Google Health is a good thing

When it launched a few weeks ago, Google Health received fairly lackluster reviews. Privacy issues and lack of features were the main complaints. Well, I’m here to tell you those initial views are wrong.
Even if you’re a long-time reader of my site, you may not know what qualifies me to make that statement, so let [...]

Condensed knowledge for 2008-03-24

Cellular Signal Amplifier http://tinyurl.com/35zrqx #
UKP14,000 TH!NK city electric car ready for showrooms http://tinyurl.com/2nwd9x #
Remote Microscopy - The Cellphone Microscope http://tinyurl.com/2p82fr #
LG’s new Flatron LX206WU Monitor makes multi monitor displays easy http://tinyurl.com/38jsot #
How does the US really rank in broadband access? http://tinyurl.com/2sgfhy #
First… tentative… steps… http://tinyurl.com/37w54s #
Illuminations: 1913 http://tinyurl.com/34f46f #
The Most Useful Web App Ever? [...]

Windows Family Safety

Windows Family Safety (WFS) is a new offering from Microsoft that aims to offer protection from questionable or indecent websites to families or individuals. I tried it out for a couple of weeks, and found it to work fairly well, except for a few hiccups here and there.
It is a software-based internet filtering mechanism. The [...]

Photography, take two, part two

I continued to work on replacing photos hosted with third party services. The list of modified posts is provided below. This has proven to be a huge effort. I had to locate the photos in my digital library — not all of which is keyworded yet, though I’ve got location information for all my photos [...]

Photography, take two

Over this weekend and the last several days, I’ve gone through posts that contain photographs, and replaced all of the images with ones hosted directly at ComeAcross. In the past, I’ve used photos hosted with third party photo sharing services, and I realize now that’s a folly.
If a third party service goes down, which is [...]

Hardware review: WD My Book World Edition II

After looking around for a storage solution to house my growing collection of photographs, I found the Western Digital My Book World Edition II. I’ve been storing my photos on single external hard drives so far, but data loss has always been a concern with that approach. All it takes is a hard drive failure, [...]

Flickr tightens up image security

Given my concern with image theft, I do not like to hear about Flickr or Zooomr hacks. A while back, a Flickr hack circulated around that allowed people to view an image’s full size even if the photographer didn’t allow it (provided the image was uploaded at high resolution.) The hack was based on Flickr’s [...]

An example of dumb software default behavior

For an example of completely thoughtless software default behavior, I have to look no further than Microsoft Access 2003 from Office 11. As soon as it’s installed, and you try to open a database with it, it gives the first of three warning dialog boxes.

Sure, they may have been well intentioned, but I don’t care [...]

The price of a free lunch in Washington

Joan Claybrook, President of Public Citizen, has an interesting take on lobbyists in Washington and their unfettered access to politicians. Her solution is outlined in the March/April edition of President’s View.

An example of cable management

Ligia and I have recently downsized our living room desk. We used to have a big, bulky desk, and now we’ve got a secretary desk. It’s very beautiful, but it also has much less space than the previous desk, and no integrated cable management whatsoever. What to do? With about $8 of stuff from Home [...]

How to steal someone’s identity with the aid of the US government

The Guardian Unlimited has a great article on this. A reporter, Steve Boggan, with the aid of a security expert, Adam Laurie (the same Laurie who wrote the Apache SSL with his brother and gave it away for free) stole someone’s identity after starting with something as banal as a boarding pass, and a few [...]

Too many passwords equals less security

Found an article on CNET News which details a survey done in Britain. It showed that there is a directly proportional relationship between the number of passwords one has to remember for work, and the number of unauthorized accesses on the company’s networks. Here’s the link to the CNET article.
Having been a director of IT [...]