3D scanner

Scanning =

The other day I commented over on the Mashable site that I’d read about a sub-$10k rp device … or 3D scanner. I couldn’t remember which. More I think about it, the more it seems I was recalling a scanner. Not that it matters now. The new opening price point is… get this … US $2,495. Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself (Link).

It’s going to be a wild and crazy year at this pace.

via Core77

Posted in virtual+meat

Tracing An Email

The purpose of this guide is to show the process involved in tracing an email. The first step required to tracing an email is finding out the headers of the email. What are headers? Email headers are lines added at the top of an email message that are used by servers as the email goes on route to get delivered. Generally email clients only show the standard To, From, and Subject headers, but there are more.

google's early censorship policy

LAN over the Internet

Hamachi : Stay Connected

With Hamachi you can organize two or more computers with an Internet connection into their own virtual network for direct secure communication.

Think - LAN over the Internet.

Think - Zero-configuration VPN.

Think - Secure peer-to-peer.

Access computers remotely. Use Windows File Sharing. Play LAN games. Run private Web or FTP servers. Communicate directly. Stay connected.

How to Outwit Chinese Internet Censors

Every day in China, Mr. Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.

Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.

Even two small commercial companies, Dynamic Internet Technology and UltraReach Internet, offer software or Web services that try to poke holes in China's "great firewall."

Link at FriskoDude

sensing and control from your PC

Sensors underpin the new control system. No, I don't mean politics and society. I hope.

Phidgets are an easy to use set of building blocks for low cost sensing and control from your PC. Using the Universal Serial Bus (USB) as the basis for all Phidgets, the complexity is managed behind an easy to use and robust Application Programming Interface (API).

Applications can be developed quickly in Visual Basic, VBA (Microsoft Access and Excel), LabView, Java, Delphi, C and C++.

PhidgetWeightSensor can weigh up to 140 kilograms.

PhidgetTemperatureSensor accepts a K-type thermocouple, and is an incredibly robust way to measure temperature. You can measure up to 1200 degrees celsius.

music trade fair

Global music fair opens as industry seeks to unlock digital dream - January 27 - MIDEM, the world's most influential music trade fair, opened its doors in Cannes on Sunday, with much of the focus expected to be on the challenges posed by online music sales. Online music sales are finally bringing in the bucks for the piracy-battered music industry but there may still be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
TMCNet.com - Discuss in Forums

P2P scorecard

Tom Mennecke at Slyck has posted a "Winners and Losers" file-sharing scorecard, a smart (if insufficiently linked) roundup of the shifting P2P landscape. While Tom notes that the RIAA earned some jubilation over the Grokster case, the underlying erosion of RIAA credibility plus the unstoppable increase in P2P use despite Grokster puts the RIAA atop the losers' column. "With more people using P2P and file-sharing technology, while fewer are buying into digital music services, it’s clear the RIAA is running a broken machine." Sony, naturally, is also a big loser. "Because of Sony-BMG’s fiasco, the future of the DRM has been cast into doubt and destroyed any credible argument against online piracy. Most of all, they betrayed the consumer."

Oddly, Apple makes the winners' column despite having little to do with P2P. BitTorrent is the big winner, though. Torrent directory ThePirateBay is singled out for having a winning year, and for its defiant pose in the face of copyright violation notices.

• Permalink

from winXPcentral

Create your own wireless hotspot in 10 minutes

just linked to MPAA

How To Use BitTorrent - For Beginners

Privacy tips

Wired News published a FAQ on How to Foil Search Engine Snoops.

pookmail

pookmail email, they're like disposable credit cards, except with less money and well okay maybe they're not like credit cards, but they are disposable.

extensive tip site

This site contains registry fixes, scripts, Troubleshooting Guides and freeware utilities to resolve problems in Windows XP. The resources available in this site should help you learn, diagnose and troubleshoot the common problems you face in Windows XP. Additionally, there is a section for Internet Explorer, addressing the Frequently Asked Questions in IE.

