Blog Marco

Useless gadget of the day: Vacuum Dustbin. Instead of sweeping up the dust into a dustpan and throwing it into the bin, have a bin which as a vacuum inside it suck the dust into it? Sounds like a good idea but really, its a waste of electricity and a waste of space. Just use the good old dust pan and broom. OR why don't you just use a vacuum cleaner? They were trying to sell this crap on http://www.catchoftheday.com.au/ today. I've actually bought junk from that website - novelty items that aren't worth a penny. RRP $150 for the vacuum, but they're having a fire sale and are selling it at a bargain basement price of $20.

Did you know that a lot of our news are produced from News Releases? Some are pure news like reports from government and things. Some are commercial. You may be being sold a product without your knowledge. I was reading through the paper and I found probably the most unconvincing story which most probably originated from a press release. I thought they were going to talk about cycling around Vietnam but really they're selling some tech gear. Screw them. (Although for disclosure I do own a FreeAgent drive which does a pretty good job, but I own a JVC HD Camera and not the Sony HD cam as advertised by the article)

In March last year, documentary filmmaker David Smith had no intention of following 30 cyclists from one end of Vietnam to the other perched on the back of a motorbike.

But two weeks later, armed with a digital high definition camera and no script, that's exactly what he and his son Denby were doing.

This story sounds like something straight out of SciFi (Science Fiction). These mad European scientists have created a labratory which can potentially create a black hole (probably a 0.0000001% chance) and destroy all of Earth in the process. I say: go ahead... it'll be so cool to see a black hole in our lifetime!

A giant particle accelerator that mimics the effects of the Big Bang could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole, a lawsuit claims.

Walter Wagner, who runs a botanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island, and Luis Sancho of Spain have asked for an injunction to prevent the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) starting up its Large Hadron Collider.

The accelerator, which will be the world's most powerful particle smasher, is due to begin hurling protons at each other at its base outside Geneva this northern summer.

Physicists hope the device, which has taken 14 years and $8.7 billion to build, will provide clues to the universe's origins by mimicking its condition one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

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Submitted by Marco on Wed, 02/04/2008 - 8:30am.

Moore's Law is an observation made by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. But it isn't too far ahead when memory chip makers will crash into the physics barrier wall - the limitations of the laws of physics and the technology based around silicon. Platters of silicon can contain hundreds of rectangles, each the size of a grain of rice, with each cell containing circuits etched at a width of 50 nanometers or 2000 times thinner that a human hair.

There will have to be a massive change of process. The next technology could well be one of the following: M-RAM, P-RAM (Phase change memory), molecular memory and carbon nanotubes. these new technologies will come to light in the next decade ushering in new processes and new processor and memory capabilities. Moore's Law would have a hard time keeping up, becuase of the shift in technology and processes. Here's to the future...

Manilians (aka people who live Manila) are technologically disabled. Take this case in point: The lines were long - super long, something like 30 or 40 people deep time 3 lines waiting to purchase a ticket for the train. There were two ticket machines located on either end. Guess who first lined up, realised there was no one waiting at the ticket machines, bought a ticket and passed all those who were waiting - leaving them speechless (they saw me, I noticed, I saw their expressions too). Yes me! I could not believe that out of all those people had no change for a simple machine. The machine only had a few buttons – compared to our 100+ button ticket machine in Sydney. My case in point: Manilians are technologically disabled.

We all love our privacy. But with the Internet boom, we tend to rely a lot on the search engines to provide us with the answers we need. But by using these search engines we are giving up a piece of our privacy. Recently, AOL released three months worth of search records from their users. Many of the searches gave a picture, or a story about the user's life. Consider this case:

On April 4, for instance, user 14162375, the melancholy Portuguese-American in Florida, seems to have passed out on the keyboard at 6.20pm, when he asked suddenly: "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb" then "vvvvbmkmjk" and "vvglhkitopppfoppr".

An hour later he had recovered enough to search for variations on his wife's name - he thought she might have moved to New England. On the evening of April 16, matters came to a head: "My cheating wife", he typed, and then, five times, "I want to kill myself", and then "I want to make my wife suffer", followed quickly by "Kill my wifes mistress", "My wifes ass", "A cheating wife". Two days after that he was back looking for audio surveillance and bugging equipment and four weeks later he seemed to have cheered up and was looking for motorcycle insurance.

Can you imagine the day when laptops will be banned from planes? Well, the day has come - with these recent UK arrests of terrorists planning to bomb multiple planes. The threat has severely restricted what passengers can bring on board with them in the airplane cabin. everything is banned - electronic devices to books and newspapers: only medicines and your passports are reported to be the only things allowed to be carried on board. Those in-flight movies better be good.

Our favourite electronic devices are suddenly facing a very uncertain future on international flights under new security measures being introduced into airports in Britain and the US.

In response to recent revelations of a suspected bomb plot targeting some UK flights travelling to the US, transport and security agencies in both countries have issued strict new guidelines, which international airlines such as Qantas must observe.

Suggested measures for travellers:

1. Do not check in what is obviously a laptop bag. Instead bury
your laptop and other devices in another bag with adequate
padding.

2. Remove all the data from your hard drive not deemed essential
for your trip. The removed data can be carried on your person on a
CD or USB stick if it is required at your destination.

