The power button logo

Ever wonder about that thing? I received an email from Travis with the following very interesting bit of information on it from Intel, explaining the origin of the power symbol.

They are certainly correct; the symbol is based on binary code, with the 'one' or vertical line representing on, and the 'zero' or circle representing off, which is what they both represent in code. I'd like to offer a little more clarification about their use and application. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has standardized this iconography, which makes sense since setting standards is one of their functions. IEC 5007 standardizes the 'power on' symbol (the line) with its definition being the symbol represents the equipment being placed into a fully powered state. IEC 5008 indicates the 'power off' symbol (the circle) indicates power will be disconnected from the device. There are other symbols as well which can be seen in this one-page .pdf.

You can see these symbols not just in the standard overlapping form presented above, but on almost every power switch, since they are standards. The power-strip below (from England, by the way) and the PC power supply pictured below that both feature the same symbols, just in a different form, but with '1' representing on and '0' representing off.

Bing

On Friday, a few of you were confusing Bing - the search engine - with a browser. I want to clear up what bing is, what a browser is, and how they, or any search engine, can be used.

Bing is a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Ask; really nothing more than a webpage. You can use it in any browser you'd like. Whether you use Firefox, or Chrome, or Internet Explorer, or Opera, or Safari, or any other browser, if you type in www.bing.com the browser you are using will take you to Bing's home page. Likewise, if you type www.google.com you will be taken to Google's page, regardless of the browser you are using.

Below are screenshots of Google and Bing in various browsers, so you can see that it's the same regardless of which browser you choose. (Blogger doesn't let me align them horizontally, so this is the best I can give you).

Google in the Chrome browser

Bing in the Chrome browser

Google in the Firefox browser

Bing in the Firefox browser

I was going to include Internet Explorer and Safari, but to be blunt it would look exactly the same; it would just be Google and Bing in that browser.

The search engine you choose, whether it's Google or Bing or whatever, is independent of the browser you use to view it.

Sounds from a coffee shop

Or lunch lounge or university food hall. Remember the white noise machine I posted a while back? Coffitivity.com is in the same vein as that, except instead of white noise it presents background noise to simulate being in one of the places mentioned above. So there will be the gray noise of chatter, clinking glasses, laughter, and other appropriate ambient sounds. Like white noise, it's supposedly able to help you concentrate on whatever it is you're trying to do. Now you don't have to put up with those pretentious latte-drinking socialites at Starbucks, you can just stay home, make your own coffee, and do whatever you were going to do anyway! Maybe that's not as fun as it sounds.

Creepy robot Friday!

I'll just leave these here. Prepare to never sleep again.




Unlike the previous two, I love this spider one. Not only is it 3D printed, It moves accurately, the same way a spider moves by coordinating legs on both sides of its body so the ones that aren't moving it forward form a triangle keeping it upright. It's threat pose and lateral moves are also accurate based on actual observations and measurements of multi-legged organisms (that right-left look it does in the beginning isn't something real spiders do, though. Yet...). 

Bing!

You all know my deal, so I'll say it again: Bing! Hint: You can steer that background with the mouse or on-screen controls. Another interesting bit, this is done - as are all their animated backgrounds - through the use of the somewhat new HTML 5.0 specification, which among other things allows rich content such as videos, music, and other interactive content without requiring additional software be installed. In other words, if you click on a video link, it can play right in the browser without needing a separate piece of software installed such as MediaPlayer or Quicktime or VLC or whatever else instead. Also, notice the news story along the bottom in the screenshot about Microsoft releasing the source code of DOS and Word? Well guess what's posted right below! See how it all comes together?

Original DOS and Word for Windows source code

You may remember our discussion of the command-line interface and DOS in particular, as well as some of our discussions about Word, including its metaphorical design and the presentation/action language.

DOS!

The Computer History Museum, which is an insanely great place by the way, has just released, through an agreement with Microsoft Research, the source code to DOS and the original Word for Windows (version 1.1, actually). DOS is done mainly in Assembly, text, and binary, with Word mainly being developed in C with a smattering of other file types as well.

It will be difficult to interpret, it's even hard for me to parse it all, but it is very informative to see what went in to these early programs that helped us get to where we are now. 

