Last Viewed Technology Blogs (217)

Every time I look at the stars, I wonder if we will ever get there. It seems unlikely. Is our lifespan too short or are we simply snookered by distance?

Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor outside our own solar system, is almost four and a half light-years away. This means that if we could travel at one tenth of the speed of light - and we cannot even remotely - it would still take us 45 years to get there. That is 90 years for the return trip with no time for any sight seeing. Few of us will outlive the entire journey.

If we were to attempt to make the journey with one of the space shuttles, it would take 135,000 years just to get there. However, hitching a ride with one of the Voyagers seems to be a better bet. The one-way trip will only take 75,000 years. Alas, we just don’t live long enough to do it.

When we look at our current technology, it seems unlikely that we will get there first and then we don’t even know if Alpha Centauri has any habitable planets. The single planet discovered so far orbiting that star is far too hot to support life as we know it. Life, as we know it, may be much further away.

Therefore, it seems a much safer bet to wait until those little green men arrive here but I not sure if ‘safer’ is the right word. If these beings arrive here, they may not be that well disposed towards us. If they display the same imperialism as our earlier European powers, we’re going to be in for a rough ride. How would you fancy having to perform slave labor on a Drakonian farm? Aliens may even have a taste for long pig… also known as human meat.

Then, on the other hand, maybe those on the other side are sitting with the same problems. It may explain the lack of any real evidence regarding ‘visits’ to our planet for all we had so far are rumors and conspiracy theories. One such theory has it that the far side of the moon is infested with aliens and that the Americans had been warned off the moon; that is why they’re no going there any more!

And I don’t know why everybody just assumes that intelligent extra-terrestrial life has to be humanoid. Maybe when they get here, they will simply proceed with their journey after failing to find intelligent life!


Have a great day and don't go flying too far

I check a site called giveawayoftheday that offers free software each day. Typically, it's less known authors looking for feedback to better their products. Usually the products are offered without technical support or updates, some are only free licenses good for a year and after stop working or continue with less functionality. I avoid about 98% of these offers and uninstall the trial ones if they don't suit my needs. Over the years, I've found lots of nice free programs, mostly in the music, graphics or utility areas.

Being free comes with a catch as they usually have a nag screen to get you to upgrade to the paid version. Some try to sell you on other selections they offer. I make it a point to uncheck other free offers when installing the one I want to try as many installations have rogue software that mysteriously come with the package. I'll go back to the original offer and give a bad review explaining the unwanted software bundled in the package.

Three months ago, I installed a basic program that saves YouTube videos to disc. Works great and doesn't leave it's name (watermark) on the video it saves. Now ads are popping up when I boot my computer as this selection is in the startup of Windows. I close the program and all is well... except this morning a few minutes after I closed the program, a browser window opened with an offer to upgrade to their latest paid version. If this nag upgrade becomes habitual, I feel a divorce will be sooner than later.

For years, I've been reading about Amazon making deliveries by drone. For the record, it's not perfected yet. Good idea or not, something on a large scale must get the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which is the same government agency that hasn't allowed flying cars. Remember those?
I'm reading some drone companies have plane-like aircraft that drop their cargo from 10 to 12 feet and not land to release the package. Tell that to your Rolex vendor.

People who make flying cars often depict someone stuck in traffic and like a transformer, opening wings and taking to the sky. Read my lips: It ain't happening.
Airplanes (real or converted cars) have to get approval from a flight tower and have a prescribed flight plan... with the exception of a crop duster in Kansas, they all have to be 'on the radar' and takeoff and land from a runway. That includes manned drones.

While Amazon drones have great merit, you cannot fill the sky with drones dropping $200 Yeazy sneakers across town. What are they good for? In my opinion, special emergency authorization like a 20 minute direct flight transporting a heart (on ice) to a hospital 50 miles away where an ambulance transport could be more than one hour getting through one busy city to another busy city. Just like an ambulance helicopter transport, a designated heli-pad is where the package would be received. Logically, there would need to be a fast charge station for the return flight.

Drone on...