We have a mirror site at Winhelponline.com

Free Camera software

Free Camera software from DIGICAMHELP -- oodles of easy-to-understand information about digital cameras, accessories, image editing and more.

Adobe Photoshop Album 3.0 Starter Edition - photo organizing
EXIF Image Viewer - view EXIF info
Exposure calculator - calculates exposure settings for various scenes. Excel spreadsheet.
Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery - recover lost images from digital camera memory cards
Art Plus Memory Card Safe Eraser - erases data from memory cards
FastStone image viewer - image browser, viewer, converter and editor
FilterSIM - photo filter simulator
FuturePaint (Mac) - full-featured image editing program
Gimp - (Windows, Mac, Unix) - photo retouching (installers available)
Hello - instant photo sharing and chat - integrates with Picasa2
Irfanview - image viewer and converter
Jalbum - web photo album generator
Neat Image - digital image noise reduction
PhotoFiltre - image editing and filter program
PhotoPlus - image editing software offering layers
Photo Story 3 - add motion, effects, music and more to digital photos. Windows XP only.
PIXresizer - image resizer
Picasa2 - photo organizing
VicMan's Photo Editor - image editing
ViewEXIF - view EXIF info via Internet Explorer
virtualPhotographer - apply photographic styles to images

WiFi 1 mile away

QuickerTek 27dBm Transceiver / Wireless Signal Booster

Okay everyone... prepare to be impressed. A company called QuickerTek has released a product suite of 27dBm transceiver adapters for both Mac and Windows PCs that – get this – give users wireless connectivity with networks up to 1 mile away (via Gizmodo).

home theater PC

How-To: Build a practical HTPC
Engadget's step-by-step guide for building a powerful, upgradeable, $1000 home theater PC

If a site is blocked

If a site is blocked, via bookofjoe

use a nifty workaround submitted by Enoch Choi, a reader who, among other things, is the founder and CEO of medmusings.

Here's his hack, which he put up in the comments section of the Panera post:
Try this the next time you're at Panera, it works on any blocked site:
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=enen&u=http://www.bookofjoe.com/
Just substitute the URL for any one you'd like to view.

Watch HDTV On Your PC or Laptop

USB HDTV Tuner with Remote -

So you want to dabble with HDTV but aren't too keen on spending the money for a new television? This HDTV Tuner will turn your laptop or PC into an HDTV and will let you record HDTV shows directly to your computer! Pause, fast forward, and rewind live HDTV and setup scheduled recordings with the electronic program guide. You can even backup your favorite episodes to DVD and watch your recorded shows over your home network. If it works as well as it sounds, this could be the perfect solution HDTV solution for those who want HDTV but don't want to shell out several grand for an HDTV set. USB HDTV Tuner with Remote :: ThinkGeek.com

dominant code ain't

wine beat windows xp in a number of benchmarking tests. They put wine 0.9.5 on identical Gentoo Linux machine and Windows XP SP2 machine and came up with some interesting results. Both had these hardware specs: nVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 ULTRA PCI-E with 256MB DDR3, 3.8GHz Intel® 570 Pentium® 4E HT Enabled CPU - 800MHz FSB, 1024MB 533MHz DDR2 RAM (2 DIMMS), 60GB IDE ATA100 HDD 7200 RPM 8MB Cache. Here is a summary of the results.

Comparing to Windows XP, Wine has the current lead on 69 tests over Windows, a lag between 0.1 and 10.0 percent on 14 tests behind Windows, a lag between 10.1 and 20.0 percent on 9 tests, and a lag of more than 20.1 percent on 55 tests. So Wine does beat Windows in some areas and not in others but the fact that it beats Windows at all is amazing. See more on these tests in detail at WineHQ.

surveillance method

Data Retention Is No Solution - Sign Petition

The data retention plans of the EU - to store all telephone and internet traffic data - are massively invading privacy and therefore the freedom of people in Europe, while at the same time lacking necessity for police investigation and leaving lots of possibilities for malicious people to sneak around this surveillance method. It's an invasive tool that effects every citizen, and lacks the improvement of security, with which its implementation is argued. Read the details on the campaign of European privacy activists and sign "Data rentention is no solution!"

