August 2007 Archives
Our children of three and eight have a computer in their room that our oldest child has had since she was three years old. It's a very popular toy, and they actively seek out educational software. They also seem to stay within safe pages (both in terms of computer security and child safety) on the net.
At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.
Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.
The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.
This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.
I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.
A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.
I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.
Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.
I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.
The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.
The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.
The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.
At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.
Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.
The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.
This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.
A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.
I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.
Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.
I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.
The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.
The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.
The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.
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Ages ago, when I was still in high school, one of my family members had just begun working as a high school teacher. We happened to discuss the typical subjects given for the written exams, and my view on the subjects was that they were so thematically predictable that one could probably create a generic, pre-written exam paper and simply replace words and phrases according to the specific subject given. The teacher agreed, and we almost set out to develop some software that could auto-generate such a report.
Fast-forward to 2005 where a group of MIT students basically did just that using a context-free grammar to auto-generate an article that, at first glance, would appear to be a scientific paper detailing a computer science topic. Except, of course, that the paper would be complete bogus consisting of phrases that sound right only to someone that doesn't have a clue.
And that's the point. It really looks valid to someone that doesn't have a clue. It looks like a valid scientific paper in the eyes of those people that try to make quick bucks by organizing "fake" conferences, for example.
A "fake" conference isn't all fake, because it actually exists, accepts submissions, and lets the attendees present their speeches. The submission standards are so low, however, that anything qualifies as long as it motivates the would-be attendees to pay the conference registration fee that serves as the organizer's income. The organizer has no interest in scholarly standards and contents and is interested only in profiting from the conference. So by scientific and most ethic standards it's a scam, but one might argue that from a capitalistic point of view it adheres to principles of supply and demand and isn't illegal.
I've received my share of call for submissions from a variety of conferences, which sometimes appear to find prospective candidates by visiting the attendee list of more respected conferences. It's tempting to use the scientific generator to create a bogus paper and get the chance to present my "research" in the same manner as the MIT students did in their video footage from the WMSCI 2005 conference wearing mad-professor wigs and lab coat and all.
To be fair, the MIT students did not give their presentation as part of the conference, and were in fact disinvited from the conference. The fact that their paper was nonetheless accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" is strong enough indication that the conference--which receives suspiciously little mention in academic circles on the web, except about its acceptance of the bogus paper--is a scam.
It is not only fake conferences that can be exposed by honeypots in the form of fake content submissions. "Awardmestar" is a piece of software that does absolutely nothing at all, and is intended as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it would get. If it gets any awards at all, presumable the award is worthless.
"Awardmestar" misses its mark, however, because visitors to the shareware directories find the idea so hilarious that they vote for the software and thus boots its rating in the directory. The rating certainly doesn't reflect the use value of the software, but it doesn't imply that the hosting shareware directory is a bogus site. At best, it illustrates that the site does not attempt to review the submissions, which in case of software would be both prohibitively complicated and dangerous for security reasons.
Fast-forward to 2005 where a group of MIT students basically did just that using a context-free grammar to auto-generate an article that, at first glance, would appear to be a scientific paper detailing a computer science topic. Except, of course, that the paper would be complete bogus consisting of phrases that sound right only to someone that doesn't have a clue.
And that's the point. It really looks valid to someone that doesn't have a clue. It looks like a valid scientific paper in the eyes of those people that try to make quick bucks by organizing "fake" conferences, for example.
A "fake" conference isn't all fake, because it actually exists, accepts submissions, and lets the attendees present their speeches. The submission standards are so low, however, that anything qualifies as long as it motivates the would-be attendees to pay the conference registration fee that serves as the organizer's income. The organizer has no interest in scholarly standards and contents and is interested only in profiting from the conference. So by scientific and most ethic standards it's a scam, but one might argue that from a capitalistic point of view it adheres to principles of supply and demand and isn't illegal.
I've received my share of call for submissions from a variety of conferences, which sometimes appear to find prospective candidates by visiting the attendee list of more respected conferences. It's tempting to use the scientific generator to create a bogus paper and get the chance to present my "research" in the same manner as the MIT students did in their video footage from the WMSCI 2005 conference wearing mad-professor wigs and lab coat and all.
To be fair, the MIT students did not give their presentation as part of the conference, and were in fact disinvited from the conference. The fact that their paper was nonetheless accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" is strong enough indication that the conference--which receives suspiciously little mention in academic circles on the web, except about its acceptance of the bogus paper--is a scam.
It is not only fake conferences that can be exposed by honeypots in the form of fake content submissions. "Awardmestar" is a piece of software that does absolutely nothing at all, and is intended as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it would get. If it gets any awards at all, presumable the award is worthless.
"Awardmestar" misses its mark, however, because visitors to the shareware directories find the idea so hilarious that they vote for the software and thus boots its rating in the directory. The rating certainly doesn't reflect the use value of the software, but it doesn't imply that the hosting shareware directory is a bogus site. At best, it illustrates that the site does not attempt to review the submissions, which in case of software would be both prohibitively complicated and dangerous for security reasons.
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Movable Type 4 doesn't come with blogroll support right out of the box unless you're willing to perform a few tricks. You can wait until MT-Blogroll is ported to MT4, but if you desperately need your blogroll right now, there is something else you can do.
The secret is that your default MT4 installation includes the MultiBlog 2.0 plugin, which lets you include contents from another blog in your blog. By creating a new blog and using that for blogroll entries, you can include that blog in your current blog, and voila: you have your blogroll.
Create the Blogroll
Create a new blog named, say, "blogroll". In "blogroll," use an entry for each link, entering your blogroll links as follows:
In your existing blog, add the following section to your template where you want the blogroll to appear; I recommend creating a new widget template. This section includes the following lines of code, which will copy your "blogroll" entries and present them as links ordered by category and title:
In the above, change include_blogs="3" in line 1 to use the ID of your new "blogroll" blog.
Finally, go to your blog's plugin settings for the Multiblog plugin. Create a new trigger and select the "blogroll" blog, choosing to rebuild indexes when the blog publishes an entry.
You're all set! You can always modify the style sheet template for your blog to fine-tune the appearance of your blogroll.
The secret is that your default MT4 installation includes the MultiBlog 2.0 plugin, which lets you include contents from another blog in your blog. By creating a new blog and using that for blogroll entries, you can include that blog in your current blog, and voila: you have your blogroll.
Create the Blogroll
Create a new blog named, say, "blogroll". In "blogroll," use an entry for each link, entering your blogroll links as follows:
- Use categories to divide your blogroll into categories.
- Each entry is a blogroll entry, where:
- The title field is the title of the link.
- The body is the actual link.
- The extended body is a piece of non-linking text that appears together with the link.
- The excerpt is a description of the link appearing when the visitor hovers the mouse over the link.
- Then fill your blogroll with links.
In your existing blog, add the following section to your template where you want the blogroll to appear; I recommend creating a new widget template. This section includes the following lines of code, which will copy your "blogroll" entries and present them as links ordered by category and title:
<MTOtherBlog include_blogs="3">
<div class="blogroll widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Blogroll</h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<MTCategories>
<div class="category"><$MTCategoryLabel$></div>
<ul>
<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">
<li>
<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>"
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">title="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>"</MTIfNonEmpty>
><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">
<span><$MTEntryMore convert_breaks="0"$></span>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
</li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>
</MTCategories>
</div></div>
</MTOtherBlog>
In the above, change include_blogs="3" in line 1 to use the ID of your new "blogroll" blog.
Finally, go to your blog's plugin settings for the Multiblog plugin. Create a new trigger and select the "blogroll" blog, choosing to rebuild indexes when the blog publishes an entry.
You're all set! You can always modify the style sheet template for your blog to fine-tune the appearance of your blogroll.
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Jesus Christ could be reborn any day. This is the astonishing news from the University of Dallas where a team of researchers have analyzed the mystical Shroud of Turin for genetic material. According to legend, the Shroud of Turan covered the face of Jesus Christ, and the research team led by Dr. Martin Dickens has discovered human hair among the shroud fibers. The researchers are convinced that these hairs belonged to Christ.
Researchers have found the hair of Christ in the Shroud of Turin. The hair contains enough genetic material to allow a cloning of Christ, Dr. Dickens concludes. I met Dr. Dickens at his office at the University of Dallas, and Dr. Dickens agreed on a brief interview.
Wolf: Congratulations on this amazing discovery. What do you think the new Jesus can tell us?
Dickens: That is hard to tell, of course. Christian theologists have discussed for centuries what Jesus meant, but we're convinced that Jesus could be persuaded to tell us which one of the about 30,000 different kinds of Christianity around the world is the correct one, or maybe he could offer his own version.
