Dwang

As one of the recently bespectacled, I quickly discovered there is a lot more to wearing glasses than just putting them on in the morning and taking them off at bedtime.  I am plagued by shower fog, sweaty nose bridge, and the impossibility of reading in bed while laying on my side.  Worst of all, however, is that the glasses just don’t feel right.  They don’t sit comfortably on my nose.  Compounding that discomfort- or maybe causing it- my ears are not even on either side of my head: the right ear is a wee bit higher than the left, so my glasses are always a little bit crooked.

Fortunately, optician Troy Kish has provided a few simple methods for adjusting your glasses’ frames for a more comfortable, more secure fit.  Unfortunately, there is nothing short of surgery to fix my uneven ears.

I love kitchen hacks.  They’re handy, applicable in daily life, and a lot of times they’re just fun.  Whereas, I don’t consider myself a kitchen wizard, I’m proud of the skills I’ve picked up working in various restaurants over the years.  With the advent of the Internet and hacking culture, however, I’ve learned far more in the past few years online, than I ever did actually working in kitchens.  Here are three hacks that I use now, but wish I knew then.

My all-time favorite kitchen trick is the simplest: pound a head of iceberg lettuce sharply on the counter to remove the core.  Don’t hit it so hard that the head explodes all over your kitchen.  Just give it a quick, sharp rap while holding the lettuce core side down, turn it over, twist and pull the core right out, and your lettuce is ready for shredding into a delicious salad or burger topping.  You can find a great illustration for this and other cooking hacks at Wonder How To.

Another handy hack from that picture is the trick of softening butter faster by shredding it first.  My wife’s one kitchen skill is making cookies, but she lacks the patience to wait for the butter to soften and usually ends up popping it into the microwave to speed up the process- which seems to make cookies that are dry and crumbly.   Shred it first and get moister, delicious cookies sooner.

The last hack of the trio is the latest in my kitchen repertoire: freezing vegetable stock in ice cube trays.  Fresh vegetable stock tastes better than stock from a can or bullion cubes and isn’t loaded with salt and preservatives.  My problem is that I always end up making more stock than I could possibly use in a month.  So, to make it last, I pour the cooled stock into a dedicated ice cube tray, freeze it, and then parcel the stock-cubes into separate ziplock bags for longer term storage.  When I’m ready to cook with it (I make a wicked good fresh tomato & bell pepper soup!) I have perfect control over how much goes into the recipe.

Please note: make sure the stock is cool before putting it into the freezer to avoid dropping the temperature below safe levels.  Also, as I mention above, use an ice cube tray that is dedicated to this one purpose.  Otherwise, your regular old ice may take on a funky vegetable flavor and spoil your next Tom Collins.

Dogs are great walking companions.  They keep you company on your daily constitutional and often keep your heart rate up as you strive to match their pace.  What’s more, according to a 2009 New York Times article, “…research from the University of Missouri has found that people who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and show more improvement in fitness than people who walk with a human companion.”  So, they’re great motivators, too.

Among this thorough list of 38 Brilliant Hacks For Dog Owners are some great suggestions to simplify your walks with Fido.

The first is a no-brainer: attach a carabiner to the end of your dog’s leash for an easy way to tie him off while you run into the store.  I say no-brainer, but, until I saw this easy solution, I would detach the leash and run the loose end around a pole or tree, then thread it through the loop handle before reattaching it to the dog.

Another useful tip- especially during the Summer- is to use an old maple syrup bottle (or any squeezable bottle) as a targeted water dispenser:

Fill it up before the walk and use it to squirt a refreshing drink straight into Rex’s mouth.  If you use the carabiner tip mentioned above, you can just clip it onto the bottle and hang it from your belt or the leash.

The Sun comprises 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System and produces a surface temperature of 5505° C.  The Earth orbits our star at an average of 92.9 millions miles.  During the Summer, however, it sometimes feels like all that roiling mass and heat is sitting just outside your car window, baking the interior and dazzling your eyes.

There’s a simple solution (my favorite kind!), however, from Popular Mechanics, who point out, “No matter how large and flexible the visors in your car or truck may be, there always seems to be that gap somewhere, during sunset or sunrise, where light can temporarily blind you and you just can’t block it.”  So, follow their advice and grab some tinted plastic sheets.  “You can place these small, moveable sheets on the windshield or side windows to knock down the intensity of sunlight and save your eyes some strain.”