Condolences via text message

In what I feel is a gross misuse of technology, it has been reported that Malaysia Airlines notified families of flight MH370 that it had likely crashed into the ocean and their families and loved ones, and did it by text message.

We are already living in a world where people often communicate by text and social network as opposed to voice, some interpersonal relationships exist solely via text/online, and immediate responses are expected (you know if someone doesn't respond in 3/5ths of a second to your text, you wonder what's taking so long). For casual conversation I can understand, but it is not appropriate for dumping someone, threatening/harassing someone, and certainly not doing...this kind of thing.

And above all, it is not appropriate for telling people their families and friends have perished. Malaysia Airlines defended their method, which on first read almost makes sense, but there need to be some circumstances that are simply off limits, and I definitely think this is one of them.

A map of your modem handshaking

Ah, the good old days.

Remember in class, when I played you the noise that the old dial-up 14.4/28.8kbps (kilobits per second) modems would make whenever you called in to an ISP? Remember how I said it was the process of (most) of the 7 layers of the OSI - Open System Interconnect - model doing their thing? In case you missed it, here's the video again so you can relive the glory days of old.


But I've done you one better! The image below, which is pretty big so you can zoom way in, shows you each step of the handshake that sets up the connection. For each noise that is made, this diagram explains exactly what's going on.

It's somewhat complicated, I know. Mapping what's happening in the video of the sounds to the image above isn't exactly intuitive. So I've done you one MORE better! The video below is the image above, but with the sound superimposed over it, and it shows exactly what is happening as each noise is heard over the modem. This makes everything much easier to understand, although it's still a lot.

The reason I'm showing you this is that even though we don't have to hear that infernal modem noise anymore, modems still work the same way, cable or dial-up. This will help give you an idea of how machines make connections and send packets across a network, the process is still the same.

See what's traversing your home network

In our discussion of networking, we talked about how messages are broken up into 'packets,' which are like envelopes that have a part of the original message, some error-tracking information, a destination and return address, and some other info. Now, I'm going to show you how to see the individual packets as they pass along your node of the World Wide Web.

First, download a program called Wireshark, which you can do at this link. You can download it for Windows or Mac, in 32 or 64-bit versions. To find out which version you need, you can go to the control panel in Windows Vista/7 and select 'System and Security,' then select 'System' and near the bottom of that window you will see whether you have a 32 or 64-bit OS. On Windows 8, slide-in from the right on your screen or move your mouse to the upper-right corner of the screen, select the 'Settings' charm, then select 'PC Info.'

On Mac, click the Apple logo in the upper-left corner of your screen, then select 'About this Mac' from the menu (if a window appears that has a 'More Information' button, click that). In the window that appears, click 'Hardware' and on the right side it will tell you your processor type. If it says anything other than 'Intel Core Solo' or 'Intel Core Duo' it's 64-bit. If it say one of those two it's 32-bit. This install guide is for Windows, but it will be almost, but not quite the same on a Mac.

Once you've downloaded Wireshark, double-click on it to install. It will ask if you want to install all the components as you see in the screen below, which you should. Keep in mind that Wireshark will also install a program called WinPcap, which actually captures the packets.

One that's been selected, it will ask about icons and associations. I would have it just make a desktop icon, and allow the associations it suggests, as they won't be used for anything else anyway. The screen should appear like the one below. 

One the Install starts, you'll see a screen something like this, with the green progress bar scooting along the top:

It won't get far, however, before you are asked to install WinPcap. You do want to do that, Wireshark won't work without it. You can set it to run at boot time or not, but if you don't and try to run Wireshark after a reboot, it won't work.

Once WinPcap has installed, the main Wireshark installation will finish and you will have an icon for it on your desktop. When you start the program, you will see a screen like this:

As you can see on the left-hand side of the window, in the section titled 'Capture,' it has an interface list, meaning network devices. It might list your NIC card, or WiFi, you'll want to select the proper interface then click 'Start' with the green shark fin right above it. You might have to try a couple of interfaces, if you select the wrong one nothing will happen, it just won't capture any packets. You'll know the right one was selected when it shows you a screen like this:

You can adjust the sizes of the three windows (Top, middle, bottom) by moving the horizontal dividers up or down. 

