Mr. Barry Clifford may have found the Santa Maria. The ship was lost off Haiti on its last voyage in December, 1492 when it ran aground on a reef. The really interesting part of the story is that Mr. Clifford found the wreck back in 2003, but didn’t realize its significance. He found some ballast stones and a ship’s cannon. That cannon was misclassified in 2003. Two years ago, while researching the cannons in use during Columbus’ time, he awoke in the middle of the night wi...
H. R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist whose work includes the art that gave us “Alien” has passed on at age 74. He studied Art and Design in Zurich and his work basically explored the relationship between the human body and machines. He termed his style “biomechanical”, and it was eroto-macabre, as well. The cover art for “Brain Salad Surgery” illustrates that well. He shall be missed. Rest In Peace, sir.
OK…it’s the RC. Almost ready for release (will supercede 2.6.33). What’s new? 1. The selective sync option is now displayed during setup if files stored on Dropbox exceed 10 Gigabytes. “The main idea behind the new feature is to provide users with options to select only necessary files for synchronization if they want to, either to speed up the synchronization process, save bandwidth, or avoid that one of the partitions on their computer system runs out of free d...
Want permanent data deletion? There’s a free version of Hardwipe that will do that. “Hardwipe can not only wipe drives and USB media, but can also sanitize the Windows Recycle Bin , overwrite selected files and folders , and clean unused drive space of unwanted remnant data. Furthermore, you can run Hardwipe as a standard-alone application, or use its convenient " right-click " context menus from within the Windows File Explorer.” – Hardwipe Fea...
So, I have some pics (family stuff) which I decided to turn into gifts. You can do this for Mother’s Day…it’s quick, easy and fun! All you need is a color printer, a photo (or more than one), the paper labels come on, tape, and some wood. The cool part is that “white” doesn’t print and the underlying wood will show through in those areas (this allows for some cool compositing)…like a clipping mask…only using a second glossy/no...
It’s been a busy month for MS. Just last week MS released an unscheduled security patch for the zero-day RCE patch. So, May 13th will be ‘Patch Tuesday’ and as usual MS has delineated what will be in the update. You can read about it here: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms14-may in far more detail as to what each patch is, and the software affected broken down in the Executive Summary and the “Software Affected” tables as well as the breakdown b...
For all you DuckDuckGo enthusiasts, there are new developments! I only learned of the redesign through gHacks.net , since it hasn’t been officially announced and it’s still in beta, but it’s really customizable now. The first image is from gHacks. The new beta is on the left. Note, the bottom of the original has been replaced by 3 buttons below the search window. If you use Chrome, there is a button to make it your default search engine in that browser. What’s cool is that if y...
Just off the presses. Finally, “Do your job or else!” makes it to the executive suite. “Target announced Monday that Chairman, President and CEO Gregg Steinhafel is out nearly five months after the retailer disclosed the breach, which has hurt its reputation among customers and has derailed its business. The nation's third-largest retailer said Steinhafel, a 35-year veteran of the company and CEO since 2008, has agreed to step down, effective immediately. He also resi...
This is a little hand held (between 2 fingers!) molecular scanner that can identify the chemicals in the substance you’re testing…from a pill found next to a child’s crib to an apple (is it ripe or rotten?) to how many calories are in that meal or, does your plant need water? This really will change the world, folks. It’ll turn out to be one of Kickstarter’s super successes…in less than 2 hours it raised $218,000. Watch the video here: http:...
We were all pretty frightened by the ‘Heartbleed’ exploit. This may be worse, because there’s no ‘easy fix’ to the “Covert Redirect” vulnerability in both the open source login systems to steal your data and redirect you to unsafe sites. Read about this one on Neowin, then went to the original source at c|net. Beware of links that ask you to login through Facebook. The OAuth 2.0 and OpenID modules ate vulnerable. These modules are us...
Browsers are pretty important. You run your on line life through them, finances, etc. So, using a very secure browser is a pretty important thing, as you can imagine. “Jeremiah Grossman and I have been publicly discussing browser security and privacy, or the lack thereof, for many years. We’ve shared the issues hundreds of times at conferences, in blog posts, on Twitter, in white papers, and in the press. As the adage goes, “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the...
Mozilla will be rolling out the stable version of the Firefox Australis (Ff 29) next Tuesday. If you don’t like it, there’s an extension called Classic Theme Restorer (imaginative name, eh?), which can be found here . If you want a good explanation of differences and some features of Australis, you can find them here . There’s another add on: The Fox, Only Better which changes some interface elements but is a lot truer to Australis in appearance. Anyway,...
A weekend blog post from MS about this. Not common at all. This exploit would allow remote code execution if one visits an affected website, after browser compromise through email or even IM. IE 10 and 11 are protected from this if they have “Enhanced Protection Mode” turned on. You are also protected if you have EMET 4.1 or 5.0 Tech Preview installed. “Microsoft says that PC owners should always enable their personal firewall, make sure to have all of the l...
Many will greet this with fear, and its misuse should be feared. However, if you can, suspend the fear for a moment, and revel in the wonder of what has been achieved. For the first time, molecular geneticists have achieved a truly wonderful thing. They have performed the precise repair of a damaged gene, and that gene only. This was what I considered would be the ultimate triumph of Medicine. The scientists at MIT have used two enzymes (from a bacterium) to locate and correct a ...
“When your PC won’t boot from its hard drive, you might be dead in the water — unless you’ve created a bootable emergency repair disk or drive…even if you’ve diligently made system-image backups, you might still need an emergency disk at hand to restore the most recent image.” – Fred Langa The links below present a really good two part series by Fred Langa in Windows Secrets. It would be well worth your time to read them, and to prepare Rescue/Emergency Boot Disks f...