Wolf: How do you think other religions will react on the rebirth of Christ?
Dickens: I think this is a very important question, and we have already consulted Jewish and Muslem experts, asking them how they would react if one day Christ was to be reborn. They were actually surprisingly positive towards the thought. The Muslems thought that since Jesus was just person within an array of prophets, he would simply applaud Muhammed's teachings. The Jews didn't quite consider the theological implications; the rabbi that we spoke with just shrugged his shoulders and said that they could just kill him again if he started any kind of trouble.
Wolf: Excuse me, but I thought you said the Jewish reaction was positive?
Dickens: Ha ha, yes, you might say that their reaction was a bit hostile, but keep in mind that we could just clone another Jesus. So it wouldn't matter if they killed him. Each time they killed one of him, we would just create a new one.
Wolf: That sounds like a strong theological defense. You could actually create an entire army of Christs?
Dickens: Well, we are scientists, and we prefer to focus on protecting our research subjects. We prefer to leave the political aspects to others. But yes, we have in fact decided to create several clones of Christ and place them in different environments to determine whether they will develop the same thoughts of Jesus if they are not aware of their divine identity. It will be very interesting to follow their development. I'm sure you can imagine that their school teachers will believe they are cheating at their exams, ha ha!
Wolf: When do you intend to begin the cloning of Christ?
Dickens: Um, er, this is where we have a somewhat awkward problem. You see, we obviously scrutinized the genetic material meticulously, and while they are surprisingly complete and intact, they are... not so fortunate based on a number of considerations.
Wolf: What are those considerations?
Dickens: Yes, er, theological interpretations have provided us with certain expectations of his perfection and beauty, and the genes do not necessarily support this view. We are also not completely certain that Jesus would be able to engage in deep, theological or philosophical discussions. We do not feel that we can allow ourselves to clone Jesus until we have discussed the problem with leading Christian theologists.
Wolf: I'm not sure I follow you. What is this problem?
Dickens: It... you see, circumstances unfortunately indicate that, ... er ... the genes indicate that Jesus had Down's syndrome.
Wolf: You mean, he was a mongoloid?
Dickens: We prefer the clinical diagnose, but yes, he had Down's syndrome. He was simply mentally retarted. This obviously puts the entire Christian world-view in a somewhat unfortunate light, and we are not sure how to deal with this problem. From a scientific point of view we should perhaps acknowledge that Jesus was mentally retarded, and I'm sure we could explain quite a few Christian thoughts based on this fact. On the other hand, if we were to somehow alter the genes to remove this syndrome, perhaps we could create a Jesus without Down's syndrome and obtain theological information that would otherwise not be accessible. We have not yet decided, but I am hoping that we could create a number of Christs with Down's syndrome and a number of Christs without Down's syndrome and leave it to theologicians to determine who should be the authority on Christianity.
Wolf: Thank you for your time!
Dickens: No problem. Have a great day.
The Christian right in the US has denied funding for research in Down's syndrome, stating that no science should receive funding if it threatens the Christian mind.
Researchers have found the hair of Christ in the Shroud of Turin.
Wolf: Congratulations on this amazing discovery. What do you think the new Jesus can tell us?
Dickens: That is hard to tell, of course. Christian theologists have discussed for centuries what Jesus meant, but we're convinced that Jesus could be persuaded to tell us which one of the about 30,000 different kinds of Christianity around the world is the correct one, or maybe he could offer his own version.
Wolf: How do you think other religions will react on the rebirth of Christ?
Dickens: I think this is a very important question, and we have already consulted Jewish and Muslem experts, asking them how they would react if one day Christ was to be reborn. They were actually surprisingly positive towards the thought. The Muslems thought that since Jesus was just person within an array of prophets, he would simply applaud Muhammed's teachings. The Jews didn't quite consider the theological implications; the rabbi that we spoke with just shrugged his shoulders and said that they could just kill him again if he started any kind of trouble.
Wolf: Excuse me, but I thought you said the Jewish reaction was positive?
Dickens: Ha ha, yes, you might say that their reaction was a bit hostile, but keep in mind that we could just clone another Jesus. So it wouldn't matter if they killed him. Each time they killed one of him, we would just create a new one.
Wolf: That sounds like a strong theological defense. You could actually create an entire army of Christs?
Dickens: Well, we are scientists, and we prefer to focus on protecting our research subjects. We prefer to leave the political aspects to others. But yes, we have in fact decided to create several clones of Christ and place them in different environments to determine whether they will develop the same thoughts of Jesus if they are not aware of their divine identity. It will be very interesting to follow their development. I'm sure you can imagine that their school teachers will believe they are cheating at their exams, ha ha!
Wolf: When do you intend to begin the cloning of Christ?
Dickens: Um, er, this is where we have a somewhat awkward problem. You see, we obviously scrutinized the genetic material meticulously, and while they are surprisingly complete and intact, they are... not so fortunate based on a number of considerations.
Wolf: What are those considerations?
Dickens: Yes, er, theological interpretations have provided us with certain expectations of his perfection and beauty, and the genes do not necessarily support this view. We are also not completely certain that Jesus would be able to engage in deep, theological or philosophical discussions. We do not feel that we can allow ourselves to clone Jesus until we have discussed the problem with leading Christian theologists.
Wolf: I'm not sure I follow you. What is this problem?
Dickens: It... you see, circumstances unfortunately indicate that, ... er ... the genes indicate that Jesus had Down's syndrome.
Wolf: You mean, he was a mongoloid?
Dickens: We prefer the clinical diagnose, but yes, he had Down's syndrome. He was simply mentally retarted. This obviously puts the entire Christian world-view in a somewhat unfortunate light, and we are not sure how to deal with this problem. From a scientific point of view we should perhaps acknowledge that Jesus was mentally retarded, and I'm sure we could explain quite a few Christian thoughts based on this fact. On the other hand, if we were to somehow alter the genes to remove this syndrome, perhaps we could create a Jesus without Down's syndrome and obtain theological information that would otherwise not be accessible. We have not yet decided, but I am hoping that we could create a number of Christs with Down's syndrome and a number of Christs without Down's syndrome and leave it to theologicians to determine who should be the authority on Christianity.
Wolf: Thank you for your time!
Dickens: No problem. Have a great day.
The Christian right in the US has denied funding for research in Down's syndrome, stating that no science should receive funding if it threatens the Christian mind.
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I receive about 250 spam messages each day, but virtually none of them ever reach my mailbox thanks to a rather aggressive spam filter.
Our mail server and spam filter setup is comprised of the following applications:
TMDA and the various scanners are highly effective and are sufficient for a near-complete elimination of spam messages. However, network bandwidth is a problem when your network is bombarded with spam messages. This is where Spamdyke can help, because it sits in front of the mail server listening to incoming connections, and is capable of rejecting spam messages before the contents ever reach the server.
The setup may seem a bit involved, but when each of the antispam measures have been installed, only Qmail-Scanner, Spamdyke, and TMDA require special setup. SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, DCC, and ClamAV are all detected and invoked automatically by Qmail-Scanner. The result of this setup is that with very few exceptions, no spam finds its way to my mailbox.
Our mail server and spam filter setup is comprised of the following applications:
- Qmail - the mail transfer and mail delivery agent. It's the mail server software.
- Spamdyke - performs connection-level graylisting and blocking of bad IPs. Graylisting is a relatively new mechanism that pretends that there's a temporary error on the mail server the first time it encounters an email address. A proper mail server will re-transmit the mail within minutes, but spam software doesn't, and the email will spam therefore never be received.
- Qmail-Scanner - scans the contents of each incoming mail on its own, and more importantly invokes a variety of mail scanners to catch viruses or spam.
- SpamAssassin - scans the contents of each incoming mail for spam characteristics.
- Pyzor - scans the contents of each incoming mail for spam characteristics based on a spam "signature." The signature is a "compressed" version of the mail, and if this signature can be found as marked by spam on a central server, then it means the message is spam.
- Razor - applies the same principle as Pyzor.
- DCC - applies the same principle as Pyzor.
- ClamAV - a very capable virus scanner.
- TMDA - "tagged mail delivery agent," which assumes that all senders are spammers until they've confirmed that they're sending legitimate mail; a confirmation that they only need to provide one time.
TMDA and the various scanners are highly effective and are sufficient for a near-complete elimination of spam messages. However, network bandwidth is a problem when your network is bombarded with spam messages. This is where Spamdyke can help, because it sits in front of the mail server listening to incoming connections, and is capable of rejecting spam messages before the contents ever reach the server.
The setup may seem a bit involved, but when each of the antispam measures have been installed, only Qmail-Scanner, Spamdyke, and TMDA require special setup. SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, DCC, and ClamAV are all detected and invoked automatically by Qmail-Scanner. The result of this setup is that with very few exceptions, no spam finds its way to my mailbox.