3. Get insurance that will cover the loss of expensive devices
should they go missing with the rest of your luggage and maintain a
list of serial numbers and product specifications.

News by Marco | Travel | Technology + Gadgets | Marco's blog | add new comment | read more»

Submitted by Marco on Mon, 14/08/2006 - 8:16am.

Holy crap. Rail guns exist? It looks like the US Navy will soon have the technology to shoot anything in North Korea from a ship with a rail gun. A rail gun basically shoots a bullet or some projectile with EM energy (Electro-Magnetic) instead of the usual gun powder. Here's more information: PopSci. I thought this type of technology was just Science Fiction. (They have these rail guns on ships in the TV series Stargate)

According to this article burned discs have a limited lifetime. If you are on the cheap with your burned CDs or DVDs expect only about 2 years of life or less. If you keep your discs in a dark cool place, you may be able to extend their life to 5 years. Other discs promise a lifetime of 100 years - these discs have gold in them which seems to lengthen their life. I wonder how they tested that? Nothing lasts forever.

I think that article was just a press release from the distributor Baltronics trying to promote their wares. I know for one that the very popular and affordable TDK burnable CD's and DVD's can last up to 70 years if stored in "appropriate conditions". Actually their official website states these CD-R Gold have a archival lifespan of also 100 years.

Did you find a USB Drive recently? If you did - don't you dare put it into your PC. Or even think about opening any of the files inside. It could be a trap.

In the latest foray in "social engineering" where hackers would drop USB drives in respective places where employees would pick up the drives and then open them up - unknowingly introducing trojans and viruses into their computer. Read more here.

I used to sell big ticket items every week on eBay. Went on for a few months. Made a decent amount of cash to get me by. But I found that selling on eBay simply required too much effort to sell. You had to take photos, then write a listing, then go through the whole eBay sell process, wait for enquiries, answer questions, wait until bidding ended, package the product, send off the product. It is too work intensive - so I called it quits and moved on to other income sources. So now just a little over a year later I'm selling this Palm Tree Seed husk and this Leadtek PVR WinFast TV2000 XP Expert TV Capture Card.

The International Consumer Electronics Show has introduced the new concept of having an all in one DVD Player and Laptop combo. Toshiba has come out with new notebooks with its "Express Media Player" feature, which enables users to instantly play audio or video DVDs and CDs with a simple push of a button and more importantly without the need to first boot the Microsoft Windows operating system. Actually, Toshioba was among the first to feature a no-waiting TV mode in 2004 with its Qosmio multimedia laptop. It then began to put the boot-less mode on its high-end models. This year, Toshiba plans to integrate the feature in about 80 per cent of its models.

Best-of lists are difficult. In the realm of video and computer
games, where every player's experience is personal and technology
is constantly improving, the task is even more perilous.
Unfazed by this, Icon has put together a list of the 50 best
interactive games ever released. Every title is a creative
masterpiece in its own right, providing countless hours of
entertainment.

The industry is only 30 years old but it has rapidly evolved
from a fledgling hobby with products created by home enthusiasts to
a $30-billion-a-year worldwide entertainment giant.
Games have evolved from primitive two-dimensional reflex tests
to epic adventures with wondrous photorealistic worlds to explore.
For this list, games have been judged on their entertainment value
today rather than their impact when released. Many influential
games, including Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Command & Conquer,
Elite, Pitfall, Street Fighter, System Shock and Pong are
absent.
We have also decided to choose the best instalment in each
series unless sequels are significantly different. Remember
these?
1. The Sims 2 (PC)
Released: 2004.
Website: thesims2.ea.com

Everyone can play this masterpiece differently, the depth and
freedom are astonishing. Guiding your endearing digital denizens to
health, happiness and fortune can be comical and poignant. Creative
flexibility lets you mould entire neighbourhoods, construct dream
homes and sculpt characters.

I was watching "Million Dollar Machines" on ABC which just finished just now. The theme was "Power Boats" and it went through the genres of traditional, sporting and modern power boats. What really took my breath away was the 118 WallyPower, which is valued at $24 million dollars.

This Mediterranean based power boat is the crème de la crème of all power boats. It could be described as a narrow, angular, black-glass-housed superluxury go-fast is 118 feet long, looks like a stealth fighter that missed the runway, and is squirted to a top speed of nearly 70 mph by a total of 16,800 gas-turbine horsepower.

The externat design of WallyPower is awesome. Glass windows - tinted - 360 degrees all around the boat, full dining table, bed(s) and a kitchen.

The Monaco-based company Wally Yachts (named after a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character, Wally Gator, which is a little like Boeing naming itself Snoopy Group) has, since 1993, been a high-tech-cruising-boat innovator. Its huge, all-composite sailboats, 60 to over 100 feet long, are prized for their computerized, hydraulically trimmed simplicity of operation, particularly when compared to boats that are rat's nests of lines and winches and require large crews. A typical 80-foot Wally can be sailed solo.

"We are making exponential progress in every type of information technology. Moreover, virtually all technologies are becoming information technologies. We can reliably predict that in the not too distant future we will reach what is known as "The Singularity".

This is a time when the pace of technological change will be so rapid and its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed. We will be able to reprogram our biology, and ultimately transcend it. The result will be an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create."
Human 2.0 - Read the rest