Read more...

Good html editor

Good site. Good insight.

Gramps: I've been around the net a long time. I remember when way back in 1995 I would code HTML in notepad on Windows 95 while walking through a snowstorm uphill both ways. Now, over ten... years... later...

Sonny: Ten years? Nobody was alive then!

Gramps: Oh yes, back when we didn't have DNS servers, we had huge host files and Yahoo was the new catalog of where things were online. And like I was saying we used notepad and spent days coding a website made up of a few pages, an image or two and a handfull of links.

Sonny: Really gramps? These days I use First Page from Evrsoft. They just came out with their 2006 version. It lets me make pages in a snap and it's able to do WYSIWYG and that old lame HTML coding too. The cool thing is I can use it at home and at work for free!

Gramps: Wizzy-who? Oh you mean FrontPage. Bah! I'd never use that it's not a very good...

Sonny: No no no Gramps, not Front Page, FIRST PAGE!

Gramps: Well lemme see that thing... wow! I should have made my first page with First Page! What the kids think of these days. Next thing you know they'll be using the internet instead of the telephone!

Sonny: Uh Gramps, let me introduce you to Skype. :)

globe getting closer

a portable gadget that translates between English, German, French, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.

That's six, count them, six languages! What? You scoff? You want more? How about the fact that it does all that and it will speak the translated words/phrases for you! Now if we could just get them to add Ferengi and Klingon to the available languages. Our friends at Gizmodo also picked up on this cool gadget. Read their snippet here or check out the link to the techjapan.com article. It will be a while before it's available in the states but it will be on the market in Japan in mid February with a street price of about 400 bucks.

Infrared Webcam

Genius has announced an INFRARED WEB CAM, which works like a normal cam, but kicks into infrared mode when the lights go out.

Infrared Webcam Hits

pvr pc

New PVR Can Record 11 Shows At Once by Richard Baguley If you don’t think you watch enough TV, this could be the answer. The people behind BeyondTV (a personal video recorder program) built a PC that can record up to 11 TV shows at once. The appropriately named Godzilla PVR has 4 digital and 7 analog TV tuners, which should be enough for the most ardent TV watcher. It also has a terabyte of storage space and a 3.2GHz dual-core CPU. But it ain’t cheap: the total cost for this setup was a monstrous $4284.90, which means it would have been a lot cheaper to buy 4 or 5 TiVos. But I guess that’s not the point... [Via PVR Blog]

And why not?

New Information Security Study Rates PGP Corporation the Lead ...

It's a breach

"Three More States Add Laws on Data Breaches"
Companies struggling to keep up with a patchwork of state laws related to data privacy and information security have three more to contend with as a result of new security-breach notification laws that went into effect in Illinois, Louisiana, and New Jersey on Jan. 1. Like existing statutes in more than 20 other states, the new laws prescribe various actions that companies are required to take in the event of a security breach involving the compromise of personal data about their customers.

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/

Computer dirt

What's Lurking on Your Computer?

While you type on your computer keyboard, your fingers could be grazing over potentially harmful bacteria...Bacteria Can Quietly Thrive on Computer Keyboards April 11, 2005 -- It's enough to make you want to scrub your hands and hose down...

Private forum

KeyForum 0.43 alpha

KeyForum will apply the concept of P2P to forums, and is developed (in perl) to give the possibility to everyone to make a serverless forum, pretty anonimous and free, thanks to the absence of a central server.

the official interuser forum (in english) can be found here
http://www.keyforum.net/forum/index.php?showforum=18

Private p2p

WASTE 1.0 Beta

Secure distributed communication and file sharing for small trusted groups

License: Freeware

multi format DVD Ripper

Kingdia DVD Ripper Professional 2.5.0

Backup your favorite DVD to VCD, SVCD, AVI, or DIVX

via fileForum

DVD slide show

VSO PhotoDVD is a program to create an animated slideshow of your digital pictures to watch them on a regular home DVD player. $9.99

via fileForum

How much memory do you need?