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Curvaceous is a plug-in (formerly known as a "mambot") for Joomla, a popular, free open-source content-management system (CMS).The plug-in is a visual component that detects the background color of your images. If an image has an irregular contour, such as the flower in the Curvaceous logo to the right, the Curvaceous makes the surrounding text flow nicely around the contour.
Get the plug-in here: plugin_curvaceous-1.1.2.zip. Note: please do not host this plug-in on your own site, but feel free to link to this blog entry.
This is the official home of the Curvaceous plug-in. Please use the comments for support and suggestions.
Installation Instructions
- Install the plug-in via Joomla's mambot installer by browsing to the Curvaceous zip file that you downloaded, and press the "Upload and install" button.
- Go to the site mambots menu, and publish the mambot.
- If you want to, you may configure the Curvaceous parameters by clicking the Curvaceous plug-in in the site mambots list. The margin specifies the margin (in pixels) between text above and below the image. The sandbagMargin specifies the margin (in pixels) between the text to the left or to the right of the image. The sandbagHeight specifies the height of the horizontal bars used to divide the picture into rows of different widths according to how much background color each row contains to the left or to the right of the image. You probably don't need to tweak this setting unless you're using very small or very large text.
- Insert the image as a MosImage. Consult your Joomla documentation on how to do that.
- Replace the {mosimage} tags in your content with {curveimage}, and left-aligned or right-aligned images with transparent backgrounds will have the text flowing around them.
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Let's just admit it: Usenet, or "News," had its heyday in the nineties before the age of web-based discussion boards and forums. There's certainly still a huge user group using Usenet for debates, however, probably because discussion boards are many and distributed rather randomly throughout the Internet while the Usenet groups are kept at a reasonably small number accessible from just one place: your news server. Directories of discussion boards that all users agree to use have yet to surface.
Google has supported Usenet searches and posting for a long time under the name "Google Groups," which is an excellent source of information since many mailing lists publish their activity in Usenet groups that are picked up by Google. If you don't find your information using the vanilla Google, try and click "Groups," and your luck is almost guaranteed to increase, especially on technical issues.
Other web services also provide access to newsgroups, often with little concern for legality or content. Easynews is one such service. The service does require its users to abide by the law, but also seems very concerned about its users' privacy, taking great care not to disclose anything that might point others towards the identity of a user. Easynews is basically a news server, but that's not its main feature.
Easynews provides a web front end to newsgroups, but unlike most news readers you install on your own computer, Easynews decodes the multi-part messages usually found in the so-called binary newsgroups and combines them into single files. For example, a 50 MByte file is often split into hundreds of individual articles when it is posted to a newsgroup, and not all news readers are readily capable of combining the messages and decoding the file. By combining and decoding for you, Easynews avoids having to shown hundreds of individual newsgroup articles, and instead shows you just the decoded file.
Many people that send files to newsgroups add "parity" files with redundant information used to recreate the files if some of the potentially tens of thousands of individual articles comprising the files are lost or damaged, as often happens when news servers across the world exchange information. Easynews locates parity files and automatically recreates damaged files for you so you don't have to mess with the parity files yourself.
The front-end is simple, and each newsgroup can be searched for your desired files. Your front page includes your favorite newsgroups, or the option to view newsgroups with video, audio, or images.
Each newsgroup list is essentially just a list of author names, subjects, and files. You can add a checkmark or a range of checkmarks to the files, and then "queue" them for convenient download later. The download area allows you to download your selected files combined into a .zip file, or as a .nzb file so that you can download the files from any news server via Newsbin or compatible products.
An Easynews subscription will cost you $10 per month, which will give you 20 GBytes of transfer, plus 1 GByte for each year of membership, per month. If you exceed your download limit, you can instantly buy another 20 GBytes.
So to summarize, you have a news server that combines files for you, ready to download as video, audio, images, or any other file format you may desire. You can download 20 GBytes per ten bucks, and Easynews hides your identity, also if you chose to use Easynews to post files to your preferred newsgroups.
In other words, welcome to Easynews, pirates. Newsgroups are a very popular sharing place for illegal copies of anything that can be represented electronically. Books, expensive applications, audio, early releases of DVDs in original quality, you name it. They're found in the "binary" newsgroups, and although Easynews has policies for removing content that violates copyright, and states explicitly in the terms of service that illegal file transfer is prohibited, in practice Easynews does not appear to perform any significant filtering to prevent users from illegally downloading or uploading content.
Google has supported Usenet searches and posting for a long time under the name "Google Groups," which is an excellent source of information since many mailing lists publish their activity in Usenet groups that are picked up by Google. If you don't find your information using the vanilla Google, try and click "Groups," and your luck is almost guaranteed to increase, especially on technical issues.
Other web services also provide access to newsgroups, often with little concern for legality or content. Easynews is one such service. The service does require its users to abide by the law, but also seems very concerned about its users' privacy, taking great care not to disclose anything that might point others towards the identity of a user. Easynews is basically a news server, but that's not its main feature.
Easynews provides a web front end to newsgroups, but unlike most news readers you install on your own computer, Easynews decodes the multi-part messages usually found in the so-called binary newsgroups and combines them into single files. For example, a 50 MByte file is often split into hundreds of individual articles when it is posted to a newsgroup, and not all news readers are readily capable of combining the messages and decoding the file. By combining and decoding for you, Easynews avoids having to shown hundreds of individual newsgroup articles, and instead shows you just the decoded file.
Many people that send files to newsgroups add "parity" files with redundant information used to recreate the files if some of the potentially tens of thousands of individual articles comprising the files are lost or damaged, as often happens when news servers across the world exchange information. Easynews locates parity files and automatically recreates damaged files for you so you don't have to mess with the parity files yourself.
The front-end is simple, and each newsgroup can be searched for your desired files. Your front page includes your favorite newsgroups, or the option to view newsgroups with video, audio, or images.
Each newsgroup list is essentially just a list of author names, subjects, and files. You can add a checkmark or a range of checkmarks to the files, and then "queue" them for convenient download later. The download area allows you to download your selected files combined into a .zip file, or as a .nzb file so that you can download the files from any news server via Newsbin or compatible products.
An Easynews subscription will cost you $10 per month, which will give you 20 GBytes of transfer, plus 1 GByte for each year of membership, per month. If you exceed your download limit, you can instantly buy another 20 GBytes.
So to summarize, you have a news server that combines files for you, ready to download as video, audio, images, or any other file format you may desire. You can download 20 GBytes per ten bucks, and Easynews hides your identity, also if you chose to use Easynews to post files to your preferred newsgroups.
In other words, welcome to Easynews, pirates. Newsgroups are a very popular sharing place for illegal copies of anything that can be represented electronically. Books, expensive applications, audio, early releases of DVDs in original quality, you name it. They're found in the "binary" newsgroups, and although Easynews has policies for removing content that violates copyright, and states explicitly in the terms of service that illegal file transfer is prohibited, in practice Easynews does not appear to perform any significant filtering to prevent users from illegally downloading or uploading content.
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You may have seen biometric recognition products such as Microsoft's fingerprint reader, which remembers your passwords for you and inserts the appropriate passwords in the appropriate password fields when you visit a web page.
I returned Microsoft's fingerprint reader to the store the next day after learning the hard way that it worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer which I had long since replaced with Firefox, and after learning that it remembered the Windows login password for domain logons only.
Many other products feature biometric recognition. For example, Lenovo's T-series ThinkPad notebooks include a built-in fingerprint reader that helps remember passwords.
Certainly it's easier to tap the fingerprint reader instead of maneuvering the cursor to the password box and remembering and subsequently entering the password. Well, that's unless you consider trust your browser's browser password storage security with remembering the passwords for your various web pages, in which case your browser automatically inserts your user name and password for you, eliminating the need to either type the password nor tap the biometric reader. At least Firefox can do that; I'm not sure whether Internet Explorer can do it.
Still, you may not want your browser to do that, say, if occasionally you leave your computer while logged in and don't want to risk having others sneak up and visit one of your password-protected pages.
Perhaps the fingerprint recognition is a secure and convenient solution in some situations.
I'd agree on the convenience, but as security guru Bruce Schneier once said, if you think technology will solve your security problems, then you don't know about technology and you don't understand security. If you think biometric recognition is safe, perhaps it's time to think again.
I'm not talking about flaws in the accompanying software, which (true to Microsoft tradition, one might add) does appear to contain serious security holes according to Wikipedia, but about trusting that your fingerprint will remain your own personal property.
