A Moment of Wisdom

I came across this FireFox extension while reading a post on Slashdot about losing our privacy. It looks like a different spin on how to fight back against those that data mine such as search engines and other entities out on the web. The approach that Track Me Not takes is to add noise and obfuscate instead of hide  and encrypt your information. I haven’t tried it out yet but probably will give it go in the coming days.

If you have any thoughts on your privacy in general or this FireFox add-on let me know!

One thing that I love to see in web development is the advancement of the open standards that drives the web forward and their adoption by the browser community (excluding MS IE of course). This demo is a great example of a CSS3 capability being applied to Google Maps using jQuery which will allow you to simply rotate the map.

At first glance it may appear to be rather boring and pointless demonstration but if you think about it this is absolutely fantastic! In order to pull this off back in “the old days” you would resort to Flash or some other browser plug-in to display such wizardry on a web page … but now it is possible with only the web browser!

To me the future of web development looks very bright as coders create little gems like this and keep sharing their talents with the world. Very bright indeed.

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First off, the title of this software totally reminds me of the show Pimp My Ride.  With a cool name like “Tweet My Mac” this little gem of technology has got to be cool … right? Well, let’s take it for a spin and see what it can do.

I found this tricked out article on LifeHacker and figured that I would give it try on my home iMac. The fun part of this application is that it can take pictures via the iSight or grab a screen capture and post the result over to TwitPic so you can see who is in front of the computer and what they are doing … sneaky huh? Then, my favorite, is the ability to make the computer say any phrase at your bidding. I actually got lucky and caught the wife and kids at home during breakfast and had the computer say, “Logan, get your finger out of your nose!” Within a minute I had a phone call asking why the computer was nagging our son!

If you currently use Twitter and have a Mac (or PC) then I recommend downloading and testing this software which is really simple to use. That is as long as you follow Google’s motto!

From Slashdot:

A company called Lok8u (“Locate You”) has come up with a clever watch that serves as a GPS tracking device for your kids. Now, we can quickly ask the question of “how paranoid are we as a society?” but at the same time we can say, “Man, I wish I had something like this in my watch whenever I misplace the darn thing!” I have little ones and ponder over whether investing in something like this makes sense or not. I probably won’t wind up getting any of these but it’s neat to see ideas like these come along … I’m sure they will do well in the market.

Funny excerpt from the Slashdot forum on this topic:

Personally I wouldn’t use this for teenagers because at that age, they have matured enough that they deserve a little privacy

Exactly – if you put the wristwatch on a teenage boy, all they’ll find is that he’s spending most of his time in the bathroom rapidly jumping back and forth about 4″ at a time.

Ahh, nothing like a little potty humor on a Monday morning.

Google does … just search for time. Personally, I trust Google’s answer on the simple question of “What Time Is It?” But then they start weirding me out a little when they tell me where I am. They list the city and state right by the time display which is cool but how accurate are they in locating my actual position? My guess is that they use the IP lookup and resolve that back down to the ISP. Does anybody out there know the inside scoop on this technology?

I saw this over at SlashGeo:

Basically, a guy walks into a green screen room and is rendered on the fly as polygons with textures and then placed into whatever 3-dimensional environment desired.  Ok, that’s cool.  Then they go on to show that this not-too-shabby rendering of a person can interact with with this virtual environment by kicking over some vases and beating up a clone of himself.  Now that’s pretty darn cool.  I wouldn’t say amazing yet but still a rather neat accomplishment.

I would say that amazing would be when the virtual world can start to interact back with the real world.  For instance, if I could enter the virtual world with that other guy and pick up one of those vases and throw it at him … and he would feel it hit him.  Now that would be awesome!

If you like Piña COLLADA,

Then you should be rather happy because the next release of SketchUp will provide much better support for the COLLADA format. According to the SketchUp blog:

In our next release, we’re going to make COLLADA an official first-class format for all modelers. You’ll be able to import and export COLLADA models, as well as COLLADA models wrapped up in the KMZ format for Google Earth, with any version of SketchUp.

Sounds like good news to me as an open standard is being support more fully by a great free tool like SketchUp.

via Coming Soon in Google SketchUp….

From the nice folks at Lifehacker,

If you ever needed to rebuild a machine or for whatever reason needed to remember the license keys to your software … well, most likely you forgot to save this valuable tidbit of information and don’t know how to easily get it back.  Wouldn’t you know that some friendly computer geek out there has already solved this problem and made it freely available!  Have you hugged your geek today?

LicenseCrawler Retrieves License Keys for Backup