Most Liked Technology Blogs (217)

what is this " I'm not a robot" deal now when logging in? someone please explain ! studecar

You know - like that legendary T.V. guy who can make/fix anything with nothing but a hairpin.

My house was built circa 1890.
Many of the fixtures are original - 125 years old.

A while ago, an original door lock went hawire.
I figured it was busted, so taking it apart couldn't hurt...what the hell, I might even be able to fix it.
Also, I'm rather fond of old things & like to keep them functioning.

A flat spring in the mechanism had broken.
I figured going to a hardware store asking for a spring for an antique lock would result in...
So I laid it aside for the time being.



A few days ago, I figured I might be able to cobble in a spring from a ballpoint pen.
Rummaging through an odds 'n ends bin, I found (are y'all ready for this?)
a...HAIRPIN!
Yes. Really!!

I figured it was just springy enough, and exactly the right size to snip & bend into a suitable flat spring.

VOILA!

Yep.
It fit just like it was custom made for the mechanism...which I guess it was, come to think 'bout it.

As long as it was disassembled, I also oiled up the whole mechanism.
It now works like everything's moving on jeweled bearings...far(!) smoother than it ever did since I've owned it...probably smoother than it has in fifty years.
Maybe a hundred years, even.

Pretty cool, huh?

Mic Guyver

Life inside the bubble of a virtual reality world

Sure, many say it's fun and costs nothing. But really? Facebook and most others ask quite a bit of us to join up. Huge personal info market for governments, businesses, scammers, etc. Why I avoid most of SM, and more and more folks are doing so. Family I know have a daughter with blood cancer. Good news--- most (85+%) of these tumors these days, with modern treatment, are fully treatable. Bad news---the treatments can make one sick as a dog. Hair loss and nausea seems worst for many kids. To learn more about their kid's treatment, family went on line, including much SM, for medical info. Began getting adverts for wigs and over the counter treatments for vomiting. Coincidence? Perhaps. Aa.

Creating a database of phone numbers, profile pictures and status information of almost all users of WhatsApp turns out to be very easy . The user doesn’t even have to be added to your contacts.  This should raise at least some privacy concerns and hopefully a lot more. Let me explain how it works.

A few years ago WhatsApp made it possible to use WhatsApp in your web browser. That is good for user experience because composing a message on your keyboard is a lot easier than using those tiny touch screen buttons. It also makes copying/pasting and adding attachments easier. So much for the good news. The bad news is that it’s technically possible to use the WhatsApp Web interface to create a huge database of all possible WhatsApp users. There’s only a small group of users not affected: the users who have changed their privacy settings. Unfortunately, most users don’t change those privacy settings and WhatsApp doesn’t encourage it very much. These facts open up the possibility of collecting huge amounts of interesting data which i’m going to show you nowExplanation for normal users
Web WhatsApp connects to the WhatsApp servers by using your phone. In a nutshell the browser instructs the server to send back all the information for a certain phone number. Some of the information that’s being sent back include the following:
The profile picture
The status text or about text, the default texts is the famous ‘Hey there! I am using WhatsApp’
The online/offline status of the user
It turns out that the above information can be requested for every phone number. As said, it’s not necessary that the phone number has been added to your contact list. And because there is no such restriction, it’s possible to create a complete database of phone numbers, profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. The database may be setup in such a way that complete timelines of phone numbers can be reconstructed. That answers questions like: when was the user with phone number xxx-xxxxxx online and offline?Almost all web sites that are being send to your browser, contain specific software that determines how the web site will function in your browser. Such software is written in Javascript. The software determines what happens when you click a button or move the mouse. But the software may also connect to a server to request certain kinds of information. The software in Web WhatsApp does that too. It sends a phone number to the WhatsApp server and in a few milliseconds it receives the information about that phone number. One of the nice things of that software is that everybody can take a look at the source code. That’s not all, you can also use the software by yourself by using certain parts of it stand alone. I’ve used that possibility to develop a script to request information from a huge range of phone numbers. That information contains the profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. Everyone can create such a script.So, what can anyone do with al this information? First of all, again, imagine that anyone can create a database with the above information that contains all phone numbers for a certain country together with the profile pictures, about texts and online/offline statuses. This is in reach for a country like the Netherlands. The database kan be queried in such a way that it tells me when a phone number was online and it tells me what profile picture belongs to the phone number. After a few months it can tell me how often you have changed your profile picture and into what pictures. And how about facial recognition? Those techniques haven been improved over the last years. Imagine this, I take a walk and take a picture of some stranger. Now I feed the database that picture and in a few minutes it tells me which phone number belongs to the picture. Now that is quite scary, isn’t it?

Perfect Woman

Yesterday and today I upgraded my Windows 10 laptop to Windows 11. I started the upgrade yesterday at 11:30 AM and it was still downloading and installing when I went to bed last night at 9:30 PM. 3 more hours this morning of installing and I finally got the computer to operate about 1 hour ago. Desktop looks the same. Very few visible changes.

A lot of time for a little nothing.

As followup to my 'Watch' this blog, about the number of people wearing watches that connect to their cellphones, I decided to buy a low-end 'fitness' watch just to check it's operation. I'm highly skeptical these devices could be accurate, at least in the ones that are inexpensive, but I'm giving it a try.

First step with any of these watches is charge the device. That gives you time to read the instructions and download the app that connects it to your smartphone. Allow time to be familiar with the settings for both the phone and watch. It defaults to metric, so I changed things to Imperial, including Fahrenheit for temperature. Only my doctors record my weight in kilos.

Since I wear no jewelry and haven't for years, I found it annoying to have this fitness watch attached to my wrist. It's already hitting the countertop, edge of doorways and anything I come in close proximity to. I expect lots of scratches on the bezel within the first week. That makes me wonder about all the people wearing diamond studded watches the size of a Frisbee!
That would equate to the women wearing 'inch-long' fake eyelashes. If you do it long enough, it becomes part of you. Kinda like Paul Stanley (KISS guitarist) wearing six-inch high platform shoes on stage must have required weeks of practice elsewhere.

Okay, I've had the watch on for 12 hours and it's reporting to my phone some statistics. Blood pressure at it's highest 127/64 and 81 beats per minute, currently 53bpm. Temperature 98.0 F, blood oxygen at 98% and I burned 11 calories.


I'm most curious about the sleep status. The first night shows 3 hours and 50 minutes with 1 hour and 30 minutes being in deep sleep.

Although the device is water resistant enough for swimming, I'll remove it for my morning shower.

Later today, I'll compare the blood pressure and beats with my stand-alone blood pressure monitor.

A number of technological traits will drive smart-domestic generation well past what’s available on keep cabinets nowadays. innovations in synthetic intelligence, as an example, stand to upend almost the whole thing in our lives, inclusive of our houses. you would possibly already be the use of some sort of AI-powered voice-assistant device to get the modern news or weather forecast every morning. however inside the smart home of the future, the ones AI structures ought to function the mind for whole homes, getting to know about citizens and coordinating and automating all in their various smart gadgets. IoT employer Crestron, as an instance, is operating on software that tracks someone’s habits, like which tune they need to listen inside the morning or which lights they want to be on at a certain time of day. Then, as soon as it gets the hold of a user’s preferences, it automatically plays simply the right playlists or dims the lighting fixtures before bedtime. “That’s sincerely the following evolutionary step in proper automation,” says John Clancy, head of Crestron’s residential commercial enterprise.