This YouTube video demonstrates how you can easily copy someone else's fingerprint and use it on the fingerprint recognition device that he or she is using to load passwords. The audio track is in German, and I haven't been able to locate a similar video with English audio or captions. However, with a little explanation I think it's reasonably straight-forward to follow what's going on:
The video shows a member of the German computer club "Kaos," which has experimented with security issues for years. To successfully copy someone's fingerprint for use in a biometric sensor, you need:
The user's fingerprint is found on a bottle that the user has touched. This could be any smooth surface that the user has touched, of course.
The narrator applies a few drops of superglue in the lid from the plastic bottle and presses it against the fingerprint left on the bottle. The superglue leaves a visible white pattern on the fingerprint when the plastic lid is removed, and the narrator takes a picture of it with his digital camera.
Next, the narrator transfers the image from the camera to the computer and cleans it of irregularities. The size is also adjusted to match that of the original fingerprint. The narrator then prints the image onto a sheet of transparent.
The printer ink leaves a three-dimensional structure, which is covered by the hobby glue. When the glue has dried, it can be removed from the plastic transparent, since the glue won't stick well to the smooth plastic. The glue is now a copy of the user's fingerprint.
The glue fingerprint is cut into an appropriate size and glued to the imposter's finger with cosmetic glue.
The fingerprint copy can now be used on the computer mouse, and voila: the fingerprint copy is recognized as the user's own printerprint.
"Kaos" demonstrates that copying a fingerprint is so easy that in practice you'll be leaving the biometric equivalent of yellow notes with your password written down on them everywhere. With biometric recognition finding its way into our daily lives and being hyped as much more secure than simple experiments disprove, perhaps it will soon be glove season all year as people realize that they leave their passwords on anything they touch.
I returned Microsoft's fingerprint reader to the store the next day after learning the hard way that it worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer which I had long since replaced with Firefox, and after learning that it remembered the Windows login password for domain logons only.Many other products feature biometric recognition. For example, Lenovo's T-series ThinkPad notebooks include a built-in fingerprint reader that helps remember passwords.
Certainly it's easier to tap the fingerprint reader instead of maneuvering the cursor to the password box and remembering and subsequently entering the password. Well, that's unless you consider trust your browser's browser password storage security with remembering the passwords for your various web pages, in which case your browser automatically inserts your user name and password for you, eliminating the need to either type the password nor tap the biometric reader. At least Firefox can do that; I'm not sure whether Internet Explorer can do it.
Still, you may not want your browser to do that, say, if occasionally you leave your computer while logged in and don't want to risk having others sneak up and visit one of your password-protected pages.
Perhaps the fingerprint recognition is a secure and convenient solution in some situations.
I'd agree on the convenience, but as security guru Bruce Schneier once said, if you think technology will solve your security problems, then you don't know about technology and you don't understand security. If you think biometric recognition is safe, perhaps it's time to think again.
I'm not talking about flaws in the accompanying software, which (true to Microsoft tradition, one might add) does appear to contain serious security holes according to Wikipedia, but about trusting that your fingerprint will remain your own personal property.
This YouTube video demonstrates how you can easily copy someone else's fingerprint and use it on the fingerprint recognition device that he or she is using to load passwords. The audio track is in German, and I haven't been able to locate a similar video with English audio or captions. However, with a little explanation I think it's reasonably straight-forward to follow what's going on:
The video shows a member of the German computer club "Kaos," which has experimented with security issues for years. To successfully copy someone's fingerprint for use in a biometric sensor, you need:
- The lid from a plastic bottle
- Superglue (the kind that glues within seconds)
- A digital camera
- Hobby glue (for gluing wood and such)
- Skin friendly cosmetic glue
- A computer with an image processing program
- A regular office printer that can print on transparents.
- A sheet of plastic transparent.
The user's fingerprint is found on a bottle that the user has touched. This could be any smooth surface that the user has touched, of course.
The narrator applies a few drops of superglue in the lid from the plastic bottle and presses it against the fingerprint left on the bottle. The superglue leaves a visible white pattern on the fingerprint when the plastic lid is removed, and the narrator takes a picture of it with his digital camera.
Next, the narrator transfers the image from the camera to the computer and cleans it of irregularities. The size is also adjusted to match that of the original fingerprint. The narrator then prints the image onto a sheet of transparent.
The printer ink leaves a three-dimensional structure, which is covered by the hobby glue. When the glue has dried, it can be removed from the plastic transparent, since the glue won't stick well to the smooth plastic. The glue is now a copy of the user's fingerprint.
The glue fingerprint is cut into an appropriate size and glued to the imposter's finger with cosmetic glue.
The fingerprint copy can now be used on the computer mouse, and voila: the fingerprint copy is recognized as the user's own printerprint.
"Kaos" demonstrates that copying a fingerprint is so easy that in practice you'll be leaving the biometric equivalent of yellow notes with your password written down on them everywhere. With biometric recognition finding its way into our daily lives and being hyped as much more secure than simple experiments disprove, perhaps it will soon be glove season all year as people realize that they leave their passwords on anything they touch.
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The patent laws were originally thought as an attempt to motivate innovation. The patent laws basically provide inventors with exclusive rights to profit from their inventions, and in return the inventors publish their inventions and describe how the inventions work. Instead of keeping their knowledge secret the world will share the knowledge. As an additional movitation to innovate, a patent is automatically granted if one demonstrates how to improve an existing patent. So it seems reasonable enough that the patenters are provided with some compensation for their innovation.
Enter reality. Competition never gave birth to cooperation, and this is also true for knowledge sharing. In practice the patent laws have become a legal cesspool where the patenter takes great care to obey the following two rules when he or she submits his or her patent application:
At the same time, the larger corporations include a number of experts that survey products manufactured by smaller companies. If a smaller company seems to grow and pose a threat to the corporation, the corporation's patent lawyers go to war. They dig into their patent database and locate patents that the smaller company may have violated. Software patents are particularly prone to being violated, because software patents refer to ideas and methods rather than tangible products.
It doesn't really matter if the corporation is wrong. The corporation can legally prevent the smaller company from selling its products while the lawsuit extends endlessly until the smaller company is starved for resources and stands no other chance of survival than agreeing on a settlement.
Enter reality. Competition never gave birth to cooperation, and this is also true for knowledge sharing. In practice the patent laws have become a legal cesspool where the patenter takes great care to obey the following two rules when he or she submits his or her patent application:
- Firstly, the description of the idea is obscured that no-one can understand the invention. If the patent is obtained, the knowledge will remain the patenter's well-kept secret.
- Secondly, the patenter describes the idea in very general terms to enable as many products, concepts, and ideas to be covered by the patent as possible. This ensures that future improvements are also covered by the original patent. It also ensures that new ideas derived from one's invention are also covered by the invention, even if the patenter never dreamed of such ideas.
At the same time, the larger corporations include a number of experts that survey products manufactured by smaller companies. If a smaller company seems to grow and pose a threat to the corporation, the corporation's patent lawyers go to war. They dig into their patent database and locate patents that the smaller company may have violated. Software patents are particularly prone to being violated, because software patents refer to ideas and methods rather than tangible products.
It doesn't really matter if the corporation is wrong. The corporation can legally prevent the smaller company from selling its products while the lawsuit extends endlessly until the smaller company is starved for resources and stands no other chance of survival than agreeing on a settlement.
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Unlike the slinkie, which serves little purpose except to bring a smile to your face when you push it down the stairs (features that I believe it shares with certain human beings), sometimes you come across an item whose only purpose seems to be... just that particular item. An item that is absolutely useless.Yet, even complete lack of sensible purpose is a source of entertainment, awe, and wonder. Take for example Junkfunnel Labs' suspicous-looking device. It doesn't even have a name; it's simply a device, and its only purpose is to look suspicious in the way that would desert airports and inspire elaborate conspiracy theories. Any area where this device is found is guaranteed to be instantly evacuated and sealed by yellow police line tape.
Granted, these days it seems anything can label you a terrorist on the suspicion that you're carrying an improvised explosive device, but still, the suspicious-looking device from Junkfunnel Labs includes all of the features of a device expected to have been manufactured by a clandestine organization that goes all the way up to the president.
The single purpose of the device is to look suspicious, but you can use this to your advantage and turn the device into a dumb-people repellant.
Statistics teach us that about half of the population have an IQ below average, and this means they will probably not understand that if the device was seriously meant to be dangerous, the designers would not have gone to such great lengths making the device look suspicious. The designers would instead have attempted to make the device blend in with the surroundings to attract as little attention as possible.
Not realizing that if the device looks that suspicious, then there's probably nothing to be afraid of, they'll be struck by fear and will leave the area.