What’s more, if you work in an office with lots of windows, the sheets can be applied and reapplied as necessary to block the incoming sun and cut the glare on your monitor or keep it out of your eyes.

If you’re trying your luck at growing fresh veggies on your balcony, you might want to try this creative repurposing of velcro cable straps.  The straps, normally used to keep wires and cables organized, have an advantage over zip strips and other similar ties in that they are easily removable and adjustable.  They’re pretty cheap, too: you can get a pack of 100 for under $10 USD.  (Credit to Reddit user wolfamiandshadow for this tip.)

Next we have the vertical garden: an ingenious solution for urban gardeners who are short on horizontal space.  It’s relatively simply to use, once you put it all together, and it looks cool.  All you need need are a shoe organizer and some simple hardware, plus the gardening materials, of course.  You can adapt it to indoor use, as well, and grow fresh herbs year round.  Just hang it in a sunny place in your home and place a trough or bucket under it to catch excess moisture.

Here’s the Instructable.  Good luck and happy gardening!

Here’s a hack that, had I found it 20 years ago, would have made my construction worker father a happy man.  As a teenager, I went through a two year period when I was fascinated by his innumerable saws, drills, sanders, and other power tools.  Dad was pretty great about letting me experiment with the tools and would even bring home scrap lumber, for me, from whatever job site he was working on.  What ticked him off, however, was the tangled pile of extension cords I would leave behind when I finished creating beautiful and moving wooden sculptures sawdust.

Sadly, my dad died back in 2005, but I can still hear him yelling, “DAVID!  Put down that damned’intendo and clean up this mess!,” followed by some choice profanity that I won’t repeat here.  And, no, it was never Nintendo, but always the one word Damned’intendo.  (Now that I’m writing it down, after all this time, I realize it could be another plane of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, and Damned’intendo.)

So, the CyanogenMod team is teasing something new. My guess is that we're either looking at the CM team getting early access to new Android versions, or - and this is something I really hope - an OEM, preferably a large one, has decided to ship a device with CyanogenMod preinstalled. A boy or girl can dream.

If your Raspberry Pi is running a bit hot you can add a few hunks of salvaged heat sink, or you can go all out and machine your own water cooling system.

Remember when everyone had a giant desktop computer which was a perfect receptacle for cool lighting effects and somewhat ridiculous cooling systems? Relive that experience with [Phame's] multi-page forum post that serves as the build log. With the exception of the tiny pump itself, this one’s a fully custom job.

The image on the left shows the machined parts being tried on for side. There is a slug which contacts the ICs on the RPi board, conducting the heat to the chambers inside through which the liquid will flow. The upright rectangular enclosure serves as the reservoir which dissipates the collected heat as the water flows through it. The image on the right shows the finished project. It uses the power pins on the GPIO header to drive the pump.

[Thanks PL via Bit-Tech]

Filed under: cnc hacks, Raspberry Pi

If you have the space, and can build a tracking rig cheaply you’ll be able to get a lot more out of your solar panels. That’s because they work best when the sun’s rays are hitting them perpendicular to the surface and not at an angle. [Michael Davis] hit both of those stipulations with this mbed powered solar tracker.

At a garage sale he picked up an antenna motor for just $15. The thing was very old, but still wrapped in the original plastic. It’s beefy enough to move his panels, but he first needed a way to mount everything. After checking his angles he built a base out of wood and used galvanized water pipe as an axle. Cable clamps mate his aluminum angle bracket frame to the pipe. This frame holds the panels securely.

To track the sun he used two smaller cells which aren’t easy to pick out in this image. They are monitored by the mbed microcontroller which measures their output in order to point the assembly in the direction which has the most intense light. A couple of limit switches are included to stop the assembly when it reaches either side.

This technique of using small solar cells as the tracking sensors seems to work well. Here’s another project that took that approach.

Filed under: green hacks

Five Rasberry Pi’s are used to drive this four-display video wall. This screenshot shows the system playing back some BBC documentaries. The sync, alignment, and video quality all seem to be spot on which makes it quite easy for your eye to assemble the images into one picture.

Each screen has its own Raspberry Pi which generates the HDMI video shown on the screen. These are fed from one central RPi board which acts as the controller. Video is pushed between the boards using the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) available through the Linux GStreamer package. Synchronization between the different video boards is taken care of using network time. [Samer] mentions that this system is scalable — each additional screen simply requires one more RPi to drive it.

