Posted on November 16th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Anyone who has looked at the night sky has wondered about what they see. It would be nice to know if that bright star is Betelgeuse, in the belt of Orion the Hunter, or Polaris, the North Star that has guided so many travelers for thousands of years. In fact, most of us haven’t a clue.
So we have been trying out a new device from telescope maker Meade (Meade.com). It’s called MySky Plus, and it looks like a ray gun from a sci-fi movie. It has a trigger and a viewing screen a little smaller than a business card. When you aim the gun at an object in the night sky and pull the trigger, MySky Plus will try to identify the target, show you a star map and provide a spoken explanation. Read more »
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Posted on November 16th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
– Instructables.com boasts over 17,000 home-brewed projects from around the globe.
We looked at hooking a treadmill up to your video game machine, adding a rapid-fire button to your mouse and modifying Disney’s “Wall-E Robot.” We also learned how to pick and husk a coconut (and were warned not to stand underneath when picking), and how to make an electricity-producing wind turbine. You can also check out a book called “The Best of Instructables, Volume 1,” $35 from Oreilly.com.
–Sprout.com offers a new and free way of searching the web. It’s a little like stumbledupon.com, in that it browses the web at random. You give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to rate whatever comes up and over time the downloadable program learns the kinds of things you like and starts to focus. Click on a smiling fish when you like a site and you’ll get more like that. Choose the frowning fish, and you’ll get fewer. And by the way, if you’ve never tried the earlier stumbledupon.com, it’s definitely worth a trip.
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Posted on November 16th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
O’Reilly’s “Head First” series is totally great, as they like to say in Silicon Valley. We often consult “Head First HTML,” to figure out web page coding. Well, here are two new ones, just as much fun as the others. Joy says they make the subjects so interesting and easy to understand that you don’t even realize you’re learning.
– “Head First Statistics,” by Dawn Griffiths; $35 from Oreilly.com. Don’t know the difference between the mean, the median and the average? Don’t worry, hardly anybody does. But you’ll learn about it here all right. What about reversion to the mean? Standard deviations and variance? (This reminds Bob of an amusing story about Karl Gauss, the mathematician who started it all.)
“Head First Physics,” by Heather Lang; $35 from Oreilly.com. Heather (if we may call upon an undeserved familiarity) starts out with the example of the reader falling into a hole which happens to go all the way through the Earth to the other side. This is something that has happened to many of us, and here in Head First Physics we learn why we start to slow down, rather than speed up, as we go deeper and deeper into the hole. Aha!
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Posted on November 9th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Viewzi.com is a new visual alternative to Google. Instead of text descriptions of sites that correspond to your search terms, you get pictures.
What you see is a moving carousel of choices, each showing a different way to view your search results. You can see results as a timeline, which shows the latest to the right and then backwards to earlier ones. You can view videos that concern your subject (lots of stuff here from YouTube). But the view we liked best was clusters of thumbnail pictures. Click on any of those and you go to that site. Read more »
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Posted on November 9th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
The maker of “Snap Art” says the Sept. 15th cover of New Yorker Magazine was done with his program. “I’d
recognize my baby anywhere,” he says. The New Yorker is famed for its artful covers and many people have them framed. The editors are silent on whether that particular cover was done with Snap Art, a plug-in program for Adobe Photoshop. But what if it was? Artists use whatever tools they can. Read more »
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Posted on November 9th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
For computer users who travel a lot, the new “Netbooks” are small and lightweight. And they cost a lot less than laptops.
One reason they’re cheap is they typically lack CD drives and have small screens. They’re used mainly for email and surfing the web, which puts them in direct competition with handheld devices and smart phones like Research In Motion’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, Google’s new Android, and many others coming down the pike. Read more »
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Posted on November 9th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
“Scientific Imaging with Photoshop; Methods, Measurement and Output,” by Jerry Sedgewick; $75 from New Riders Press, newriders.com.
The author is director of the Biomedical Image Processing Lab at the University of Minnesota and many of the examples in this book are drawn from those areas of research. Still, the imaging techniques apply to almost any discipline. He shows you lighting tricks for microscope stages and how to apply what’s called “false color” to make parts of an image easier for the eye to distinguish.
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Posted on November 2nd, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
When times turn down, theft turns up. After cash and jewelry, the most valuable portable objects may be laptops.
The cheapest way to guard a laptop from theft is chain it to a post. In fact, special cable locks, much like the ones for bicycles, are made for just that purpose. They cost about $30. Most laptops come with a socket on the side that fits one end of these anti-theft cable locks. Once locked, you can’t remove that computer without smashing it to bits.
Then there’s “Lojack.” This is a recovery system initially designed to find stolen cars. But now there’s LoJack for Laptops.” If you declare your laptop stolen, it begins reporting its location every 30 minutes, through the Internet. Read more »
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Posted on November 1st, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Sometimes it’s not enough to have anti-virus and anti-spyware. If you have personal information stored on your computer, only the dumbest thieves would miss it. That personal information, in fact, may be the reason they’re stealing the computer.
We tried out a new program called “IdentityFinder” that scours your computer for anything personal and then encrypts it with a click or two. It automatically looks for data saved by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook Express, Outlook and Windows Mail, along with all of your Microsoft Office documents and PDFs. Among the things considered personal are social security numbers, phone numbers, bank codes, anything financial or medical, passwords, etc.
It found over 350 sensitive items on Joy’s computer, including credit card numbers and passwords. It looks for those automatically, and you can add others, like your mother’s maiden name or anything else you consider private. You can save all your passwords in a “password vault,” that is itself encrypted by a master password not saved on your computer. Hang on to that password.
The program is $25 for home users, $35 for small businesses. More info at identityfinder.com.
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Posted on October 30th, 2008 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
High tech is getting really high tech. More features, less money.
If you haven’t looked at new laptops in a while, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. They’re sleek, powerful and relatively cheap. Is it the crumbling world economies, or economies of scale? Joy says it’s competition. Whatever it is, consumers who haven’t maxed out their credit cards can get some deals.
We’ve been trying out a new laptop from HP, the model “dv5z.” It’s the best we’ve seen up till now. Read more »
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