Category Archives: Tech

My Raspberry Pi is here

I just got my Raspberry Pi delivered 20 minutes ago after a seemingly eternal wait. I’m staring at it blankly with no idea what I should do with it. Any suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime I need to grab an SD card and a power supply so I can boot it up.

The Raspberry Pi is a very inexpensive ($35 because I bought the “high-end” one) small computer. It has an ARM processor (like your phone!) and a few ports. You provide a Linux installation in an SD card, a power supply, keyboard, mouse (optional), and a screen. I’m sure people will put together cool things for this once it’s been out for a while. For now… let’s see what I can do.

Online security 2

Another ridiculous hacker image recommended by Eva. Click on it for more.

I wrote about password reuse a while ago and I promised to follow up – I just didn’t promise to follow up quickly.

Today, LinkedIn suffered a massive security breach, and 6.5 million passwords were stolen. I went and I changed my password for a new one and I am done. You should do the same, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are done.

If you re-use your password, then you are in trouble. You may be really good about not writing down your password and not telling it to anyone… but the breach can happen on the other side. It’s trivial for a hacker to write code to try out every username/password combination on many popular websites (Google, banks, Facebook, etc). Out of 6.5 million passwords, I’m willing to bet they would have lots of success. You should really, really use different passwords for each different account you have.

Impossible to manage? No. Just use a password manager. I use 1Password on the Mac, iPhone, iPad. It stores all the passwords locally and securely encrypted. The browser plug-in for the desktop is really good, and the app for the iPad and iPhone is ok. It all synchronizes seamlessly. It’s an expensive solution, but having your bank account drained or your identity stolen will be way more expensive. There are other similar products but I haven’t tried them.

Will this make you completely secure? Well, no…

…you are never 100% safe. But you can always do better.

And last, and admission: While I knew I was vulnerable because I was reusing just 2-3 passwords on all my online accounts, what prompted me to get serious is when I saw one of my passwords on this list. Shameful.

The eternal number

In 2001 I moved to Austin and got a land line number with AT&T. This is the number I give out for everything that’s not personal: banks, credit cards, etc.

Keeping this number has been hard. I had to transfer from AT&T to Vonage. This was great: cheap long distance, voice mail to email, and the ability to bring it with me to California. But Vonage charges me per month and frankly I wasn’t getting much use out of it anyway. But I want to keep the number!

So I started another odyssey: porting my number to Google Voice.

This wasn’t trivial: Google will port numbers from some cell phone companies, but not from Vonage. So I had to go through an AT&T pre-paid cell phone. $15 for the SIM + $20 for the Google Voice port. And I get to get rid of this:

Simplicity is beauty: This is the junk I am getting rid by ditching my Vonage line.

I’m happy to announce that the process is now complete and was successful! The only drawback: spam calls about the elections are now getting redirected to my cell phone. Time to deal with that.

DeLonghi Alicia espresso maker

When I got back home last Thursday, I found this at the door:

A DeLonghi Alicia electric espresso maker!

As you can see, it looks like a regular old school stove-top espresso maker. But this one uses electricity instead of a stove, making it viable for office use! I first learned about it in Amanda’s blog so I added it to The MKX® Wish List on a whim (readers: it’s not too late to buy me a birthday present). Turns out a reader got it for me 🙂

It’s three main pieces. The left-most thing is what replaces the stove. The pitcher itself is clear which is cool because watching espresso brew is cool. So what.

Everything is standard. You add the coffee, you screw everything together. You push the button and wait. I’m just posting the photos because they look neat, not because they are all that informative.

The brewing process is short. The coffee comes out tasting great and the whole thing is easy to clean. It makes enough for maybe 3 cups of espresso. For the price I think it’s a worthy investment. If you buy one, maybe you can use the link below so that I get a tiny referral bonus?

Recommendation: If you work at an office and hate office coffee, buy this. It works really well and it only costs about 20 Starbucks espresso shots.

Lytro

T-Rex at the Academy of Sciences

What is Lytro? It’s a “light field camera”, a totally new kind of camera. Instead of recording the color and intensity of each pixel, it records the color, intensity, and direction of the rays of light.

What does this mean? It means that unlike the film and digital cameras you know, you don’t need to focus the light on the film/sensor in order to take a sharp photo. Instead, it captures the rays of light, and when you are viewing the photo, software processes the information to produced a final focused image. This means that you can focus the image after it was taken.

Very cool idea. Lytro just shipped their first consumer product and Amit and I went to the San Francisco Academy of Sciences to check it out.

The camera looks different from most cameras. It’s a stick, has no flash, and a small touchscreen. You need special software to view the images, since they aren’t normal image files. The software is Mac-only: a sign of the times.

Want to see an example photo we took? I thought so. Click on the preview below, let it load and then click on different parts of the photo to see it re-focus.