The information rapidly scrolling up in the top window are the actual packets that are working their way across your network right now, and it will tell you the type of packet (we didn't cover packet types in class) and what it's trying to do. You can also see source and destination IP addresses. 

If you click on one of the packets, you will see some collapsed items in the middle window, with the payload, or actual data the packet is carrying, in the bottom window. If you click on any of the little pluses to the left of the entries in the middle window, you can get a ton of information, as you can see in the screen below.

You don't have to worry about the specifics of all it's telling you, although if you see something curious anywhere in there I can help you analyze what it is. In the picture above, you can see my printer and scanner sending out commands, for example. The colors also represent the type of packet being sent. Also remember, some of those packets are yours, others are just making their way across the Internet. 

This is known as packet-sniffing, and it's an incredibly valuable tool that can help you diagnose issues or simply see what is being sent across your network. Usually, when you see an IP address beginning with 192.168.1 or 255.255.255, that is your network sending data to your network.

I think you'l be amazed at how much data is sailing across your network all the time, and how much information you can get from watching it. Be amazed!

Flight simulator of missing Malaysia Air captain

It is well-known that one of the pilots of the missing Malaysia Air 777 had an elaborate flight-simulator at his house. I found a picture of it and thought I would try to figure out what hardware and software he had from the images. The image above came up again and again, so I started there.

It's an incredible setup. From examining the above image you can see he has three huge (27"?) Panasonic screens that appear to be touch-capable (although why he would need that I don't know) and running Microsoft's Flight Simulator, along with a console, also from Microsoft Flight Simulator, on the smaller bottom-center monitor and a control panel being displayed on what I assume is also a touch-screen monitor that you can barely see at the top-right of the picture. He's using this Saitek flight yoke at the bottom of the image with the green display (the blue-tipped lever to its right is part of it) and what I'm pretty confident is a Saitek Cybork Evo flight-sim joystick in the lower left corner. I also see a standard Microsoft optical mouse and keyboard. 

I found this collage of images indicating the hardware he used in the PC controlling it all:

He loved Asus! I can see a Rampage IV motherboard that can handle the latest-gen Intel Core i7 processors, not one but TWO HD7970 video cards which run on the Raedon Graphics Processing Unit from AMD so he must have been planning to run them in parallel (known as Scalable Link Interface, or SLI), but I wouldn't have used Raedon-based cards for that; I would have used GeForce cards instead, especially because they pioneered the technology as can be seen in the SLI link. On the other hand, he may be using one to power the main displays, and the other to power the two control consoles. I also see a SilverStone Strider Gold 1000W power supply, which is a beast of a cooling mechanism, way more than a regular PC would need, however no liquid cooling as far as I can tell, nor can I see any indication of RAM.

Even with all of this, it is not - in my opinion - cause for alarm, many flight enthusiasts do something similar. Don't believe it? Check out the home flight simulator this guy built! There is also some really advanced cockpit-simulator software out there. Aviation enthusiasts don't screw around. The files he allegedly deleted cause me some concern, but I'll wait until there is more information. 

Gold Ethernet cables

In class on Friday, a story was told about someone who went to Office Depot (I think it was Office Depot. Office max? Staples? One of those) and bought gold-plated Ethernet cables. Or gold-wired, or gold-something. I interpreted that to mean the ends of the cable were gold plated as sometimes happens with other analog cables like this one or this one or these. I was intrigued, because gold-plating Ethernet cable connectors would do absolutely nothing.

So I went to the local office supply store to see what they had. I found the Belkin Cat6 (Category 6) Ethernet cable that you can see below; Ethernet cable is usually the blue or grey networking cable you may have at home. Cat6 has higher transmission speeds than Cat5, but is also more expensive. Both Cat5 and Cat6 are a type of Ethernet cable, which is a type of twisted-pair wire as we discussed in class. Standard phone-line is also twisted-pair but a much lower transmission rate. Cat5 Ethernet cable usually has about 3 twists per inch, although manufacturers differ.

Note in the second picture it says, under point 'C,' that the cable has "50 micro-inches of gold for better conductivity." Gold is *not* a better conductor than copper which is the standard wire type used in these cables, including the ones in the pictures, but it is more resilient as it won't corrode. Also, standards for Cat6 cable connectors make no mention of gold, their specifications already minimize noise and subsequent possibility of crosstalk - the signal jumping from one of the twisted wires to the other - as we talked about on Friday. 

