Virus, Malware, Ransomware all need our help

Viruses have evolved. Big time. We have many words for viruses, depending on the type. Malware refers to specific types of them. Ransomware, for example, is a type that holds a computer hostage until a fee is paid. Some ransomware just freezes our PCs and asks us to pay. These threats, typically can be unlocked…

MakerBot Academy is coming to a school near you

The President, during a State of the Union, does rally the troops to begin the next industrial revolution. The launch of MakerBot Academy may indeed be an attempt to realize President Obama’s urge to: “ensure that the Next Industrial Revolution in manufacturing will happen in America.” The plan is pretty simple, and already underway, from…

Battle of the Bands: Configuration Management

Anyone who works in information technology spends a fair amount of their day automating simple tasks. I always say if it can be done once, twice, in the same way, it can be automated. Technology should do some of our tactical work for us. Configuration Management (CM) is arguably one of the best fits for…

The trade-offs of trading up

This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what…

conforming 24p

Even though the 5Dmkii has the capability to capture at 24p natively, it’s still a cool effect to capture @ 30p and conform to 24p: click here for html5 version

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Neil Postman

From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…

Xuggler

If you’ve ever fumbled around with ffmpeg and other tools, there is a superior alternative I was turned onto today by Paul Gregoire via his blog: Xuggler! The Media Tools are particularly of use to folks like me – how suhweeet is this?

On Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing: Sound as Image

translating information from one sense into another, especially sound to image, is one of the things technology does well case in point is Close Encounters of the Third Kind is this captivating? in the case of Close Encounters it is. however, personally, i can only say that in other cases, such as the one below,…

Solution Evolution

Over the years, I’ve had many different backup solutions in place in my home to back up the now >3TB of data I deem worthy of the trouble. I’ve used RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6. I’ve used complete solutions and DIY on all the major platforms, as well as Linux flavors like Debian,…

satellite browser

NASA hopes we enjoy J-Track 3-D. Clicking on the thumbnail below or here or there will activate JTrack3D and it will appear in its own window and begin loading a database of over 900 satellites. What you will see (presuming the system you’re on supports Java) is a plot in 3-dimensions showing the position of…

MIT Media Lab: Personas

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s…

Linux on your celli? Yes plz

Nokia decided to put aside its favorite S60 platform and switch to Maemo, which is all another way of saying that they ditched S60 for Linux. We like that and so should you. For one, the browser is pretty stable, and it supports flash, video and applets. No more harrumphing when the iPhone loads a…

Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds

Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM: From Wikipedia: He was the chief architect…