The team also did some experiments with live video. They added a sixth RPi board with the camera module in order to display a live feed.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi, video hacks

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Note 2 could go from 4.1 to 4.3, Telstra document suggests

The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 might never see Android 4.2, but instead jump straight to the next version of the OS — presumably Android 4.3. In its latest update advisory, Australian carrier Telstra said of the Galaxy Note 2 4.2 update —

"Samsung have elected globally to skip the 4.2.2 update for this device and will instead go to a newer version of Android. No schedule has been provided for this update."

There's been no official confirmation of this from Samsung, nor do we know whether this situation might affect Note 2 devices outside of Australia. But with the Android 4.3 launch seemingly close at hand, it wouldn't surprise us to see certain Android 4.1 phones skip directly to this next version of Jelly Bean.

While Android 4.2 is a relatively minor update for skinned devices, the extra time needed to roll out 4.3 could result Note 2 waiting a little longer for new TouchWiz features. In any case, hopefully the update situation will become clearer once Google officially unveils Android 4.3, something which is expected to occur at next Wednesday's San Francisco press event.

Source: Telstra

Third-party messaging apps now have access to Google Voice; CyanogenMod to include 'Babel' soon

Likely best known for his work on all things ClockworkMod, Android developer Koush has been working for the past few weeks on a tool he currently calls "Babel" to integrate Google Voice into third-party messaging apps. Following a development cycle with some ups and downs, he has decided to completely open-source the project for anyone to use and implement. Babel (although this is only a temporary name) works alongside code in the latest nightly builds of CyanogenMod to seamlessly integrate your Google Voice messages into the stock Messaging app.

Nothing is perfect just yet, but the latest versions of the Babel apk along with the latest nightly builds of CM give users a relatively seamless integration option for the stock messaging app after a little bit of hackery to get things set up just right. In his latest post on Google+, he notes that it is going through review to be included in CM completely as well, which should cut down on the hassle for users to get things working.

The hope is that going forward more messaging apps will take advantage of this code to integrate Google Voice using Babel (or whatever it is called going forward) as the back-end. Enterprising developers among us can take a look at everything available on GitHub at the source link below.

Source: +Koushik Dutta (Google+); GitHub

Larry Page is pretty excited about the Moto X today, but you and I, peasants that we are, will have to wait a wee bit longer for one on US Cellular, according to this internal memo we've received. 

Looks like marketing materials currently are slated to arrive the last week of August, with a device launch on Aug. 26. We're told that the "Wave 1, 2, & 3" part could refer to stores in USCC's LTE markets getting first dibs on the devices, with non-LTE markets to follow.

Still nothing official from Motorola or any of the carriers, but given that Motorola's hyping the hell out of this thing and we've seen the likes of Eric Schmidt walking around with it in broad daylight (to say nothing of about 3,000 other sightings), it can't be too long now.

More: Moto X forums; Thanks, anon!

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Speculation runs from a new set of customizations for the CM everyone knows and loves (possible), to AOSP for the iPhone (unlikely),  to a new custom ROM based on TouchWiz (wut?). The few people that know aren't saying.

We know it's something new, and it's coming. Good things often come to those who wait. 

Fill the comments with your guesses. 

Via: +CyanogenMod

The ink has barely dried on Samsung's last SSD announcement and the South Korean manufacturer has already made it obsolete by orders of magnitude. This 2.5-inch enterprise-class SSD isn't for us regular Joes, but if you thought the company's EVO 840's 540MB/s was zippy, hold on to your desk chair. The newly announced NVMe SSD XS1715 reads data at a mind-numbing 3,000MB/s. Hitting these absurd numbers isn't without a caveat, though, as this SSD won't run on a SATA-6 port -- it requires a PCIe hook-up. When these speed demons do arrive, they'll be available in 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB sizes. Oh, and we want one. For business.

Filed under: Desktops, Samsung

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Feeling productive? So are the folks at 6Wunderkinder, who've been busy little bees translating the popular desktop and mobile productivity tool, Wunderlist, into a packaged application for Chrome. The Wunderlist for Chrome experience is about as close to native as it can get -- because it's a packaged app, it works outside your Chrome browser, just like the desktop version. Included with the app are nifty features like voice dictation for your to-do list, desktop notifications, offline availability and a tagging system. Linux users will be especially happy to know that the Chrome version brings Wunderlist back to their OS, after having lost it when the company abandoned HTML5. To get your productivity on, head on over to the source link below to download the free app. And for a quick preview, check out the video after the break.

