Unsought Input

What is Twitter? Well it’s blogging for people with ADHD. Updating your blog daily with painstaking detail of your every action not good enough, wish you could update in real time while your doing it as well as alert all of your friends simultaneously then Twitter is for you. All you have to do is go to twitter.com to sign up for a free account.

Once you’ve signed up you can set up your phone and instant messenger client to receive updates as well. It works like this you can log on to twitter and update your blog from there, or you can use your IM client or most importantly you can update your twitter blog from your phone.

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Yuki Taro, the Japanese sidewalk snow plow.  Think Roomba for snow covered sidewalks.  The basic idea here is that a very cute robot runs itself with GPS and plows up snow.  This snow it then turns into bricks that you can do anything with.  As long as they don’t melt.  The article I linked to says it was invented by kids but it was not.  The Japanese are just suckers for anything that is super cute and useful.  The name basically means “snow boy”, in case you were wondering.

~FBI gets their wire tap phone service disconnected.  I am not sure if there is anyone out there who hadn’t heard of this massive failure but I couldn’t let it get away with not being mentioned on this site.   Ha!  No free rides for you, FBI.  There are a few quotes that really sum this up.  “More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.” More than half?  So, about 445 bills or so were unpaid?  Very interesting.

And one other quote worth mentioning, “We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence”.  NO! I never would have guessed that not paying your bills and having your services shut off could affect your ability to spy on people without a warrant.  A final note on this topic is that they are trying to pin the blame on a woman who stole some money from them.  So, you are telling me that one woman was the sole person responsible to pay every phone bill for the FBI? Hmm, maybe the FBI needs to consider implementing a checks and balance system.

~Burning coal for electricity creates a byproduct that is more radioactive than nuclear waste.  At least it is according to a new article in Scientific America.  It actually says that the ash created from burning the coal that is released into the air is up to 100 times more radioactive then nuclear waste.  I mean, with coal there is never a chance of a nuclear meltdown but maybe it really is time to move away from our dependency on coal.  I mean, we could live with acid rain, greenhouse gas emissions and the occasional trapped miners or unstoppable underground coal fires.  But now, with all of these things, please let’s just realize when to call it a draw.  In the defense of coal, the uranium content can change due to where the coal was mined, making some less radioactive then others.  But in the overall scheme of things, does it really matter?

Hope you enjoyed.  Please comment below.

Sci-Fi movies invariably have cool, futuristic gadgets that are much more interesting than silly things like characters and plot. Luckily, the future is getting closer all the time. Although we don’t have flying cars, we do have four move technologies that will make you feel like you’re living in the future.

1. Tech: Kaneda’s electric motorcycle

Movie: Akira

Akira opens with a battle between two motorcycle gangs in Neo-Tokyo in the year 2019. The bikes are fast, dangerous, and apparently electric.

Leave it to the Japanese to make geeky future tech happen. This version isn’t quite as fast or mean looking, but paint it red and throw on some decals and the clowns won’t mess with you.

Tech we really want: SOL

Although Tetsuou eventually makes mincemeat of the The Satellite Orbiting Laser, it’s the only thing in the whole move that was able to hurt him. Plus, how cool would it been to be able to rain down laser on command? Think of all the popcorn you could make!

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My wife surprised me with an iPhone. Huge surprise. I like my Treo 650, except for one major flaw – it periodically freezes up and requires a reset. This was frustrating for me, but even more frustrating for her – if she called and I didn’t answer, she had no way to know if I would get the message in a little while or hours and hours later, when I finally realized my phone was dead.

So she surprises me with an iPhone. I check to make sure I have the latest version of iTunes and plug it in. Then, nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Windows tries to “add new hardware” but it can’t find the drivers for the iPhone. I try manually looking for them under iTunes’ folder, but no *.inf files are to be found.

Apple is well known for their focus on eas of use, so why am I having problems? My iPhone will work quite happily with my PC, once I pay Microsoft $100 or so.

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A lot of people are buying laptops and skipping desktop computers entirely. Laptops are portable, more energy-efficient, and wifi connections are pretty easy to find just about anywhere. Today’s laptops and notebooks are fairly comparable to desktops in speed and memory. The one drawback is that desktops are still a lot easier to add on to.

So what do you do if your trusty iBook is running out of hard drive space? You could buy a larger internal hard drive and replace your old one, but then you have to deal with installing OSX, reinstalling all your applications, and moving all your old files over. This applies to Windows computers too – swapping out the hard drive of your Dell requires all the same tediousness.

If you just need more space to store your photos, music, and videos, and external storage might be the right solution. You have a few options here, and there are a few tricky details you’ll want to know about that I’ll cover below.

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