Here’s why it’s important to have smart humans at some point in the chain. I just received this email from FlowersDirect, a UK online flower delivery service, which I use quite a bit. Too much, as it turns out: Many thanks for your recent order. However, there appears to be two very similar orders on… Read More »
It’s finally arrived: the USB flash drive that thinks it’s a floppy disk. It was like this: For years stuff — data, programs — was moved around via a floppy disk. First they were big 5” things, then they shrank to 3”. Iomega tried to win people over with ZIP drives but they never really penetrated… Read More »
One of my favorite and most used programs, the MyInfo outliner, is now out in a new version that wraps in tagging, fast searching and other tweaks that put it ahead of the opposition. If you use outliners, check it out, and if you don’t, you might want to consider it. (Outliners are simple free-text databases,… Read More »
My favorite new gadget: the HeadLamp 6, known as the Pilot. It looks like a Bluetooth earpiece, the type you fit over an ear and appear to others as if you’re being attacked by a plastic mollusc. But it ain’t. It’s an LED light: It delivers a relatively powerful, focused beam onto whatever you’re looking… Read More »
Could it be possible to use Radio Frequency ID tags, or RFID, to transmit viruses? Some researchers reckon so. Unstrung reports that a paper presented at the Pervasive Computing and Communications Conference in Pisa, Italy, the researchers from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, led by Andrew Tanenbaum, show just how susceptible radio-frequency tags may be to malware.… Read More »