I’ve been waiting for years to find out what’s behind that little door. It’s almost certainly nothing… but there’s always the chance that it will be something amazing.
“How to Program Your Immune System”
“Altermune.” Pretty damn smart. I expect this will be a product (or more likely, dozens of products) before this decade is out. And that people born in the next one will consider our worries about most infectious diseases as incomprehensible as we see the beliefs of the Dark Ages.
“Funny t-shirt: ‘this was supposed to be the future'”
I love it. Now if we can just make it obsolete… 😉
“Fidgeting and Doodling Could Be Unconscious Focus Tools”
I always wondered why some people doodled when they were listening or thinking. This may explain it.
“Shark Knife will terrify your enemies with macho impracticality”
As the last sentence in the description says:
The Klingons have a word for this, most often translated as “trying too hard.”
🙂
Wireless Webcams
I recently had a discussion with a friend about webcams, and we both mentioned that we rarely had any use for them… at least, for the usual uses.
We’ve had a problem in the last few months with one of our cats defecating on the floor in a particular spot. As mentioned, we have three of them, and we couldn’t tell which one(s) were doing it, but I had an idea: I went out and picked up a webcam (a D-Link DCS-920) that would connect to our wireless network, and set it up to watch the spot where it was happening, using the supplied software to record it when we weren’t around.
The culprit turned out to be Salem, and we’ve been trying to find a way to convince her to use the box instead. It’s an uphill battle though… the thing that seems to work best is to catch her when she needs to go, but before she actually does, and put her into the box, not letting her out until she does her business. But catching her at just the right time is problematic, so whenever I’m at the computer now, I keep a browser window open to the webcam.
She only slips about once a week now, as opposed to daily before we got the webcam. Very annoying, but she’s almost as stubborn as I am, so it takes time to retrain her. I have hope that we’ll manage it somehow, eventually. If and when we do, I’m thinking to set up the camera to overlook the front door, so we can see who’s there before we open it.
Oh, and the network name of the device? We called it PoopCam. 😉
“Think Twice About What ‘Everybody Knows'”
I found some of this stuff to be shocking. It’s worth a read.
“How To Grow A New Joint Inside Your Body”
I think I’m jealous of future generations. They’ll grow up with all this neat technological stuff that we’re just hearing about now, like the ability to regrow a damaged joint in your own body. The stuff of science fiction to us will be taken for granted by them.
On the other hand, they’ll have to deal with problems that we don’t, just as we’re having to deal with things that our great grandparents never dreamed of. Maybe I should be satisfied with my place in history.
It does sometimes make one hope that the religions that believe in reincarnation are right, though. 😉
Useful Memory Tricks
I’ve mentioned the memory tricks that I use before, a couple times. Yesterday I had a rare chance to really put them to the test.
I’d used those tricks to remember the combination to a lock that I’d put on our shed, maybe six or seven years ago. The lock was on there for less than a year; I quickly discovered that it froze up in the winter, which made getting to our snow-removal equipment interesting. I replaced it, tossed it into a drawer, and haven’t looked at it since.
As some of you know, we bought a second place, moved into it, and tried renting out the first. About a month ago, that experiment ended as a minor disaster, and we decided to sell the place instead. We’re cleaning it up now, in preparation for putting it on the market, and we’ve had to store a lawnmower there to keep the lawn looking neat while it’s for sale, so of course we wanted to lock up the shed again. I immediately thought of that old lock. But I hadn’t written the combination down anywhere. Could I remember it, after all this time?
I could, and did. 🙂 I remembered the visual mnemonic that I’d created for it by visualizing the shed itself (which was part of it), and was able to extract the three numbers from its elements, in almost the right order (I swapped the first and second numbers initially). Amazing… I’d used that combination no more than fifteen times total, the last of which was more than five years ago. Even with my fairly good memory of numbers from my programming work, I would never have recalled it without those memory tricks.
So it passed the test, confirming its usefulness and saving me the cost of a new lock. Not too shabby. 🙂
“WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud”
I can’t believe that someone had the gall to do this. My systems are safe enough, because I use long random strings that I’ve been able to memorize, but most of the WiFi networks of my friends and associates — the ones I’ve been given the passwords for — would fall to it quickly. I do have the problem that the last sentence of that post mentions:
[…] But good luck reading the password aloud to your visiting friend when she needs to get her laptop online.
I usually have to type in the password on such machines myself, because while I can rattle it off at a moment’s notice, people seem to have a difficult time typing it in. But that’s a minor consideration, compared to the security of my network.