Paul Boutin shares a number of low-tech hacks for high-tech problems.
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
Mr. Pozar explains, "You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works." Using your head can extend the key's wireless range by a few car lengths.
A short synopsis from imdb:
After World War III Paris is lying in tatters. The earth has been contaminated and survivors of the war have to live underground imprisoned by the victorious nation (it's never said explicitly which nation that is, but they are talking German). Scientists are looking for a way to secure the survival of mankind by exploring the possibilities of time traveling. In the process one of the prisoners, who has a strong connection to the past because of a recurring dream of his childhood, serves as their guinea pig. As the experiments go on the time traveler falls in love with a woman from the past and comes face to face with the childhood memory he's been obsessed with all his life.
Director: Chris Marker. Beautiful signing by the Choirs of the Cathedral of St Alexandre Newski. "Music from Russian Liturgy of the Good Saturday."
28 minutes
Twitter is nothing more than a group Short Message Service or SMS. It is built for the mobile as SMS is. User has a choice to tell the whole world that they are about to do laundry in 140 characters or less, or they can keep it in the family. No more, no less.
Twitter.
One of the most celebrated commercials of all time was Mama Magadini's Spicy Meatballs for Alka-Seltzer. Created by Doyle Dane Bernbach Advertising Agency. In 1996, Leo Burnett Company featured it in a compilation of the 100 Best Commercials of All Time; and, it was ranked number four in Entertainment Weekly's feature on the top 50 commercials (March 28, 1997 issue).
It reminded me one of the all time famous Alka Seltzer's «Spicy Meat Ball.» See more of PETA's Banned Spots and become a vegetarian today.
NBC found spots promoting vegetarianism as being too sexy, while at the same time they run ads promoting "fried chicken and burgers... -- even though these foods make Americans fat, sick, and boring in bed," said PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange in her statement about the decision.
In my view PETA intentinally crafed the spots to be rejected by NBC. The Web Site of PETA's Banned Spots for Super Bowl drives plenty of traffic.
It is January 16. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos.
By the time you read this her account is: Dieses Konto wurde gesperrt. For some reason YouTube thinks that I am in Germany but the meaning stays the same: This Account is Closed.
Photo from site key2australia-holidays.co.uk
Telegraph wrote an article today about a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote Tourism Queensland. For example, the clip of a female who tattoed a message professing her love for the Great Barrier Reef was created by the advertising agency.
In its latest campaign, Tourism Queensland invited people around the world to send in a 60-second video of themselves to apply for a six-month stint on idyllic Hamilton Island in Whitsundays. The job involves little more than lazing around on the beach and blogging about life in paradise. Thousands of sun-seekers have applied so far.
Tourism Queensland have since been forced to admit that "Tegan's" video was concocted by their advertising agency.
The site received 25 thousand hits in one hour and close to 300 thousand in one day and was taken down by traffic.
I though it was a thing of the past. If you use embedded flash files on your Site, you should read How Embedded Flaws in Flash Files Allow for Cross Site Scripting Attacks:
An attacker can carry out cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks on a vulnerable system through newly disclosed vulnerabilities in Shockwave Flash (SWF) files.
The flaws, which can be found by the thousand via search engine, are caused by an error in the way that input is validated when passed to embedded ActionScript and JavaScript in Flash files, according to the US-CERT, which warned about the issue in an advisory updated today.
Websites hosting vulnerable Flash files are exploitable by an XSS attack in the context of the domain hosting the vulnerable file, as well as attacks that spoof or modify online content, according to the cybersecurity division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis compares output and employment changes between this and past recessions. It doesn't look as bad as thought, and yet:
The 10 previous postwar recessions have ranged in length from 6 months to 16 months, averaging about 10 1/2 months. The current recession has surely surpassed the postwar average, but its total length will only be known when the Business Cycle Dating Committee retrospectively determines the final month of the recession.
Adolf Merckle, one of the world’s richest men, committed suicide last week by throwing himself under a train, reports Bloomberg:
[Merckle's company] VEM was caught in a so-called short squeeze after betting Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen’s stock would fall. Merckle lost at least 500 million euros on the bets on VW stock, people familiar said on Nov. 18. VEM lost “low three-digit million euros” on VW stock, the company said in November.
It took Porsche three years of careful maneuvering:
It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune.