People that are bright enough to understand that this device is evidently a practical joke can be expected to stay around, and not only will you find yourself in company with comparably bright people, you'll also have an excellent conversation piece for initiating contact with these people.
I'm sorry. I just realized my misanthropia is showing. I'll get back to building my doomsday devices now.
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Donald Norman, the author of books such as The Psychology of Everyday Things,
has argued that the perfect user interface is invisible. No user
should be forced to wonder how to operate a certain gadget--it should
be so intuitive that the gadget, or at least the use of it, would hardly be noticed. Think of the
ABS brakes in your car, for example: when you apply pressure to the
brake pedal, you don't pause to think about the computer that analyzes
your driving conditions and takes care of the braking system. In fact,
I'm rather sure you don't ever want to think of a pop-up window asking
you to confirm your decision to brake. It would bring an entirely new meaning to the term "computer crash," I'm sure.Many everyday objects have user interfaces that we would consider intuitive. For example, you'd think your door has a very intuitive user interface. You turn the knob, and the door opens. Or, if you live in Europe, you twist the handle, and the door opens. Or, you turn the knob the other way if the door won't open. Unless it's locked. If it's a handle, maybe the handle budges because the door is locked, or because you need to move it upward instead of downward. Of course, it may be possible to turn the know or twist the handle and still be faced with a closed door, because it's locked. All of a sudden, perhaps it isn't all that intuitive after all? For the person that was raised in a society unfamiliar with door handles, the door could be eternally locked. It is clear that opening a door requires a certain amount of social schooling in the use of everyday things.
Naomi Thellier de Poncheville suggests a design, aptly named the "Hand-le," that literally lends a helping hand to those that might wonder which part of the door requires manual operation. Her page unfortunately only illustrates the design and does not describe how the handle is to be operated.
A visual inspection of the hand-le design indicates that the handle turns clock-wise or counter-clockwise. If the Western greeting practice of grabbed the hand firmly and shaking it were to apply, the hand-le would require at least some sort of up/down toggling motion, so unfortunately the conventional greeting gesture will probably not cause the passage to open.
The circular motion indicates that the hand-le is a modification of the American door knob, and that the hand-le is to be grabbed and rotated rather than shaken. Compared with the European handle that may be operated with an elbow if the user's hands are occupied, the hand-le inherits the door knob's inherent disadvantage in that respect.
By Donald Norman's user interface standards, I'm afraid the hand-le would receive a thumbs-down rating for a design that is no more intuitive than the usual door knobs and handles, as it would require the same social training as the conventional handles.
I'll hand it to the hand-le that it looks quite good, but I've seen door knobs and door handles in many shapes that I considered much more appealing. I suspect the primary design motivation was the designer's wish to make a pun.
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The term "there's no such thing as a free lunch" implies that there's always a hidden cost somewhere that someone has to pay. And if someone offers you something ostensibly for free, chances are you'll be the one that pays in the end, my friend. It's the adult version of "don't accept gifts from strangers," because if you belive the gift is free, you'll soon find yourself screwed.
Weight loss programs and weight loss diet vendors seem to be particularly prone to offering "free lunches" guaranteeing virtually anything under the sun for almost nothing. In practice, weight loss diets are often absolutely against doctor's orders, and generally rather uneffective. Oh, and I won't even get started on the myriad of web pages offering weight loss programs all "guaranteed" to work, because they're "scientifically documented." Right. They somehow never get into detail describing exactly what this documentation states; I mean, it's probably scientifically documented that jumping off a cliff will hurt you, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing to try. I suspect the scientific conclusion on several weight loss diets is: "This product will cause mal-nourishment and no weight loss."
But there are exceptions. Danish product Nupo is a so-called "very low calorie diet" that promises a weight loss of about three pounds per week if followed carefully.
Originally known as the "Hvidovre diet," the diet was invented by a Danish expert in nutrition at the hospital of Hvidovre in the early 1980es. The product was later refined into "NUPO" (short for "nutritional powder"), a product that tastes like known foods and provides the body with all of its required nutrition, but maintains an insufficient amount of energy. Without being deprived of its required nutrition, the body must burn fat.
The product has been widely tested and the scientific conclusions are reasonably consistent: the product works as promised without the dangerous drawbacks of malnourishment found in certain weight loss diets.
Of course, even non-experts on nutrition can tell you that to lose weight, you should permanently change your diet and do lots of exercise. That's certainly true, but few people are willing to shave an hour off the day to be uncomfortable running around. I realize that the endorphine level boost caused by running around the neighborhood will soon take on the characteristics of a mild narcotic that provides the runner with a sense of pleasure and even dependency on the "drug," but on the short term you won't experience that feeling. So, doing exercises not only seems like an unsurmountable task, it's actually boring and uncomfortable. Face it, a weight loss program can be successful only if it is handed on a silver platter.
Weight loss programs and weight loss diet vendors seem to be particularly prone to offering "free lunches" guaranteeing virtually anything under the sun for almost nothing. In practice, weight loss diets are often absolutely against doctor's orders, and generally rather uneffective. Oh, and I won't even get started on the myriad of web pages offering weight loss programs all "guaranteed" to work, because they're "scientifically documented." Right. They somehow never get into detail describing exactly what this documentation states; I mean, it's probably scientifically documented that jumping off a cliff will hurt you, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing to try. I suspect the scientific conclusion on several weight loss diets is: "This product will cause mal-nourishment and no weight loss."
But there are exceptions. Danish product Nupo is a so-called "very low calorie diet" that promises a weight loss of about three pounds per week if followed carefully.Originally known as the "Hvidovre diet," the diet was invented by a Danish expert in nutrition at the hospital of Hvidovre in the early 1980es. The product was later refined into "NUPO" (short for "nutritional powder"), a product that tastes like known foods and provides the body with all of its required nutrition, but maintains an insufficient amount of energy. Without being deprived of its required nutrition, the body must burn fat.
The product has been widely tested and the scientific conclusions are reasonably consistent: the product works as promised without the dangerous drawbacks of malnourishment found in certain weight loss diets.
Of course, even non-experts on nutrition can tell you that to lose weight, you should permanently change your diet and do lots of exercise. That's certainly true, but few people are willing to shave an hour off the day to be uncomfortable running around. I realize that the endorphine level boost caused by running around the neighborhood will soon take on the characteristics of a mild narcotic that provides the runner with a sense of pleasure and even dependency on the "drug," but on the short term you won't experience that feeling. So, doing exercises not only seems like an unsurmountable task, it's actually boring and uncomfortable. Face it, a weight loss program can be successful only if it is handed on a silver platter.
I'm one of those people that wouldn't be caught dead running. Unfortunately I'm also one of those people that suddenly saw his weight increase after a long-term assignment at a customer with an excellent catering service. Within a year I gained about ten pounds. Not that this made me overweight, but it did seem a little too much to me. Friends also began to mentioned to me that I seemed to have gained weight. I stopped gaining weight after the assignment, but getting rid of the extra pounds seemed impossible. After four years, my weight hadn't changed a bit.
I eventually decided I'd have to do something about it, and my girlfriend mentioned Nupo's diet as a possible method. Somewhat skeptical at first, I investigated the claims and did some rough calculations on my own and came to a conclusion that is supported by Nupo's web site. Following the diet suggestion reasonably closely I expected a weight loss of around two pounds per week.
Fortunately I'm a reasonably determined person. When I started my martial arts training I decided I'd buy all of the belt colors after just two weeks of training, and my next graduation will prove that the black belt was not to be forgotten in the back of the drawer. In other words, I filled the kitchen shelf with Nupo products, ready to start on the diet the next day.
The Nupo products consist of basically three kinds of food, two of which are powder based: shakes, soups, and bars. The shakes come in coffee latte, chocolate, and strawberry flavors. The soups are mushroom and aspargus flavored. The bars are chocolate, caramel, hazel nut, and coconut flavored. All of the powder based products are shaked with water, and the soups are heated in the microwave afterwards. The bars don't need preparation.
The preferred flavor is obviously an individual choice. I quickly grew tired of the coffee latte, and the strawberry flavor is beginning to taste like "enough candy for tonight" to me. The bars are edible, and while they're not actually bad, they tend to eliminate my appetite. The first few bites are okay, but then each mouthful seems to grow bigger in my mouth until I really don't want to finish the bar. It's not that the taste is bad, but somehow I grow tired of the taste almost instantly. On the upside, you get the pleasure of chewing something, which is a much desired alternative to the powder-based products.
I like the soups, although they're certainly far from "real" mushroom or aspargus soup. As the shakes go, I prefer chocolate powder and I can stand the stawberry powder. I can probably stand all of the bars, but the coconut flavored bar has the advantage of a somewhat "fresh" taste compared with the other flavors.