A few times a day I receive (robotic) phone solicitation calls to my cellphone offering me discounted healthcare programs and the recording starts with "We've been trying to reach you..." along with that is their takeaway "This is our last attempt to offer this discount..."
If that were true, I wouldn't receive so many calls.

I stopped using a land line years ago and switched to VOIP service provided by Vonage. It was my backup to a cellphone and served as a FAX line. I haven't used it in months and decided the $30 fee could be used elsewhere.

Since I'm a T-Mobile customer, I decided to switch to their VOIP service for $10 and now that I'm at a location 45 miles North, I selected a new phone number in the local exchange.

The device with new number has been installed for a little more than a week and the first message on the voicemail system is:
"We've been trying to reach you..."

Saves Millions Of Lives

I'm just kind of curious if anyone has found any really useful apps( I know they all are useful) that can be downloaded on Google Play. If you have a teenage kid thats related to a lion then Life 360 is handy, and you can keep discreet tabs on him. (or maybe not)

Thing is there are thousands available but which are really useful?

Whats your personal favorite?
Fuel Calculator?

Far too many to list...

Hello.

So i was wondering myself
about the last years...
how social are we?
Now we dont even say hi
to the people we see on the street
in our normal day.
We are not even polite !
But we can spend every minute
of our day online
saying hi to people we dont even know
in real life ¡?

So...a day without social media
is my project ...

i spent a day without going online
not even to check fb or whatsapp
Spent the day talking with my family
went out and enjoyed a good movie
and dinner
Smiled to many people i saw
some of them saw me like ... whats wrong with her???
lol

I felt like i was living in a real world
with real people around me.

Next day i went online
and saw all was fine and nothing new...just many txt, messages,
and likes lol
but hey... we can do this =)
enjoy real world
smile, eat...movie ...
and nobody has to know what ur doing every second !!!

So...lets do this at least once per week :D

kisses xoxo

Back when everyone started to carry a camera on them (cell phone)....the skeptics of UFOs would say, why are we not getting any pictures of them? Today, there are many pictures of them taken. Now what?

What is the next move for society?

Do we continue to just go on with life living literally in our own little bubbles.....or....our big bubble (the planet)? Or, do we now look beyond ourselves....our own species....and start to acclimate ourselves to others out there? What would that even look like?

I seen one documentary where they were saying that they want to understand their technology....harness it...and put it to use to protect our environment when it came to developing new energy. My thoughts to that was.....why?....so they can send us a bill in the mail for something that now cost them something even cheaper to make....to make a larger profit?



Perhaps if people could live free....not where government controls you....but where one can have access to the basic elements to life without being a slave to the powerful.

The wind is down and I'm charging batteries to catch a few model aircraft flights this morning. The batteries I use are lithium polymer or Li-Po for short. They develop lots of power for a short time, so I have several when I go flying.
It's important to monitor the flight time because draining a battery below 3.8 volts will shorten its life. Batteries are pretty expensive, around 25 to $30 a piece for the style I use.
Depending on batteries deserves a Blog of its own!

I don't play or copy CD's DVD's or Blueray discs and have avoided programs that allow you to save those forms of media to another system. I saw one available for free today on give away of the day dot com.
One of my clients is in the business of total home automation where lights, appliances, window shades can be controlled via an iPhone. That includes TV's and sound system throughout the house. He has software that allows him to copy any DVD, including protected ones and migrate those movies to a huge hard drive so the clients total library is accessible and they don't have to flip DVD's to watch movies.

Since I'm avoiding Geekdom, much of that process uses ISO files. A quick read says it's a compressed single file of the contents of data or possibly an operating system. So copying an entire DVD to one ISO file so it can be played directly from the system without having to play the DVD.

Most of the people I know who are deeply into streaming, have Netflix or some other service so they pull whatever video they want via internet to see from a huge library. Unless they have a big collection of movies, they probably bypassed the ISO phase.

I'll probably read a little more for the knowledge as I'm told you can copy an entire Windows operating system to ISO for future retrieval.