Virtual reality helps autistic kids develop skills

From MSNBC: A playmate named Sam, a talking dog named Buddy and an Israeli street leading to a Toys”R”Us store all have starring roles in a new generation of virtual reality games designed to teach basic safety and social skills to children diagnosed with autism. For school-aged children with autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome, …

Now vs. then: 1988 and 2008, A Tech Retrospective

I wasn’t sure if this was more a news item or a tip, but I’ll consider it a tip (actually, a recommended web site). PC World recently had an article comparing technology from 10 years ago with today. Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It’s easy to forgive your Tandy desktop …

geoGreeting

I was reading an article in the paper the other day about the Webby Awards, and one of the highlighted sites was geoGreeting. This is a site that let’s you write a message using pictures of buildings that look like letters (the PCIN.net image above for example). The creator of the site describes it in …

Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet

From the New York Times: Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians’ rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better. The Global Information Technology Report issued on Wednesday found that the United States now ranked fourth in the world behind just three …

Clean Install Windows XP

There have been quite a bit of news recently about the Windows Vista upgrade DVD not really needing anything to upgrade from. You can do a clean install of Vista without putting in the product key, and then upgrade that installation. That talk has led to some talk about doing a clean install of XP, …

Say ‘cheese’: New tech measures a smile’s breadth

From USA Today: The breadth of a smile can be measured by new technology from Japanese electronics and health care company Omron Corp. The software technology, shown to reporters Thursday, scans a video image to detect faces. It can find up to 100 faces in an image, according to Yasushi Kawamoto of Omron. “Okao Catch,” …

Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go?

From eWeek: A professor says he has only one girl in a computer science major class in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2000. What happened? eWEEK gets field experts to weigh in. While women hold 51 percent of professional jobs in the United States, they make up only 26 percent of the IT work …

U.S. Adults Wary Of Web-Use Tracking

From InformationWeek: A majority of U.S. adults are uncomfortable with Web sites using a person’s online activity to deliver customized content, a study released Thursday showed. However, Harris Interactive found that people became more comfortable after they were presented with Web-site privacy and security policies recommended by the Federal Trade Commission. Based on a nationwide …

Bounce Flash – Digital Photography Tip of the Week

Photographing people indoors often requires the use of flash for added light. Direct, on camera flash however often results in multiple problems, red eye, washed out or overexposed subjects and of course, harsh, unflattering light. If you use the flash built in to your camera, you don’t have many options. However, if you use an …

Recuva – Windows freeware file recovery

I heard about Recuva a couple of months ago on the Kim Komando show. I bookmarked it, and finally got around to checking it out. It is a file recover utility. Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from …