Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Prey Project

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Prey is an Open Source software project for locating your lost or stolen machine. You install a faceless background service on your computer that runs every X minutes. When it runs, it connects to a server and asks “Is the computer reported as missing?”.

If it is, it takes a webcam photo, a screenshot, gets the geographical location of the computer (think GPS but without GPS hardware which your laptop probably lacks, using WiFi triangulation instead, similar to this) plus some other info. It then uploads the results to the server.

All configuration is done from the website. This way the program on your computer is harder to find and thus to uninstall. Most thieves will not know where to look and there’s a good chance they aren’t sophisticated enough to even format your computer.

So, don’t be a schmuck and wait for your laptop to be stolen: install this thing. It’s free, it’s invisible until you need it, and it may recover your computer one day.

Edit: Removed a redundant mention of “background service”that was repeated and also unnecessary. Pointed out by Daniel Jaramillo.

Tech

No device neutrality at The NYT

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Starting today, full online access to The New York Times will no longer be free (i.e solely ad-supported). That is fine and it’s fair: a serious newspaper has very high costs including paying the salary of professional reporters. They create valuable content and annoying Flash ads that no one clicks on is not paying the bills.

So they came up with a subscription plan, as decoded by Frédéric Filloux:

  • The first 20 articles in a “calendar month” are free. After that, you’ll be nudged towards a $15 subscription for 4 weeks of Web access.
  • Smartphones? An iPhone, Android, or Blackberry app is included with the $15 deal. For one year of 52 (4 * 13) weeks, you’ll pay 13 * $15 = $195. Yearly subscriptions aren’t offered. But do I have to pay twice if I own both an iPhone and a Moto Droid?There’s no Web-only deal. The basic $15 rate bundles Web and smartphone access.
  • If you have an iPad you’ll pay extra: $20 per 4-week billing cycle = $210 for one year.
  • Other tablets? Not yet.
  • You want access from all of your devices? PC, smartphone, iPad, Times Reader 2.0, the NY Times app from the Chrome Web Store…that’ll be $35 for 4 weeks, $355 for a year.
  • If you’re a paper subscriber, the NYT elders smile upon you: You’ll have access to everything from all your devices with no unseemly display of surcharge. But it depends on the deal you make: new subscriber, renewal, special offer, a conversation with a Customer Retention Specialist… It all sounds like dealing with a cell phone carrier or a cable network provider or an airline. Three well-loved businesses.
  • For e-book readers such as the Kindle and the Nook: Sorry, no access at this time. (Amazon will sell you the NY Times newspaper, but it doesn’t give you access to the site.)
  • What happens if you touch a page through a search engine, through your friend’s Facebook wall or Twitter tweet, through a link on someone’s blog? Free…unless it’s not. Some visits fall within the 20 articles/month rule; others, such as through Google links, will have a 5 free articles-a-day limit. One can see what an enterprising geek could make of this. How does the NYT know it’s you coming back for one more hit of their good stuff? They do it through cookies. $195/year is a good incentive for a little bit of “cookie management” and IP address spoofing.

Yes, it makes your head hurt. This is another instance of (lack of) device neutrality, which I talked about in an earlier post. Basically, they have decided that they can charge different amounts for the same content based on what device you read the content on. In this case, similar to Hulu, they can see that an iPad would be much more appealing to read the newspaper on, so they charge more to read it there than they charge to read it on a web browser. All of a sudden, designing a better user experience becomes a liability for Apple’s device.

We’ll see how this goes with readers, assuming this makes it past Apple’s subscription rules about charging less outside the app. I just wished their subscription plan didn’t give me a headache trying to understand it. That’s what my cellphone company is for.

Tech

Preserving childhood memories

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You may or may not know this, but video quality in tapes (VHS more so, Beta a little less so) degrades with time. Photos too, and some kinds of photo paper degrade faster than others, and most people have no idea when they go out to have those rolls first developed.

We take those photos and make those videos because our memory fades with time. Little did we know that those old home videos and albums full of photos would fade too!

But you can put an end to this: Digitize. By digitizing your videos and scanning your photos you turn them into ones and zeros, and those don’t fade with time. I’ve been begging my mom to have our videos and photos digitized for years! I know it’s a lot of work… but maybe one day?

Shlomit decided to tackle this problem and just took all her family photos (about 5000) out of their albums and shipped them off in three boxes to ScanMyPhotos. In less than a week the photos came back along with three data DVDs. It was a lot of work, but well worth it!

The nice thing about digital photos (besides the fact that they don’t fade, you can copy without a loss of quality, you can email them, and they take up no physical space) is that even though the colors may be faded on the originals, you can always do a little bit of restoration on the computer without too much work.

I grabbed one random photo whose colors were badly faded and did some very quick color-correction using iPhoto‘s built-in tools – nothing terribly fancy. The results were better than I expected:

Before
After

Not too bad, huh? So, mom… when are we doing this?

Tech

Will Palm survive?

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Image source: Engadget

After Palm announced terrible quartery results, the press is doubting their survival as a company. This is a shame, because in today’s smartphone world, it seems to me that Palm’s WebOS/Pre is the best product in the market after the iPhone.

Blackberries feel like Windows 3.1: ugly, outdated, unusable. I don’t understand why people love them so much. Windows Mobile attempts to cram a desktop UI into a 3 inch screen. My friend Luis had one and it took him 20 minutes to look anything up in the web. Android phones are like Linux: powerful, but only a techie could use it, if he wants to deal with the pain. I haven’t used a Nokia smartphone in years so I don’t know.

It’s just sad: A really nice product, only too little, too late. I’ll be surprised if they are still around a year from now. Some reading for those who care:

Tech

Supercomputer on your lap.

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ASCI Red

In 1996, IBM’s ASCI Red was the top ranked supercomputer in the world. It was the first one that could do 1 Teraflop. A Teraflop means 1000000000000 floating point (think fractional math) operations per second. It was used to simulate nuclear explosions and such.

This week, AMD released the ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870 can also do 1 Teraflop. This is a graphic chip for laptop computers. It will be used to draw millions of polygons per second depicting your simulated orgies and such.

This is Moore’s law to you. Thanks to CUDA Chess for the info.

Tech

Live from CES

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For the first time, The MKX® has sent a correspondent to the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Roaming the show floor right as this is published, we have gadget connoisseur Pepe Correa. He has sent us some fantastic images.

First, one of the coolest things that is all the rage for 2010: 3D. As you know, every major TV manufacturer is releasing some sort of 3D TV this year. Below, you can check out Motorola’s 3D glasses, which will work with some of these TVs:

Read more for more photos…

Continue reading Live from CES →