Most computer-savvy folks consider the answer to the above question to be simply "More." Common wisdom says the more RAM in a PC, the better it will perform.

But as cheap as memory is, loading up on it can still stress a budget. Tom's Hardware has a typically thorough article showing just how much memory you really need, based on your usage.

Writers Jon Kullberg and Patrick Schmid combined benchmarks and file-transfer tests to show what happens when you take the real speed killer -- hard disk access -- out of the equation. They use popular games for benchmarking -- Quake 4, Doom 3, Far Cry, etc. -- to make their point.

Their conclusions are here. The executive summary: 512 MB is the bare minimum, really good only for those who don't ask their Windows XP computers to multitask. A gigabyte of RAM is the sweet spot, the optimum amount for most users. And 2 GB is recommended for gamers and power users.

I recently bumped my system up to 2 GB, and I'll agree with their findings. I think I'll also tweak my recommended PC specs pages to reflect this, as well.

Updated: I made the changes to my PC Specs pages, and here are my new minimum recommendations for desktop system memory:

• Budget/novices -- Still 512 MB, but get a gigabyte if it's within your budget.

capture FM

Washington-based Time Trax Technologies announced Friday that it was launching a new product called the TraxCatcher, which is sure to make the folks at the RIAA upset.

The TraxCatcher is a MP3 player that sits on top of a FM radio dock. From there, it will tune into your favorite FM radio station and record songs from the radio into "near perfectly cut" high-quality MP3 files.

Continue reading "New Device Grabs Songs from FM Radio"

Mushroom networking

Sharing your broadband and increase your speed

By Jack Schofield on Internet

"Mushroom Networks, which was started at the University of California, San Diego, and WiBoost Inc., based in Seattle, have built prototypes of simple wireless systems that make it possible for groups of neighbors to share their D.S.L. or cable Internet...

Security briefings

Fred Langa points out in his excellent security summary:

It will be a surprise to many, but Microsoft has assembled perhaps the most extensive free, online library of security articles and how-tos, including:

Dealing with "Pretexting" or "Phishing"
Help safeguard your personal information online
Home office security checklist
Pharming: Is your trusted Web site a clever fake?
What to do if you're a victim of credit card fraud
Protect your privacy with online payment services
How to limit your personal data in online directories
5 safety tips for using a public computer
Using Office security features
Use public wireless networks more safely
Retire that computer more safely

The Microsoft security meta-site offers easy access to all the above, and to related pages.

So, I'm not nuts

Show full path in title bar setting is lost after Safe Mode - all Windows

watch for it

iSCSI Storage - IP Network Storage Trends

E-zine dedicated to information about storage over the internet. Provides news, experts, and discussion of IP SANs, NAS (Network attached storage), RAID, ...

BYTECC BT-200

Connect any device with an IDE Interface to a PC with USB interface
Transfer rate Approx. 480 MBps

IE cookies policy

You can set IE not to accept 3rd party cookies
(highly recommended to all users to prevent tracking cookies)

MS Snarf

via HPU blog from Homepage Universe, an excellent low-cost hosting service.

I hate to advertise a Microsoft product, but you gotta admit that they do some great software. This one I found on their Research site. SNARF is the Social Network and Relationship Finder and installs into Outlook. It sorts through your emails and marks them by popularity, so you see the messages that you want to see.

SNARF was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long.

The SNARF UI is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. Clicking on a name shows all messages involving that person.

Download it and play around. Its pretty nifty.

Outsourced shipping

Outsource your shipping today—no approval or shopping cart required Customers shop on your Web site or by phone and pay you directly We handle shipping and return processing, so you can focus all your attention on growing your business As soon as we receive your initial inventory, we can start shipping your orders No annual commitment required No startup or cancellation fees

Learn more

test internet bit rate

http://www.computers4sure.com/speed.asp