News: Phone Camera Jamming. It Sounds Like A Reggae Outfit

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment
 From the It’s Going To Have To Happen Dept comes news of a product that could “automatically switch off camera phones to protect industrial secrets and private areas.” CNET reports that Safe Haven combines hardware transmitters with a small piece of control software loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated when the handset is out of range.
 
 
The good news is that although the technology is designed only for disabling the imaging system, it could be adapted for a wide number of uses, such as blocking loud or annoying ring tones in a theater or even disabling text messaging in a school. Is there any way of administering electric shocks to folks who yap away too loudly in public on their phone. One guy totally ruined my reflexology experience the other day. Totally.

News: Is That A USB Drive In Your Pocket Or…?

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment
 I don’t have a link for this, but I’m amazed at how the price of USB thumb drives — those little sticks on a key ring — have fallen in price. Now in my local mall you can pick up one holding 256 megabytes for less than $60.
 
 
Given prices a year ago were not far off $1 per megabyte, and less than six months ago I paid that for a drive with half the capacity, that’s quite a drop. There are hundreds of manufacturers out there making them now, so I wouldn’t recommend any particular one. Don’t entrust the only copy of your data to one, but it’s great as a secondary backup you can carry around with you. They also make great gifts, and one or two people might still be impressed by them during lulls at parties.

Update: More Evidence That SoBig Was, Er, So Big

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment
 Just in case you thought we were making all this virus stuff up, here are some interesting new statistics from MailWatch, “a leading Spam-blocking, virus-scanning and content-filtering service protecting corporate networks worldwide”, which said they intercepted 24 times as many viruses in August than they did in July. This, needless to say, is something of a record for them. Needless to say, too, of those 7,132,102 viruses, 95% were the SoBig.F variant, the one that has been doing all the damage. Given that it was only discovered on August 18, that’s some damage in less than two weeks.
 
Of course, all these press releases I received about all these viruses contain a fair amount of companies touting their wares. It doesn’t mean the information is inaccurate, just that one shouldn’t always take their prescriptions for the pain too literally. This one from MailWatch, for example, quotes Bill Fallon, Vice President of Product Marketing at EasyLink Services Corporation, the company that offers and operates MailWatch, as saying, “It’s clear that dealing with attacks of this sort as well as the daily onslaught of Spam are now a part of the cost of being an Internet-connected business today. MailWatch helps businesses of all sizes dramatically reduce this cost.” Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t try so hard with their pitches. Not least because it’s MailWatch that has the annoying habit of sending people emails informing them (usually incorrectly) that they’re infected.

Software: More Search Options

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment
 Talking of Outlook functionality, 80-20 have just come out with a new version of Retriever, a great search engine that integrates with Outlook (but also works from Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, System Tray and Task Bar.)
 
 
Definitely worth a look. Also, the folks at IdeaLab have come up with a new beta version of their search product X1, which they seem pretty excited about. If you’re still looking for the perfect way to find stuff on your hard drive, give it a shot. There’s a free version which may or may not come with Adware; I haven’t checked what their policy is on this recently.
 
 

Update: Outlook Email Organiser

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment
 A program I’ve raved about in the past, Nelson Email Organizer, or NEO, is planning a new version. NEO works atop Outlook to help you better organise and find emails, attachments and whatever. If you use Outlook, it’s a definite boon.
 
 
Caelo say they’re close to releasing Beta versions of NEO 3.0 and NEO Pro, which will deliver “a redesigned user interface, new global filtering capabilities, improved views with more flexibility for organizing and faster, more scalable searching with additional search parameters.”
 
I have to be honest: While I loved the program I found in the end that Outlook just was not the email client for me. I use Courier, although The Bat is just into version 2.0 so I’ll give that a try. Experiment. Email should be what you want it to be.