Also, a micro-inch is one millionth of an inch. It's not much, even 50 micro-inches isn't much. I very seriously doubt that the 50 micro-inches of gold touted on the package, but not explained in any detail, do anything for performance. The price difference between this and standard Cat5 is $10 ($14 vs. $24), but Cat6 *may possibly* provide an improvement if you are doing a lot of data transfer. For a standard home network Cat5 should be fine. 

Uh-oh. One of the good guys going bad?

In case you've been living under a rock that doesn't have Wi-Fi, the NSA is apparently monitoring what you do. Everyone went crazy when they found out, although I personally don't care because all the NSA will find out about me is I'm pretty boring. And remember, right or wrong, governments have been doing this for thousands of years - remember our discussion of the runners in ancient civilizations?

Anyway, a lawsuit in California now alleges that Google has been mining student email messages that were sent through its 'Apps for Education' service, which provides tools that can be used by educators  at all levels, including K-12, colleges and universities, to hopefully facilitate learning. When we say mining, we mean they have been looking for keywords, patterns, phrases, and generally scanning their contents which would allow them, apparently, to provide targeted advertising. The real issue, however, is that the data was also used to create user profiles of those who utilized the service.

Google's slogan is 'Don't be Evil.' It really is.

Google claims that users of Apps for Education, of which Gmail is an integral part, can turn off the advertisements. Even so, their information is still mined and profiles still created as Google themselves admit. As thee article states, this might be a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

Here's my take. OF COURSE they're going to be mining all the data they can. Google even admitted recently that Google Plus was a big effort to track you, and collect and mine your data. The issue here is the privacy of students *required* to use a service as opposed to doing so electively. I can't fault companies for wanting to mine data, they can make important and effective decisions that way. It's *how* they go about it, and disclose it, that's important.

On the other hand, I always question the true motivations of class-action lawsuits, which this one is attempting to become. The plaintiffs want monetary damages, and that immediately makes me suspect it's an opportunistic money-grab. I can't imagine (although I don't know) that anyone was hurt financially or so emotionally they need financial compensation. That aspect of the suit, at least for now, I disagree with.

Class-action status hasn't yet been granted, but I could see it going either way. Ultimately, data mining will continue, it's happening to all of us right now, and people don't like it. But it is a useful tool for companies, and the 'how' still needs to be worked out.

...interesting site of the week.

You know you've always wanted to. You've always wanted to write in llama. That's right, like the animal. You wanted to type and have llamas form the words. Well now you can! Just head over to llamafont.com and type away!

If you need something a little more interactive, expressive and artistic, you can try incredibox.com. It's a...I'm not sure how to describe it, but have a bunch of random...people that you dress up make a rhythm for you. Just try it already, you'll love it, I promise!

The most notorious computer game ever made gets an update

Before I tell you what the most notorious computer game ever created is, you might already have an idea formed. Some Xbox game, maybe? Or the infernal Angry Birds or Candy Crush? Please. Those are for kids. Let me clarify; by notorious, I mean difficult, Not just difficult, but insidious, and obtuse, and unclear, and confusing, and if you make one tiny mistake your character will be dead and you'll have to start over.

You'll be surprised when I tell you. Usually it's the other way around; I say "You'll know when I tell you," then I tell you, and you all say "Oh yeah, I knew that." But this is a tough one.

Are you ready? Are you sure you're ready? You didn't see it on the screenshot above? OK, here it is:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yep, based off the beloved book/radio play of the same name by the late Douglas Adams, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the book that went on to become a 4-part trilogy. But it's not a game as we know it today. This particular game was released way back in 1984, in the very early days of computer gaming when the industry was still trying to find its place, by a company known as Infocom. Infocom was unique, because it released games that had no graphics, they were text only. The game would provide a written description of where you were and what was going on, and you typed a command just like the command-line interface we discussed in class. Because of that, their descriptions of environments were incredibly illustrative and colorful even without images, and could accept and parse a wide range of complex inputs at the command line, such as 'Get squid from squid tank and wear it as a hat, then open the inflatable treasure chest.' They were interactive fiction, as well written and absorbing as any novel.