I suppose the somewhat bland experience may be an advantage although it is hardly something Nupo would pride themselves of. If their weight loss products tasted as top of the line cuisine, perhaps the unfortunate users would be tempted to squeeze just one more chocolate bar down until eventually they might as well have eaten candy bars. Somehow it seems right that weight loss food doesn't tempt you to eat lots of it.
Nupo suggests different uses of the products appealing to the temperament of the individual users. The hard core version means you eat Nupo products only, and is obviously the most effective weight loss method. Less can do however, such as eating a regular meal once a day and replacing the other meals with Nupo's food replacements.
I've used the products somewhat in-between the hard core and the "one preferred meal" per day, and the weight loss promise by Nupo isn't all wrong. I managed to get rid of the extra pounds gained four years ago in about four weeks, and without feeling tired, particularly hungry, or otherwise feeling like I'm on a diet. And that included an occasional treat in the form of a piece of cake as well as a meal once a day.
Nupo cautions that, like with all weight loss programs, when the Nupo diet is finished you must be careful with your future diet. Research shows that no matter how successful people have been with their weight loss diets, they'll regain all of their weight unless they change their diet permanently.
And the free lunch? You won't get that, of course. Regular food tastes better than Nupo's products, and certainly provides much more variation than three shakes, four bars, and two soups. Nupo's products are reasonably priced, however, and if you decide to start the Nupo diet you may in fact save quite some money since you avoid the expenses on real food.
To summarize, the Nupo diet itself provides you with the nutrition you need, costs less than regular food, and each dish is prepared faster than most quick-meals. It doesn't provide you with the required energy, however, and therefore requires your body to burn fat, reducing your weight at a rate of two or three pounds a week.
The conclusion is evident: once you've reached your desired weight, you can keep your weight down on a diet of a somewhat dull appetizer and cake as the main dish--and still pay less for your food than today.
I eventually decided I'd have to do something about it, and my girlfriend mentioned Nupo's diet as a possible method. Somewhat skeptical at first, I investigated the claims and did some rough calculations on my own and came to a conclusion that is supported by Nupo's web site. Following the diet suggestion reasonably closely I expected a weight loss of around two pounds per week.
Fortunately I'm a reasonably determined person. When I started my martial arts training I decided I'd buy all of the belt colors after just two weeks of training, and my next graduation will prove that the black belt was not to be forgotten in the back of the drawer. In other words, I filled the kitchen shelf with Nupo products, ready to start on the diet the next day.
The Nupo products consist of basically three kinds of food, two of which are powder based: shakes, soups, and bars. The shakes come in coffee latte, chocolate, and strawberry flavors. The soups are mushroom and aspargus flavored. The bars are chocolate, caramel, hazel nut, and coconut flavored. All of the powder based products are shaked with water, and the soups are heated in the microwave afterwards. The bars don't need preparation.
The preferred flavor is obviously an individual choice. I quickly grew tired of the coffee latte, and the strawberry flavor is beginning to taste like "enough candy for tonight" to me. The bars are edible, and while they're not actually bad, they tend to eliminate my appetite. The first few bites are okay, but then each mouthful seems to grow bigger in my mouth until I really don't want to finish the bar. It's not that the taste is bad, but somehow I grow tired of the taste almost instantly. On the upside, you get the pleasure of chewing something, which is a much desired alternative to the powder-based products.
I like the soups, although they're certainly far from "real" mushroom or aspargus soup. As the shakes go, I prefer chocolate powder and I can stand the stawberry powder. I can probably stand all of the bars, but the coconut flavored bar has the advantage of a somewhat "fresh" taste compared with the other flavors.
I suppose the somewhat bland experience may be an advantage although it is hardly something Nupo would pride themselves of. If their weight loss products tasted as top of the line cuisine, perhaps the unfortunate users would be tempted to squeeze just one more chocolate bar down until eventually they might as well have eaten candy bars. Somehow it seems right that weight loss food doesn't tempt you to eat lots of it.
Nupo suggests different uses of the products appealing to the temperament of the individual users. The hard core version means you eat Nupo products only, and is obviously the most effective weight loss method. Less can do however, such as eating a regular meal once a day and replacing the other meals with Nupo's food replacements.
I've used the products somewhat in-between the hard core and the "one preferred meal" per day, and the weight loss promise by Nupo isn't all wrong. I managed to get rid of the extra pounds gained four years ago in about four weeks, and without feeling tired, particularly hungry, or otherwise feeling like I'm on a diet. And that included an occasional treat in the form of a piece of cake as well as a meal once a day.
Nupo cautions that, like with all weight loss programs, when the Nupo diet is finished you must be careful with your future diet. Research shows that no matter how successful people have been with their weight loss diets, they'll regain all of their weight unless they change their diet permanently.
And the free lunch? You won't get that, of course. Regular food tastes better than Nupo's products, and certainly provides much more variation than three shakes, four bars, and two soups. Nupo's products are reasonably priced, however, and if you decide to start the Nupo diet you may in fact save quite some money since you avoid the expenses on real food.
To summarize, the Nupo diet itself provides you with the nutrition you need, costs less than regular food, and each dish is prepared faster than most quick-meals. It doesn't provide you with the required energy, however, and therefore requires your body to burn fat, reducing your weight at a rate of two or three pounds a week.
The conclusion is evident: once you've reached your desired weight, you can keep your weight down on a diet of a somewhat dull appetizer and cake as the main dish--and still pay less for your food than today.
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You generally wouldn't expect a manufacturer of headphones to brag about their ability to quell sound. After all, headphones are supposed to provide you with sound.
With two children in the house I'll admit I do occasionally wish to record an entire CD of silence, put it in the CD player, and crank up the volume hoping that silence played back at full volume might lower the general noise level of our home, but somehow my technical background tells me it might not work as expected.
Then again, that's probably not the way Bose's QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones work. (According to Bose's website, apparently that's what they're called, trademark protection and all, but I'll just refer to them as QuietComfort 3.)
Bose's QuietConfort 3 headphones are designed to put a lid on the noise. In this case, noise is considered the same thing as one of my students suggested at an exam when I asked for some characteristics of electrical noise: my student suggested that this might be the sounds produced at a concert, which the neighbors might very well consider noise. Noise, in this context, is ambient sound that you don't want to hear. Incidentally, the Bose headphones make excellent headphones capable of playing back music with a high audio quality.
In my field of engineering unfortunately office space is planned on the assumption that highly interverted people such as engineers whose stress levels are increased by the presence of other people will thrive in crowded, noisy offices. Well, we don't, but unfortunately office planners seem to prefer saving a few hundred dollars per month instead of earning several times that amount by means of increased productivity by employees working in environments tailored for productivity.
I'm one of those people that is particularly stressed by other people's noise, and I demand virtually complete silence at work. Bose's QuietComfort 3 come at a steep price, and reviewers tend to disagree on several performance parameters, but I decided I'd purchase the headphones. A price tag of $349.00 may cause wallet aches, but keeping my sanity seems more valuable.
The headphones weren't available for online purchase in my country at that time, but after calling Bose and handing over my credit card number, I had them within a week. I could probably have purchased a set online via helpful sellers at eBay or such, but then I probably wouldn't have the proper plugs for the electrical outlets in my country.
Upon opening the box, it is evident that Bose has frequent travelers in mind. A handy bag includes the headphones themselves, of course, a charger with replaceable mains plugs, two batteries capable of delivering 20 hours of silence, and an adapter that fits into those pesky separated left and right channels that most airlines have adapted in order to force passengers to rent the airline's rather poor headphones instead of using the headphones the passengers brought with them for their MP3 players or discman.
The QuietComfort 3 headphones themselves are about the size of any other small set of headphones, but the padding on the ear contact discs is soft, and the headphones are somewhat heavier. They're still reasonably lightweight, though, and won't tire your neck. The battery plugs seamless into the headphones themselves, so you won't have to deal with an extra box lying around.
On with the headphones, and where usual noise cancellation headphones block much of the ambient noice passively by virtue of a cup that covers all of your ear, somehow, the soft material on the QuiteComfort 3 headphones accomplished the same effect by gluing itself to my ears, covering the sound canal entirely. A significant amount of noise was already dampened at this stage, and with a little fiddling with the "on" switch on the side of the headphones, I turned on the active noise cancellation.
The effect of the active noise cancellation was not immediate, but within two seconds the active noise cancellation algorithm adapted to the room characteristics and the ambient noise, and the silence was complete. I have quite a few experiments with active noise cancellation and adaptive algorithms at university (in fact, my specialty is adaptive filtering algorithms), and Bose has made an excellent job.
