open . MacWorld adds: You don't have to have a Facebook window open, you don't need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there's no notification, and there doesn't appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook's byzantine privacy settings. OK, from now on, I will use one web browser (Chromium? Firefox? IE?) to visit Facebook, purge its cookies and cache on every shutdown, and my favorite browser (Chrome) to browse to everywhere else. That will keep Facebook in its place.

$24 in China will get you a WiFi hacking kit designed to automate cracking WEP and WPA passwords. As the Network World article reveals: To crack a WEP key, the applications exploit weaknesses in the protocol that have been known for years. For WPA, they capture data being transmitted over the wireless network and target it with a brute-force attack to guess the key. Want privacy? Go to WPA2 security, or use a long WPA password with upper case, lowercase, numbers and punctuation. WPA2's a lot better...

Need to find an old Radio Shack catalog? Don't head to the garage (the XYL threw them out, anyway, during spring cleaning). Instead, see them online at http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html

Think twice about putting anything controversial on social media; think three times about posting to Facebook. A simple test shows, even a year after removal, tha t content is still sitting where it can be accessed on Facebook servers . The file with this kitten was removed over a year ago, yet its link still shows you the content on Facebook servers.