I know the above screenshot doesn't look like much, but it is the opening screen of the very first and most well-known Infocom release, Zork I. The stories and technology to tell them became more advanced as time went on.

They had many detailed and involving games games, each one an adventure in a unique setting - from a carnival to a haunted house to a sunken ship and many others - as you can tell from their titles. Games included Wishbringer, Infidel, Ballyhoo, Deadline, Lurking Horror, Planetfall, Cutthroats, and there were many more as you can see in the promo image for the iPhone/iPad app below.

To make the experience even more engrossing, their packaging included what Infocom referred to as 'Feelies.' These were maps, or magazines from the game world, or tokens, or a wand, or pieces of eight, or a key, or a bunch of other things from the story itself that helped the story come alive.

Back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is legendary for it's difficulty and the level of frustration it caused. In fact, when it first starts, this is all you get:

• You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't.
  
  It is pitch black.

• >_

And that's it! You are expected to figure out what to type at that prompt, and almost anything you type will give you a smart-ass response or get you killed. Even if you're familiar with the books it's still very difficult to figure out the proper sequence of actions to survive even for a second. But don't panic.

So why am I telling you about all this? Because it's been updated and re-released on the BBC's website! But this time it's using the HTML5 specification and updated with retro-futuristic graphics, along with the ability to save and reload your game, thankfully. For someone like me who remembers the original, it's a thing of beauty. But if you aren't familiar with this type of interactive fiction or even the story of the Guide, this is an outstanding introduction to both. I dare you to try it and let us know how you did. As far as I can tell, *it only works in Internet Explorer,* but it's worth it. 

I should also add that, as mentioned above, there is a very well-done app for the iPad and iPhone called 'Lost Treasures of Infocom,' that has Infocom's original game, Zork I, and its other titles available for 99 cents each. But they come with enhanced playability, history of the game, and all of the 'feelies' that were included with each title. It's so well done I can't stand it, I'm envious of iPhone users because they have access to it.

Also, if you decide to brave The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, the very first thing you should type is 'Turn on light.' You'll thank me later. 

The birth of the World Wide Web!

Before we start talking about the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, we need to make a very important distinction: The World Wide Web and the Internet are two different things. The Internet is the collection of hardware and software, protocols and channels, upon which the World Wide Web rests. The technology of the Internet is what allows the transfer of information such as web pages, videos, and music across the World Wide Web.

Now with that out of the way, to paraphrase The Beatles, it was 25 years ago today - March 12th, 1989 - that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN (the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire in Switzerland, which is now home to the Large Hadron Collider) submitted a paper describing the open, platform-independent, hypertext-linked network that would become the World Wide Web.

Later, using the very NeXT computer you can see in the image below, and with help from colleague Robert Cailliau, he developed the first web browser ever, seen in the second image below, and the two connected their machines in the first instance of wqhat would become the World Wide Web. As a side note, NeXT Computers was founded by Steve Jobs when he originally left (was ousted by) Apple.

This original web browser and connection might not have been a big deal, except that a few techie people had paid attention to the original paper written by Berners-Lee, and started developing web browsers of their own. One of the first was the ViolaWWW, developed in 1992 by Pei-Yuan Wei at UC Berkeley, a screenshot from Wikimedia Commons is below.

You can see it's nowhere near what we have today, although it did allow for embedding and in-browser functionality using applets. The web hinged on the concept of hyperlinks; that is, a document would be peppered with links that would lead to further information about the linked topic. In order to display these links, a markup language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was used, and it allowed for continual access to related information about whatever was linked. This made it easy to not just display information, but display links to related information as well, and present in a way similar to looking at a magazine page with images and layout considerations included. But the links clearly put it above a static printed page. The potential was staggering. We will be learning some basic HTML in class, it's not as daunting as it may seem. It relies on the use of markup tags, so for example if you type <b>This text is bold</b>, it will show on a web page as This text is bold. Below is an example of a very simple HTML page, that if you were to type it into a text editor, save as an HTML document, and open in a web browser, would actually display as a web page.