Okay, the silence isn't quite complete. I'd have expected PC fan noise to be less audible, but some of the most annoying sounds are practically gone. We've suffered at work because of a construction site just outside of the building where what seemed like an infinite number of concrete pillars were driven into the ground. Conversation was rendered impossible because of the heavy banging noises outside, let alone the ability to concentrate. The QuietComfort 3 headphones managed to reduce this ear-rendering noice to the sound of someone driving nails into wood at a distance of about 300 feet. This is truly an impressive noise reduction. Unfortunately the headphones couldn't make the monitor stop bouncing on the table as a result of the massive vibrations caused by the hammers outside.
Virtually all reverberations are canceled by the noise reduction algorithms, so indirect speech coming from a neighbor office may be reduced to faint mumbling. Direct speech is only slightly reduced, however, and because of the eliminated reverberation the speakers sound as if they're speaking from a radio studio.
Some reviewers have complained about a feeling of pressure onto their eardrums by the headphones. I'm quite sure this is purely a psychological effect, as I remember some fellow students making similar complaints back at university when others didn't feel a thing. This is probably an entirely individual feeling that little can be done about. However, if you're not used to having your ears covered, expect pain after prolonged caused by the physical pressure onto your ears. Just don't blame Bose; people that wear a scarf for a long time can tell you about similar pains caused by the pressure from the scarf.
All things considered, I find the headphones comfortable and highly effective, but unfortunately they don't quite eliminate the one source of noise that has bothered me the most, that is, the noise of other people speaking. In my home office the headphones filter most of the ambient noise, causing the one noise I specifically want to avoid to pass through with unprecedented ease: no matter where in the house my children are, if I put on my QuiteComfort 3, I hear that particular noise of the children chattering endlessly loud and clear. As a result, I mostly use them as regular headphones because of the great sound quality.
In short, I probably shelled out a fortune for a set of headphones whose noise reduction I hardly use. But when it comes to traveling for hours in a car or by plane, they're wonderful. They eliminate only some of the car noise or airplane noise, but they reduce it to a level where you're less prone to being fatigued by the end of your journey. I've always been somewhat shell-shocked after a long journey, but after wearing the QuietComfort 3 headphones my mind is still reasonably clear when I reach my destination. Some users have claimed that they no longer experience jet lag, but I've yet to share this experience.
Bose cautions that these headphones actually might deliver lower audio quality than typically expected from Bose products. It may be true that high-grade headphones specifically designed for playback deliver better audio quality, but compared with the low-end consumer range headphones that you purchase at your local electronics store, Bose's QuietComfort 3 deliver an astonishing audio quality. It's good enough for me; maybe I'd be able to hear the difference between QuietComfort 3 and their high-end headphones, but I feel my demands are fully satisfied.
With two children in the house I'll admit I do occasionally wish to record an entire CD of silence, put it in the CD player, and crank up the volume hoping that silence played back at full volume might lower the general noise level of our home, but somehow my technical background tells me it might not work as expected.
Then again, that's probably not the way Bose's QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones work. (According to Bose's website, apparently that's what they're called, trademark protection and all, but I'll just refer to them as QuietComfort 3.)Bose's QuietConfort 3 headphones are designed to put a lid on the noise. In this case, noise is considered the same thing as one of my students suggested at an exam when I asked for some characteristics of electrical noise: my student suggested that this might be the sounds produced at a concert, which the neighbors might very well consider noise. Noise, in this context, is ambient sound that you don't want to hear. Incidentally, the Bose headphones make excellent headphones capable of playing back music with a high audio quality.
In my field of engineering unfortunately office space is planned on the assumption that highly interverted people such as engineers whose stress levels are increased by the presence of other people will thrive in crowded, noisy offices. Well, we don't, but unfortunately office planners seem to prefer saving a few hundred dollars per month instead of earning several times that amount by means of increased productivity by employees working in environments tailored for productivity.
I'm one of those people that is particularly stressed by other people's noise, and I demand virtually complete silence at work. Bose's QuietComfort 3 come at a steep price, and reviewers tend to disagree on several performance parameters, but I decided I'd purchase the headphones. A price tag of $349.00 may cause wallet aches, but keeping my sanity seems more valuable.
The headphones weren't available for online purchase in my country at that time, but after calling Bose and handing over my credit card number, I had them within a week. I could probably have purchased a set online via helpful sellers at eBay or such, but then I probably wouldn't have the proper plugs for the electrical outlets in my country.
Upon opening the box, it is evident that Bose has frequent travelers in mind. A handy bag includes the headphones themselves, of course, a charger with replaceable mains plugs, two batteries capable of delivering 20 hours of silence, and an adapter that fits into those pesky separated left and right channels that most airlines have adapted in order to force passengers to rent the airline's rather poor headphones instead of using the headphones the passengers brought with them for their MP3 players or discman.
The QuietComfort 3 headphones themselves are about the size of any other small set of headphones, but the padding on the ear contact discs is soft, and the headphones are somewhat heavier. They're still reasonably lightweight, though, and won't tire your neck. The battery plugs seamless into the headphones themselves, so you won't have to deal with an extra box lying around.
On with the headphones, and where usual noise cancellation headphones block much of the ambient noice passively by virtue of a cup that covers all of your ear, somehow, the soft material on the QuiteComfort 3 headphones accomplished the same effect by gluing itself to my ears, covering the sound canal entirely. A significant amount of noise was already dampened at this stage, and with a little fiddling with the "on" switch on the side of the headphones, I turned on the active noise cancellation.
The effect of the active noise cancellation was not immediate, but within two seconds the active noise cancellation algorithm adapted to the room characteristics and the ambient noise, and the silence was complete. I have quite a few experiments with active noise cancellation and adaptive algorithms at university (in fact, my specialty is adaptive filtering algorithms), and Bose has made an excellent job.
Okay, the silence isn't quite complete. I'd have expected PC fan noise to be less audible, but some of the most annoying sounds are practically gone. We've suffered at work because of a construction site just outside of the building where what seemed like an infinite number of concrete pillars were driven into the ground. Conversation was rendered impossible because of the heavy banging noises outside, let alone the ability to concentrate. The QuietComfort 3 headphones managed to reduce this ear-rendering noice to the sound of someone driving nails into wood at a distance of about 300 feet. This is truly an impressive noise reduction. Unfortunately the headphones couldn't make the monitor stop bouncing on the table as a result of the massive vibrations caused by the hammers outside.
Virtually all reverberations are canceled by the noise reduction algorithms, so indirect speech coming from a neighbor office may be reduced to faint mumbling. Direct speech is only slightly reduced, however, and because of the eliminated reverberation the speakers sound as if they're speaking from a radio studio.
Some reviewers have complained about a feeling of pressure onto their eardrums by the headphones. I'm quite sure this is purely a psychological effect, as I remember some fellow students making similar complaints back at university when others didn't feel a thing. This is probably an entirely individual feeling that little can be done about. However, if you're not used to having your ears covered, expect pain after prolonged caused by the physical pressure onto your ears. Just don't blame Bose; people that wear a scarf for a long time can tell you about similar pains caused by the pressure from the scarf.
All things considered, I find the headphones comfortable and highly effective, but unfortunately they don't quite eliminate the one source of noise that has bothered me the most, that is, the noise of other people speaking. In my home office the headphones filter most of the ambient noise, causing the one noise I specifically want to avoid to pass through with unprecedented ease: no matter where in the house my children are, if I put on my QuiteComfort 3, I hear that particular noise of the children chattering endlessly loud and clear. As a result, I mostly use them as regular headphones because of the great sound quality.
In short, I probably shelled out a fortune for a set of headphones whose noise reduction I hardly use. But when it comes to traveling for hours in a car or by plane, they're wonderful. They eliminate only some of the car noise or airplane noise, but they reduce it to a level where you're less prone to being fatigued by the end of your journey. I've always been somewhat shell-shocked after a long journey, but after wearing the QuietComfort 3 headphones my mind is still reasonably clear when I reach my destination. Some users have claimed that they no longer experience jet lag, but I've yet to share this experience.
Bose cautions that these headphones actually might deliver lower audio quality than typically expected from Bose products. It may be true that high-grade headphones specifically designed for playback deliver better audio quality, but compared with the low-end consumer range headphones that you purchase at your local electronics store, Bose's QuietComfort 3 deliver an astonishing audio quality. It's good enough for me; maybe I'd be able to hear the difference between QuietComfort 3 and their high-end headphones, but I feel my demands are fully satisfied.
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Every now and then you'll find a product that either isn't for sale in your country, or seems to cost a fortune unless you import it. Unfortunately, export restrictions prevent you from purchasing the product online in one of the other countries.
That doesn't mean you can't obtain it, though.
