All posts by AndrewH

Ever Get That Feeling You’re Being Followed (On The Internet)? Check This Out.

Privacy, ,

You don’t have to click around too much to find advice on how to protect your anonymity on the Internet. Finding good advice that isn’t simply fear-laden jibber-jabber or link bait designed to get you to pay for an identity protection service is a bit more difficult.

Slashgeek.net posted a brief, but realistic and practical, piece on maintaining anonymity while navigating the Internet. The true sign that this post is a collection of actionable advice and not a panicked plea to save your identity?

Two things – 1. They admit that some people might not mind being tracked across the Internet by websites, ad networks and search engines – it does help those folks deliver more relevant ads to you and, like it or not, advertising makes the web go ‘round. 2. The post tells you the easiest and best ways to protect your anonymity – one of which takes about 5 minutes to accomplish (caveat – you’d have to use Firefox exclusively).

Check out the post from Slashgeek.net. It might be old news for some, but there are a lot of great tips in the comment section, as well. Share any additions you might have to these suggestions.

New MacBook Pro With Retina Display Unfixable?

Apple, mac, Technology, ,

The brave souls at ifixit.org ripped apart the new MacBook Pro that Planet Earth has been raving about since Apple announced their newest laptop (with now-legendary retina display) and found something startling.

“This is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart,” the ifixit.org team announced in a June 13th blog post, just a few days after the official announcement at Apple’s annual developer’s conference.

The folks at ifixit.org (kind of like Will It Blend, without the blender….and with the ability to put things back together) pried apart the new MacBook Pro to find that it going to be really hard to fix, ,should anything go wrong. The full details of the teardown are here, but the basic theme of their findings is as follows:

  • special screws proprietary to Apple are impossible to remove without a special tool
  • key parts (RAM, Battery) are fixed into place with either no way to remove or upgrade, or fixed in such particularly perilous way (the battery is glued to the case, rather than screwed into)
  • display assembly is fused together with no opportunity to fetch something dropped in.

They gave it a 1/10 score in terms of repairability, stating “the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable—making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.”

Photo Credit: Computer Repair from Big Stock Photo

MyFord Mobile – The Future of Smart Driving?

application, automotive, electric car, iPhone, itunes, Microsoft,

Adoption of electric vehicles in the United States has been a bumpy road, at best. If it wasn’t cost, it was availability. And if it wasn’t availability, it was functionality. For whatever reason, electric cars can’t seem to get traction.

With a new app announced today, Ford is looking to set the tone for what owning an electric car should feel like. Owners of the 2012 Ford Focus Electric can now download the MyFord Mobile iPhone app from either iTunes or www.myfordmobile.com.

http://youtu.be/x7z2WAi8OBE

The new app makes owning and operating the new electric Focus seem challenging and fun – a little bit like a game. No longer do the selling points of an electric car have to be contained to economic and environmental advantages (although, those are pretty important, too). MyFord Mobile gives you tools to manage your vehicle – like you would manage your calendar or finances.

“The Focus Electric is a fun car to drive and helps save customers money at the pump; with MyFord Mobile, the enjoyment and savings continue after the vehicle is parked and charging,” Bill Frykman, Business and Product Development manager, said. “This innovative app also offers new ways of sharing your driving experiences to create a “cool” factor while educating new Focus Electric drivers on the perks that come with an electric vehicle lifestyle.”

Among the features of the new app:

  • Users can monitor the battery display for the current charge level and for how long the car will need to be plugged in to get a full charge or reach a desired range.
  • A MapQuest-powered trip planner built into both the app and Web portal enables users to find available public charging stations and plan efficient multi-destination routes.
  • Value charging technology (developed with Microsoft) helps customers charge the vehicle at lowest possible costs based on varying electricity rates depending on location, season and time of day. The app uses Microsoft’s cloud computing platform to check local utility rates and then automatically starts charging after the prices drop.
  • Users can program driving schedules and set a desired cabin temperature.
  • Drivers can learn to be more energy efficient by automatically uploading and processing vehicle data from each trip.

The link between smartphone and car is possible via an embedded AT&T wireless module through which drivers can log in at any time.

Of course, app users can make their Ford Focus Electric ownership a social experience by participating in forums on the MyFord Mobile website – featuring leader boards, achievements and social networking. Driving achievements and statistics can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter – probably leaving your friends and followers wondering why your car is talking to them and possibly eliciting references to 1980s TV classic Knight Rider.

Drivers interested in the MyFord Mobile can check out the site and the app as a guest. MyFord Mobile will also work with the upcoming C-MAX Energi and Fusion Energi plug-in hybrids.

Proof That All HDMI Cables Are Created Equal

Gear, review, tech,
Turns out that higher price doesn’t really equal higher quality with HDMI cables. They are all equally awesome.