<HTML>
   <HEAD>
      <TITLE>
         A Small Hello
      </TITLE>
   </HEAD>
<BODY>
   <H1>Hi</H1>
   <P>This is very minimal "hello world" HTML document.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

However it was Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina, two students in the Software Design Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) who witnessed a demonstration of the ViolaWWW browser that took it to the next level. They were motivated to develop a browser of their own, NCSA Mosaic. Because of the mission of NCSA, the browser was released free of charge to the public through the dissemination channel of the time, newsgroups, and it became the first truly popular-use web browser of the Internet. A screenshot of the Mosaic Browser is below, along with the very first website on the still-not-quite-public Web.

There was very limited functionality, the Web as it was was more of an informational place than an interactive place as it is now; the idea of streaming music or video or even transferring files of a type other than basic text documents was unheard of and would remain that way for many years. However, after Mosaic was released, the potential was seen by anyone who was even remotely connected to the tech world, and it was the next browser that caused it to explode in popularity.

That browser was Netscape. Developed through an offshoot of the original NCSA group that developed Mosaic and including Marc Andreesen, a company was set up to develop a commercial yet still free web browser. The result was Netscape (seen below) and it is the browser that introduced most of the world to the Web. The animated 'N' in the upper-right corner of the browser letting us know a page was loading was an exciting thing back then.

Netscape was unique because it combined technologies such as an email reader into a single software client, making the process of not just web-browsing but other communications easy and accessible. Once the public got hold of it, there was no stopping the growth of the Web and nothing has been the same since.

It is well known that Bill Gates thought the Internet a fad, however with the release of Netscape and its subsequent versions he realized he was quite incorrect. That led to the crushing, and some say unfair, dominance of Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer, one that has never been very good but led to support for Netscape finally ceasing in 2008. However there are now many competitors and Internet Explorer is no longer as dominant. Alternatives include Firefox, which is a rebirth of sorts of the Netscape browser, Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Opera, even specialized browsers such as Dolphin on the mobile front and the not-sure-if-still-updated child-friendly Kid Rocket browser.

There is so much to talk about regarding this topic I could never cover it all in a single post. I encourage you to read the article celebrating the Web's birth at The Computer History Museum's site. It goes into some real depth and detail, it's a fascinating read.

If you'd really like to see what the web was like all the way back in the dark ages of the id-'90's, you can still download the original Mosaic browser for Windows 3.1 (you heard me) here and for Mac here, versions of the Netscape browser here, and you can even download the truly first browser, a text-based affair known as LYNX, here. It won't be easy to get any of them up and running, so have fun reliving the 20th century!

Help search for Malaysia Air flight 370

As we should all know by now, there has been what sounds like it will be a disaster of epic proportions. On Saturday, March 8th, Malaysia Air flight 370 vanished over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. This is a major mystery for several reasons: The plane, a Boeing 777, is one of the safest planes ever made, without a single crash until last year's crash at San Francisco International Airport, which ultimately was blamed on pilot error anyway. It vanished in good weather with no distress call or transponder signal, but its last known contact showed it was way off course. To make matters worse, no trace of the plane of the plane has been found. No debris, no oil or fuel on the water, no wreckage, no nothing.

There is so much mystery surrounding it all that now the public can pitch in to look for evidence of the plane over the water from their own PC. Tomnod lets people use satellite imagery to scour the surface of the ocean looking for evidence of the missing plane, and tagging it if you find something. I had trouble getting it to run in the Chrome browser, but it worked in all others. You'll need to click [Start Tagging] to begin your search.

It's an offshoot of the concept of grid computing we discussed earlier, where many, many processors are being used as a singular machine to perform a task, and if you have a few minutes I certainly encourage you to take a look and see if you can find anything. Great things happen when complex issues are opened to the crowdsourcing model; remember when a bunch of gamers took less than a month to solve an AIDS-related problems that scientists had been working on for years? Good luck.

Leave it to MIT.

I don't even know what to say here, I can't come up with something witty. I have no idea what the actual application of this is, but it's one of the niftiest things I've seen in quite a while. Researchers at MIT's Tangible Media Group have developed what they call the INform system, that can, as they explain it, 'render 3-D content physically.' Similar to those pin-things you could get at science stores that would make the shape of your hand when you pressed your hand against it (as seen above), this allows someone remotely-located to have a 3-D presence by causing a similar pin-esque area to morph and flex to represent the persons hands, or anything else for that matter. Plus, they light up! If you're familiar with gaming technology, it's using 2 Kinect devices to interpret the movement of the person's hands.