"Don't forget..." consists of Photoshop palettes pasted over billboards in a metro station in Berlin. Is it a street art project or clever advertising campaign? I studied advertisng in Berlin at HdK and will not be surprised if there is an advertising campaign behind it.
Firefox 3 limits usable encrypted (SSL) Web sites to those who are willing to pay money to one of their approved digital-certificate vendors. Self-signed certificates (SSC) get rejected. For example U.S. Army uses certificates are issued by the Department of Defense and could not be trusted according to Firefox 3. Expired SSL certificates on Google and LinkedIn get affected as well.
The Mozilla.com Web site, where Firefox 3.0 can be freely downloaded, defends the new feature, saying SSL certificates not issued by a validated certificate authority -- so-called self-signed certificates (SSC) -- don't provide even basic validation; and expired certificates should not be viewed as "harmless" because they open avenues for hackers.
On the other hand expired SSL certificates are actually quite common.
According to Netcraft data, the number of SSL websites passed 600,000 in 2007. If we make a rough estimate and assume the same ratio as for the Fortune 1000 websites, that would mean that there are around 108,000 websites with expired SSL certificates. All these would get the “error page” in Firefox 3.
The lack of one industry standard when it comes to SSL and SSC creates both the security hazard and sub-prime usability issue. This is actually something that Mozilla itself seems aware of. Jonathan Nightingale, who works with usability and security at Mozilla, had this to say in his blog in regards to how Firefox 3 handles SSL certificates:
I don’t think the approach in Firefox 3 is perfect, I’m not sure any of us do. I have filed bugs, and talked about things I think we could do to continue to enhance our users’ security while at the same time reducing unnecessary annoyances.
What is the difference between:
www.moxietype.net
moxietype.net
moxietype.net/index.php
www.moxietype.net/index.php
User might expect all those pages lead to the same page. Search Engines though might store these locations separately. This might result in much lower page rank.
Solution
Decide if you want to keep www or not and make a Global Redirect at your server or write Global Redirect in htaccess file. I prefer non-www as it takes a few more strokes to type in.
Inform Google on Webmaster Dashboard Tools (under Settings) about which version they should keep in their Index. Join Google Webmaster Central if you haven't done so already.
Analyze all the pages in your Web Site and remove duplicate URLs from Google Index by using robots.txt. For example print or category in URL could lead to the same page. You might want to restrict print and category in URL from being indexed. Read about Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol.
There is a set of simple questions to ask while planning a contribution-based project such as technological requirements, skills of the contributors and time dependancy.
Be aware of any specialized language that you are using in your instructions or in the description of the project. Words and phrases like “cache”, “ftp”, “social book-marking”, “beta”, “screengrab”, “firewall”, “tagging”, “tweet”, “proxy”, etc… may not be part of your audience’s vocabulary.
If you get the server error message such as:
- (Mac OS X 10.2) "An error occurred while trying to add the selected printers. Error 1282"
- (Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4) "server-error-service-unavailable."
You might need to reset the system. Follow these easy steps:
TinEye is an image search engine. You give TinEye an image and it'll find it on the web for you. TinEye analyzes image attributes and compares fingerprints of every single image in the TinEye Search Index. However, keep in mind that TinEye is a new Web search engine and they didn't have the time to index all the images on the Web yet. I found over 500 sites containing variations of the image.
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web — even if it has been modified.
Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.
Every day TinEye's spiders crawl the web for additional images. Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for each one and adds it to the index.
Ever wanted to get rid of your Web Hosting Company? Good news! You can set up UNIX server right at your home or in your office if you have static IP address and high speed internet connection. Below are steps and links to the original instructions. I can't vouch for them as I am still looking for an old PC to pull it off.
It appears that it is much easier to rely on the content generated by the other sites than create their own. In this case I will agree with the Facebook.
Power.com asks users to provide their user names and passwords for social networks. It then accesses those outside sites as if it were the user, and allows the user to view the other site’s pages without actually visiting it.
Facebook blocked access to its site from Power.com, which “deliberately circumvented Facebook’s technological security measures in order to continue its unlawful practice of accessing Facebook’s computer systems without authorization,” the complaint stated.
Photo: prefabricated WeberHaus
There are now about 15,000 passive houses built around the world, with the majority in German-speaking countries and Scandinavia. It costs only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses. Passive Houses get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
Related 
WeberHaus
1 comment ( 1215 views )