Impressed? Neither was I. The final image quality is similar to that of a crappy webcam. But don’t dismiss Lytro just yet. Remember that the first digital camera was created in 1975. It took many years for the technology to improve and replace film cameras. As technology progresses, I can imagine light field cameras take over current digital camera technology. This is just a glimpse into that future. We just aren’t there yet.

Sharing links from Google Reader

Those who know me are aware that I am addicted to the anything-reading efficiency of Google Reader (204 feed subscriptions and counting). It’s great. If you are one of those people who still open a few websites every morning in order to read news, then you really need to look into this.

We all hate the recent Google Reader redesign. One of the coolest features it had was the ability of sharing a link, so that anything you “share” shows up in your friend’s Google Reader. In their desperate attempts to fight Facebook, Google cut this feature and replaced it with Google+ integration.

I’ve seen a lot of complains about it online, and even a pretty crazy workaround. Here’s mine:

Use the granddaddy of link sharing services: Web 2.0 pioneer Delicious. You can post things on Delicious directly from the Google Reader interface (you need to enable this in the Google Reader Settings).

Let me know if you create a Delicious account, and I may just add your feed to my Google Reader account. Here’s mine. Or you can just subscribe to The MKX® Super Feed, which aggregates Delicious, Flickr, The MKX®, The MKX® Photo Central, Twitter and YouTube in a single, convenient feed.

Why I bought a Kindle

I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. I have an iPad, so why did I buy a Kindle?

Amazon would like you to believe it’s all about the screen. Truth be told, I’ve been reading about E-ink since the mid nineties, fascinated by the prospect of a screen that uses almost no power and looks like a printed page. It took many years until I saw one live and I loved it. And it took another few years until I owned one (this Kindle). But no, reading in direct sunlight is not a huge selling point for an ultra-white Mexican who’s respectful of the Sun’s ultraviolet rays.

I actually really like the iPad’s LCD screen for reading. My eyes don’t get tired, and it’s great to be in bed at night, in total darkness, reading on the perfectly illuminated screen – brightness turned all the way down. Battery life is more than fine as well: I never read for more than 11 hours straight at a time without access to a power outlet. I’ve read several books on my iPad and I’ve enjoyed immensely.

Then Amazon released 3 new Kindles:

  1. Kindle Fire: Ultra-cheap media-viewing subsidized tablet ($200)
  2. Kindle Keyboard (a.k.a Kindle 3): ($99)
  3. Kindle Touch: E-ink with a touch screen ($99)
  4. Kindle: E-ink, no keyboard ($79)

I always thought that the keyboard on the Kindle was stupid. It takes up a third of the device’s space for something you only use once a month for a minute! On the other hand, the new Kindle’s lack of keyboard and touchscreen make it unbearably painful to type, whenever it is you need to. So why would anyone buy the Kindle when for $20 more you can buy a Kindle with a touchscreen keyboard?

And why would Marcos spend money on a dedicated reading device that limits you to a single store for buying books?

This is why:

New cheapo Kindle on top of iPad 2. As classy as a pocket billboard.
  • iPad 2: 21.28 oz
  • Kindle Fire: 14.6 oz
  • Kindle keyboard: 8.5 oz
  • Kindle touch: 7.5 oz
  • Kindle: 5.98 oz

When you are holding something up for hours, every ounce counts. This new Kindle is tiny, super light, and at $80 well not impulse buy territory. And I can still pick up in whatever page I was at on my iPad when in total darkness, or on my iPhone when I have a few minutes to read and I’m away from the larger toys.

Real-life Pipe Dream

Many of you saw this cool computer animation that went viral a few years ago (you know it’s because it’s hosted on Google Video):

This week at IDF they demo’ed a real-life version. The video is not professionally shot, sadly:

They mention they use a bunch of Intel gear. What they don’t mention, is that the company that put this together, SISU Devices, also used a bunch of National Instruments hardware and software, probably a more key component to the system. Cool stuff.

Online security

Eva thinks I should use this image in this post. Click on the image for others I could have used.

The many high profile hacks that have occurred recently, like the one on Sony and Gawker (and those are the ones we know about) have made me think a lot about my online security. We all know what we need to do: Use different strong passwords that cannot be guessed using dictionary attacks for every single account.

The stakes range from the mildly annoying (someone sending spam from your email account, which can get it deactivated) to the really annoying (damage to your reputation due to inappropriate posts made from your Facebook/Twitter/Google+/whatever account), to the really painful (money stolen from bank accounts, identity theft).

I think password reuse is especially bad: someone gets access to one password database, they can now try them on many popular websites. It will work. Hackers don’t do this because “I” or “you” are terribly interesting people to hack. They do it because it’s profitable. Spam, Google Bombing, you name it. It happens all the time, just see how many fake emails you get from for friend’s email accounts. Just a few weeks ago my friend Rafa had his Skype account compromised and his SkypeOut credit used. It’s real.

Ok, but is there a practical way to have different strong passwords for every service we use? I think there is, and I’ve decided to do it. Follow up post coming.