I know this doesn't make any sense, I honestly could't think of any other way to describe it, so I am just linking the video from the project page itself. You can see how someone remotely located is manipulating the pins as though their hands were right there. Watch it, and be amazed. A more detailed behind-the-scenes video and writeup is available at CNN.

Southwest now allows (some of) you to use a mobile boarding pass.

Back in 2004, Southwest began allowing people to print their own boarding passes instead of trade-in a confirmation for one at the airport. Now, in keeping with the ever-evolving mobile market, they have rolled out a test in some Texas locations letting some people show the boarding pass on their smart phone and check in that way. It's not a huge deal, but it certainly is a convenience.

If I'm on Southwest, wherever I end up I have to take time out of the visit to print out the boarding pass, which is a major extra step, since I use the phone to check in in the first place. Hopefully this will be something they roll out on a national level. The image below is an example taken from the linked Cnet article.

 

National Day of Unplugging

Its already passed. It was from Sundown Friday to Sundown Saturday last week. I apologize for neglecting to bring it up in class because I think it's something we all need, even though the colloquialism 'unplugged' doesn't apply to all of it. Here's the official web page for the movement, which in light of our recent discussion questions, is pretty terrible. I guess the designers were too busy unplugging.

The belief is that we are too addicted to technology, which research backs up and with which I agree, and that to detach from it for even a day can allow us to reset our minds, sleep better, and reconnect with more important things, like people. To further illustrate the dangerous levels to which tech has infiltrated society and life, it has even been shown that when people are removed from the technology on which they have become dependent, they can experience symptoms similar to the delirium tremens that alcoholics feel as they detox.

It also has recently come to light that a few days of camping and/or experiencing nature can reset one's mind and allow them to think in a more focused manner, and even reset their circadian rhythm.

This is much better than Angry Birds

So if you missed it, which I suspect you did, see if you can take a day - a single 24-hour period - without using technology at all. If you're able to do it, let us know how it went. If you didn't, let us know why not. If you tried but couldn't because you needed your work BlackBerry, that's OK too, everyone is different.

I asked on the first day of class if you could give up technology for a weekend and most of you said 'no' before I finished asking the question. Let's try it again and see what happens. Talk to you all again on Tuesday!

Absolutely ingenious, invaluable, indispensable app/device of the week.

Bacon. You know you love it. Everyone loves it. I only eat turkey bacon, which I have been told isn't real bacon, but I still love bacon. I even like the word. Bacon Bacon Bacon.

So what to do if you don't have access to it, or just can't get enough of the 'ambiance' of bacon; the smell, the sound of it sizzling? Well, as is the case with everything else, there's an app - and even an associated device that plugs into your iPhone - for that.

None other than Oscar Meyer (just get your wiener jokes out of the way right now) has released a...thing, that's it in the header image, called 'Wake up and smell the bacon.' It's a device that plugs into your iPhone, and you use it like an alarm, however when it goes off it not only plays a sound of bacon sizzling, it actually emits the scent of bacon cooking from the device! Your nose holes will thank you forever.

Don't have an iPhone? Well Yankee Candle is there to pick up the slack.

Here's a video that shows the glory that Oscar Meyer has bestowed on us all. Bacon!

Wireless routers hacked

Do you have a wireless router? Many people do, and if you're one of them you'll want to pay special attention to this post.

According to this post on Ars Technica, a whopping 300,000 wireless routers have been hacked, and not just for fun; the attackers have been using a modification of what is formally known as a pharming attack. This kind of attack is normally run against two specific targets: The first are Domain Name System (DNS) servers that are used to reconcile the web address a user types in with the numerical address the computer understands, and the second are 'Host' files on your PC that do the same thing.

In the wireless-router attack, attackers are able to remotely access the router and redirect legitimately and correctly entered web addresses (such as www.bankofamerica.com) to a fraudulent website, even though the correct address was entered. You won't realize you have gone to the wrong website since the fraudulent one is almost an exact copy, so you'll still enter your username and password, and then the hackers have it. We will talk about things like numerical web addresses and remote servers and whatnot later in the semester, but I have included an interesting and informative video below to give an idea about how this type of attack works.