An experiment with HDMI cables is being touted as showing definitive proof that expensive HDMI cables perform no better than cheaper competitors.

Posted to Expert Reviews, the study compared HDMI cables – from relatively cheap (just a few dollars) to painfully expensive (a couple hundred dollars). What sets this experiment apart is the thoroughness employed to make sure as many variables as possible were controlled – essentially creating a conclusion that it would be nearly impossible to refute.

Focusing on the output from the HDMI cables led author Tom Morgan used a PC to output a Blu-ray version of an open-source film called Sintel and recorded the output on capture card. That allowed him to look at raw, un-corrected frames of this film.

Utilizing identical screenshots (those on the PC and those on the capture card), he compared the before and after using programs that identify individual pixel variations, as well as documenting the “digital fingerprint” of the frame on each end of the HDMI cable.

The result?  “What’s clear from our tests is that we got no errors on any of the cables, and more expensive cables did not improve image quality at all. Given our results, we’d definitely buy cheaper HDMI-certified cables.”

In other words – the higher price on some HDMI cables appears to be hype. Unless you subscribe to the “I just got new sneakers and I can run faster and jump higher” school of thought, don’t waste your money on pricey HDMI cables when the cheap ones work just as well.

Photo Credit: HDMI Cable from Big Stock Photo

Touchscreens Get Physical

smartphone, tech, Technology, , ,

Dynamic touch screen technology. Deformable tactile surface. Haptic user interface.

Whatever you want to call it, Tactus Technology is poised to change the way you think about what has become near-ubiquitous touch-screen technology. Imagine a touch screen that rises to meet your fingers – keyboard configurations that physically pop up from the screen. That’s what Tactus says it will bring to market in 2013.

TG Daily reported yesterday that Tactus Technology “uses microfluidic technology to create physical buttons that rise from the touchscreen to give users the experience or feeling of operating a physical keyboard. When no longer needed, the buttons recede back into the touchscreen, leaving no trace of their presence.”

Tactus expects its new tactile touch technology could be implemented across all modern touch screen devices – from smart phones and handheld gaming to readers and in-dash auto screens.

Evidence of Massive Cosmic Blast 1,200 Years Ago – Cause Unknown

Astronomy, Science, space, , , ,
Mysterious and Massive Radiation Event 1200 1200 Years Ago

Japanese physicists have identified a mysterious blast of high-energy radiation that struck Planet Earth more than 1,200 years ago – some 20 times larger than normal variations. The cosmic origins of this ancient and massive radiation event, however, are still unknown.

Cosmic-ray physicists from Japan’s Nagoya University, led by Fusa Miyake, discovered the radioactive event – said to have occurred between 774 and 773 AD – based on carbon dating performed on ancient trees.

Their investigation of tree rings from that era show a 20% increase in levels of the 14C isotope over the course of a year. Those isotopes, according Nature.com, are formed “when highly energetic radiation from outer space hits atoms in the upper atmosphere, producing neutrons. These collide with nitrogen-14, which then decays to 14C.”

What happened is clear, but why it happened seems anything but. The usual suspects for this radioactive spike are supernova explosions or solar flares. According to Miyake and his team, both are unlikely culprits considering no other recorded evidence exists of such massive events.

The search for the cause behind this massive cosmic event will likely send scientists to pore through historical data to find any correlative events that might clear things up. Either way – the trees don’t lie (they can’t). Something huge happened 1,200 years ago.

Photo: Solar Flare from Big Stock Photo

“Each second we produce about 25 million times as much memory as the world had in all of 1953”

google, Technology,
URs Holzlz - G+ Profile Image

At a Memorial Day barbeque over the weekend, I found myself sequestered in a corner of a friend’s yard with a mutually nerdy acquaintance talking about memory – both human and digital. The question was, “How much memory does the human brain possess – in bytes?” We theorized, but neither we, nor anyone else, it seems, has an answer.

While the human brain and its capacity is still largely a mystery, Google engineer Urs Holzle posted an interesting factoid about digital memory from his Google+ account over the weekend:

“59 years ago, in March 1953, the world had a grand total of 53 kilobytes of RAM spread over a dozen or so computers, the largest having 5KB. That’s not enough RAM to store a single icon…

For comparison, today the DRAM market produces around 40 billion billion bits per year. In other words, each second we produce about 25 million times as much memory as the world had in all of 1953.”

Those types of numbers are difficult to digest, but the advancement in memory and computing capabilities even over the past could of decades is remarkable. Moving forward, I would imagine not only the memory available will continue to rise, but the way we access it will continue to develop, as well – from sub-pint-sized memory sticks to consumer cloud storage by the gigabyte.