You may of course be lucky to know a colleague or a family member that is on vacation in one of the selling countries, and if you give them the amount, they'll probably be happy to purchase the product for you. If you're in the IT business and it's a cool tech gadget, not only will your colleague buy one for you, he'll probably also buy one for himself and you'll have some great conversation pieces at work.
If you're less lucky than that, go to eBay. You know what eBay is, of course, but you may not know that there are sellers that will be more than happy to sell you an item that is slightly overpriced for their own country but with a significantly lower price tag than the same item in your own country. I've seen a brand new Lego Mindstorm set for sale on eBay from a US seller at about 30% below the price of exactly the same set in Europe, only the set couldn't be shipped from the US to Europe from conventional stores because of export restrictions. Buying the set from the seller at eBay would save you quite a sum, and the seller would still profit, so you both win. In short, if a product is difficult or expensive to obtain because of export restrictions, eBay may be your friend.
I'm entirely sure whether this is legal, or if you need special permission from your local tax authorities. If it isn't legal, please don't tell anyone I said it.
That doesn't mean you can't obtain it, though.
You may of course be lucky to know a colleague or a family member that is on vacation in one of the selling countries, and if you give them the amount, they'll probably be happy to purchase the product for you. If you're in the IT business and it's a cool tech gadget, not only will your colleague buy one for you, he'll probably also buy one for himself and you'll have some great conversation pieces at work.
If you're less lucky than that, go to eBay. You know what eBay is, of course, but you may not know that there are sellers that will be more than happy to sell you an item that is slightly overpriced for their own country but with a significantly lower price tag than the same item in your own country. I've seen a brand new Lego Mindstorm set for sale on eBay from a US seller at about 30% below the price of exactly the same set in Europe, only the set couldn't be shipped from the US to Europe from conventional stores because of export restrictions. Buying the set from the seller at eBay would save you quite a sum, and the seller would still profit, so you both win. In short, if a product is difficult or expensive to obtain because of export restrictions, eBay may be your friend.
I'm entirely sure whether this is legal, or if you need special permission from your local tax authorities. If it isn't legal, please don't tell anyone I said it.
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Invite your favorite mathematician friend over and pour his next drink from a Klein Bottle, and you'll have won his respect once and for all.As mathematicians will know--and I'm sure your friend will go into great length and detail--a Klein Bottle is a mathematical construct hatched by Felix Klein a century and a half ago, when he imagined that two Möbius Loops could be combined to form a single-sided bottle with no boundary.
In practice, this means you have a surface that is wrapped in such a way that its inside is basically also its outside. It can't be done in our three-dimensional world, but you can get reasonably close.
With the glass Klein Bottles produced by Acme Klein Bottle, you can have such a strange construct yourself. With a Klein Bottle drinking glass you're really pouring your drink into your glass by pouring it on the outside of the glass, and a full bottle of wine is literally empty even if it's clearly full, because mathematically speaking the bottle can have no contents in the sense that it doesn't bound a volume.
I expect to purchase a Klein Bottle one day, primarily because I want to be able to accidentally spill my drink right onto the table outside of the Klein Bottle drinking glass, expecting the drink to appear inside of the glass nonetheless. I'm just hoping that the zero-volume property won't prevent me from drinking from the glass which, by definition, will always be empty.
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That's right. In the past, whenever I needed a webhost to host yet another one of my domains, I'd research carefully all the various options and features provided by the webhosts, including storage, monthly bandwidth, number of virtual hosts, email addresses, aliases, ftp accounts, file managing features, databases, etc., trying to have as much as possible for the lowest price.
That's probably a reasonable approach, especially because in reality none of the webhosts have actually provided me with what I always needed.
Until now, that is. One of my friends happened to discover Servage.net, which may not be the least expensive of the thousands of options, but they provide an unparallelled storage. Starting at 360 GBytes, most people could upload their entire harddisk and, well, if they were like me, they'd probably replace the contents with Linux and hope someone at Servage was a jerk and accidentally installed the entire thing onto his own computer. Okay, I didn't actually go that far; besides, I had already ditched Windows and installed Ubuntu two years ago.
I did sign up for Servage.net, though, and Servage.net provides all of the features, I'm used to looking for. This time, however, I'm using virtually none of them. I don't need an infinite number of email or FTP accounts, virtual hosts, and what not, which ironically Servage.net does provide. I'd like to have unlimited bandwidth, and while 3,600 GBytes of bandwidth per month is infinite for all practical purposes, I'd actually have preferred more. It's the huge amount of web storage, and it's all mine, just mine.
In fact, it's so much mine that I won't even share it with anyone. I could put thousands of images, movie clips, and audio files up there and have them accessible from anywhere and--within reason--for anyone.
Instead, I'm using the web storage for backups. With that much storage, backup is a mere problem of upload bandwidth, and at about 1024 Kbps, most backups can be completed within an acceptable time frame.
That's right. I'm be uploading until my network cable catches fire and my Internet service provider sends his goons out to persuade me to put a lid on my network usage, and no one will ever see the files I'm uploading. Including me, hopefully.
Oh, and while you're signing up, remember to use coupon code CUST39765. That's mine, of course, and if you use that one, both you and I will have another 25 GBytes added to our accounts. And once you've signed up, watch your storage limit grow, because Servage.net adds several megabytes of storage to your account each day.
That's probably a reasonable approach, especially because in reality none of the webhosts have actually provided me with what I always needed.
Until now, that is. One of my friends happened to discover Servage.net, which may not be the least expensive of the thousands of options, but they provide an unparallelled storage. Starting at 360 GBytes, most people could upload their entire harddisk and, well, if they were like me, they'd probably replace the contents with Linux and hope someone at Servage was a jerk and accidentally installed the entire thing onto his own computer. Okay, I didn't actually go that far; besides, I had already ditched Windows and installed Ubuntu two years ago.
I did sign up for Servage.net, though, and Servage.net provides all of the features, I'm used to looking for. This time, however, I'm using virtually none of them. I don't need an infinite number of email or FTP accounts, virtual hosts, and what not, which ironically Servage.net does provide. I'd like to have unlimited bandwidth, and while 3,600 GBytes of bandwidth per month is infinite for all practical purposes, I'd actually have preferred more. It's the huge amount of web storage, and it's all mine, just mine.
In fact, it's so much mine that I won't even share it with anyone. I could put thousands of images, movie clips, and audio files up there and have them accessible from anywhere and--within reason--for anyone.
Instead, I'm using the web storage for backups. With that much storage, backup is a mere problem of upload bandwidth, and at about 1024 Kbps, most backups can be completed within an acceptable time frame.
That's right. I'm be uploading until my network cable catches fire and my Internet service provider sends his goons out to persuade me to put a lid on my network usage, and no one will ever see the files I'm uploading. Including me, hopefully.
Oh, and while you're signing up, remember to use coupon code CUST39765. That's mine, of course, and if you use that one, both you and I will have another 25 GBytes added to our accounts. And once you've signed up, watch your storage limit grow, because Servage.net adds several megabytes of storage to your account each day.
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I'll admit this right from the beginning. This blog is an attempt to make a little money by being online. I don't expect this to pay for my food or anything, but since I can't help writing, I might as well see if I can earn a little money on it as a side effect.
There are going to be a variety of opinionated entries and some downloadable stuff, as well as nerdy tips and tricks, especially in the beginning.
Later, the blog is to focus on various products that I happen to find interesting enough to write about.
Unfortunately, I'm a horrible consumer. Commercials never seem to catch on to me, probably because I'm an engineer with a penchant for data and evaluation. If the manufacturer states that their product is "10% better," I'm waiting for the end of the sentence, requiring an answer: better than what?
And if the vendor somehow is successful enough to make me buy whatever gadget he or she is presenting, chances are I'm using it dead wrong. In any event, I tend to gain a perspective on products that nobody else seems to have. With a little luck, maybe this blog will lend some insight into my marginally twisted view and anticipated use of consumer products.
There are going to be a variety of opinionated entries and some downloadable stuff, as well as nerdy tips and tricks, especially in the beginning.
Later, the blog is to focus on various products that I happen to find interesting enough to write about.
Unfortunately, I'm a horrible consumer. Commercials never seem to catch on to me, probably because I'm an engineer with a penchant for data and evaluation. If the manufacturer states that their product is "10% better," I'm waiting for the end of the sentence, requiring an answer: better than what?
And if the vendor somehow is successful enough to make me buy whatever gadget he or she is presenting, chances are I'm using it dead wrong. In any event, I tend to gain a perspective on products that nobody else seems to have. With a little luck, maybe this blog will lend some insight into my marginally twisted view and anticipated use of consumer products.
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