New, tips, and more
From CNN:
From bugs to lasers to cell phones, the Vatican is on guard for high-tech eavesdropping ahead of Monday’s opening of the conclave to elect a new pope to lead the Roman Catholic Church.
Intensifying the speculation — and perhaps the taste for espionage — are the lack of a clear favorite, a media blackout imposed on cardinals by the Vatican, and the church’s tight-lipped statements on the cardinals’ meetings so far.
From CNN:
Britain’s Prince Harry, who is scheduled to start his army officer training next month, has been told to brush up on his computer skills after reportedly failing a test at the elite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Col. Roy Parkinson, protocol officer at Sandhurst, said Friday that Harry underwent a series of tests, physical and academic, to measure his strengths and weaknesses ahead of his arrival on May 8.
It has been my experience that Browser Helper Objects (BHO) cause the most problems on your computer. The problems are caused by “spyware” that hooks itself into Internet Explorer and then opens pop-ups or slows down your computer whenever you run Internet Explorer.
To check what BHOs you might have installed, you can either use HijackThis! or BHODemon. These both show you a list of all BHOs installed, and then you can choose to remove or “unhook” them. Even if you don’t have any spyware installed, it may be a good idea to run the software now so you know how to use it in case you end up with a problem.
From InfoWorld:
Intel is contributing to global warming, the company admitted Thursday. Not the bad kind, though. Two employees at Intel Russia have erected what may be the world’s most northerly Wi-Fi hotspot 130 kilometers from the North Pole.
The hotspot was built in the Arctic Region at the Barneo ice camp, a tent complex used by scientists, researchers, and rescue crews during the month of April, when ice conditions are safe.
From MSNBC:
An infinite number of newly discovered monkeys trying to name themselves could have pounded on their keyboards a long time before coming up with this one: GoldenPalace.com.
The Internet casino paid $650,000 for the right to name the foot-high primate, online auction house CharityFolks.com announced Wednesday. GoldenPalace.com won a March 3 online auction that raised money to help manage Madidi National Park in Bolivia, where the species of titi monkey was discovered by a Wildlife Conservation Society scientist last year.
From TechRepublic:
Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey.
Web hosting company Hostway this week released the results of its poll of 2,500 Americans on blogging. Eighty percent of respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens.
A further 72 percent favored censorship of personal information about celebrities, and 68 percent, information about elected or appointed government officials such as judges or mayors.
From TechRepublic
Recording Industry Association of America said Tuesday it would file suit against students at 18 universities accused of trading files on the supercharged Internet2 network.
The suits, to be filed Wednesday, are the first to focus on the next-generation research network operated by universities. The i2Hub file-swapping service has operated for a year on campuses that are connected to Internet2.
Recording industry executives said i2Hub had become a serious problem over time as students believed they could not be observed trading files.
“i2Hub has been seen as a safe haven, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception,” said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. “This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed.”
I first read about this in the LangaList newsletter. Someone had emailed Fred and told him about this utility that automatically puts photos together to make it a panoramic photo. Well, it just so happens that yesterday Chris and I were at Brick City in Niagara Falls, and Chris had taken several pictures in order to make it a panorama shot.
I know this example isn’t the best since it is so small, but you can see a lot of duplication between the first and second photo, and slight overlap between the fourth and fifth. The software is able to determine what is in common, blend them together, and make the nice single panoramic shot.
The software is called Autostich. It is still under development, but seems to work exactly as advertised. There is nothing to install… just a zip file you download and extract the executable.
Graham and I walk each day on our lunch break. We walk along Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, up Murray hill across from the new Fallsview Casino then back down toward Victoria Avenue, one of the main streets for Tourism in Niagara Falls, and back to our jobs on Clifton Hill. The walk is approximately 3.5 km (2.2 miles) and we walk quickly covering this distance in about 35-40 minutes.
The route that we walk can be seen in the image below (enlarge) with our location in reference to Niagara Falls clearly visible. The image is from Google’s latest acquisition, Keyhole.
We have previously mentioned the games at http://www.yetisports.org. They release their 8th game last week with one more scheduled to come. I played YetiSports Jungle Swing once but haven’t really gotten too far into it.
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