While redirecting users to malicious sites based off of accurately entered web addresses is nothing new, but it was not that common a practice. With this attack, they are stepping up their game in a big way, and to make it even more concerning, an attack of this type is very difficult for a user to notice. There would be some subtle issues like the HTTPS before the full address, but if you're not paying attention it's an easy thing to overlook.

The attacks, from what I can tell, haven't yet happened in the U.S., and they haven't attacked Linksys routers, the most widely used here in the U.S. by far, but my guess is that they are using the routers in other countries as a test run before they try something really big. For now, if you're router looks like the one below (or is made by Cisco/Linksys) you should be generally OK.

According to the Ars Technica article, you can tell if you've been hacked as the DNS settings in your router, accessed by typing a specific numerical address specified by the manufacturer into a browser bar, have been changed to 5.45.75.11 and 5.45.76.36. Again, it won't be any of you, but it's a possibility to be aware of in the future.

Robot termites

This is an interesting concept. I didn't know Harvard had an Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, but it's a great idea. Animals, insects specifically, are great at amazing feats of engineering, and now researchers there have developed robots that can work as a collective to build structures, in a similar vein to how ants or termites build theirs.

It may not sound like a big deal, but ant and termite mounds are wonders of the natural world. They are built without any plan, and by insects of course, but they have ventilation, heat re-direction, greenhouses, nurseries, and a complex series of non-random passageways. If one can't function the building goes on without her and they often even sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony.

Honestly, all large structures are built the same way by humans, but they need a plan. If you watch the construction of any building there are numerous people crawling all over the place to get it done. Imagine if robots could be used instead to build complex structures.

These researchers didn't provide the robots with a plan, rather they gave them a basic set of rules and the robots were able to build complex structures using only the rules that defined the end goal. It's a difficult ting to explain, but the video below explains it in more detail and shows the robots moving blocks in to place. It's surprisingly interesting to see.


Not that they would be used to replace humans, they would be used in situations where it would be dangerous for humans to be. As the article states, if structures needed to be built underwater or on the surface of another planet, these robots would be ideal.

Walking garden lamps

You know what's wrong with my garden? The lights don't up and walk around on their own to give the garden a new look every once in a while.

Well, my problem has been solved! If I'm willing to do a little tinkering, I can get centrally controlled yet autonomous garden lights that are capable of monitoring their surroundings and relocating to different spots around the yard, either for a new look or to avoid people walking around.

The linked article indicates that the robots, that run $1,000, are actually just 4-legged robots. You can put anything you want on them; cameras, drinks, they could even come and g through a doggie-door.

I just want quadri-pedal garden lights that walk around on their own.

I learned a new word.

I've heard all types of derogatory terms in my years. Funny ones, not-funny ones, misused ones, ones that make it clear the person saying them has no idea what they really mean. Recently, a brand-new derogatory term has been making the rounds, and while I never agree with this kind of thing, I am at least willing to admit that I understand it.

The term is "Glasshole."

It refers to someone who wears the new Google Glass headset in what can only be described as a socially inappropriate way. This could be anything, really. It could just be an air of smugness, or not paying attention to the world around you, or in what became an extreme case, wearing it to the type of bar where it clearly should not be worn. As a disclaimer, I am absolutely not justifying the result, here, but in my own personal opinion there was an obvious risk.

I'm seeing the term everywhere these days, even a linguistic evaluation of the evolution of the term. Mainly, these articles that use it are telling you how not to be one, which is good advice. I'm still not convinced of the applicability of Google Glass, but there will definitely be an adjustment period as it comes into social acceptance. I even found a blog post where the author came up with a whopping thirty-five arguments against Google Glass. Even I think that's overkill, but it's an interesting read and he makes valid points. Will it cause a surveillance state? Destroy what shreds of privacy we have left? These questions will have to be answered.

This kind of thing is not new when it comes to new technology. The most recent comparison is the Bluetooth dongle that people wear in their ear. When they first started becoming popular, I felt they made people look like smug jackasses (and I still do). They're more accepted now, and similarlyGoogle Glass may become more accepted as time goes on, and may even be location specific; so if someone is wearing them in Silicon Valley, then no big deal. But if they're trying to wear them around Sturgis, South Dakota, well, the outcome might be slightly different. Additionally, I think they have very real value in such arenas as the military and biotech where they would have actual application.

Be careful out there.