Filed under: Software

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Source: 6Wunderkinder, Chrome Web Store

Take a look at your Android phone. See that background shot? It's probably kind of cute, but hardly inspiring. In fact, is is bringing you any joy whatsoever? Is it helping you to make rent? Believe it or not, there's now an app for that. Locket has just launched into the Google Play Store, enabling a limited (for now) selection of advertisers to place ads on your lock screen and then paying you one cent for each time you unlock. Of course, it's capped at $0.03 per hour (so every other unlock is just making the company money), and you'll be allowed to cash out, toss the funds on a gift card or donate your earnings to a charity. Don't worry, we already did the math -- you can earn $262.80 by unlocking your phone's screen three times each hour, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Or you can just mow some grass.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

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Source: Locket, Google Play Store

Though there's no official word from Google yet, it looks like the Chrome launcher has come out of developer preview mode and into full release, at least for Windows. On our own PCs, the installation placed the launcher app on the start page, taskbar and desktop for Windows 8 and in Windows 7's menu bar. From there, you can quickly access Chrome, the Chrome store, Gmail and any other apps that work with Google's ubiquitous browser / OS. We're not sure when it'll hit OS X or Linux (Chrome OS users have had it for awhile), but if your Windows workflow revolves around Mountain View's myriad products, you can enable it at the source.

[Thanks, Adam]

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: Chrome Webstore

It looks like those not satisfied with the recent Gmail redesign will soon have a new option to make things operate in a slightly more familiar manner. Google announced today that it's begun rolling out a new full-screen compose window that gives you more room to work with than the current option that's pinned to the lower right corner. What's more, you'll also find that the formatting toolbar is now on by default instead of requiring an extra click as it does now, and you can choose to make the full-screen view the default if you prefer it. If you don't have the new option already, Google says you should within the next couple of days.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Gmail (Google+)

Disney Research is at it again. The arm of Walt's empire responsible for interactive house plants wants to add haptic feedback not to a seat cushion, but to thin air. Using a combination of 3D-printed components -- thank the MakerBots for those -- with five actuators and a gaggle of sensors, AIREAL pumps out tight vortices of air to simulate tactility in three dimensional space. The idea is to give touchless experiences like motion control a form of physical interaction, offering the end user a more natural response through, well, touch.

Like most of the lab's experiments this has been in the works for awhile, and the chances of it being used outside of Disneyworld anytime soon are probably slim. AIREAL will be on display at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim from Sunday to Wednesday this week. Didn't register? Check out the video after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Science

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Via: Gizmodo (Australia)

Source: Disney Research

Flexible circuitry is frequently a one-way affair -- we've seen bendy displays and touch layers, but rarely both in one surface. UC Berkeley is at last merging those two technologies through a plastic skin whose display reacts to touch. By curing a polymer on top of a silicon wafer, the school's researchers found that they could unite a grid of pressure sensors with an OLED screen; they just had to remove the polymer to create a flexible skin. As the film-like material can be laminated on just about anything, it maylead to touch displays in places where they were previously impractical, or even very thin blood pressure sensors. It could also be easy to produce -- since the skins use off-the-shelf chip manufacturing techniques, commercial products are well within reach.

Filed under: Science

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Via: Phys.org

Source: UC Berkeley

Every phone needs a SIM card, and you'd think such a ubiquitous standard would be immune to any hijack attempts. Evidently not, as Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs -- who found a hole in GSM call encryption several years ago -- has uncovered a flaw that allows some SIM cards to be hacked with only a couple of text messages. By cloaking an SMS so it appears to have come from a carrier, Nohl said that in around a quarter of cases, he receives an error message back containing the necessary info to work out the SIM's digital key. With that knowledge, another text can be sent that opens it up so one can listen in on calls, send messages, make mobile purchases and steal all manner of data.

Apparently, this can all be done "in about two minutes, using a simple personal computer," but only affects SIMs running the older data encryption standard (DES). Cards with the newer Triple DES aren't affected; also, the other three quarters of SIMs with DES Nohl probed recognized his initial message as a fraud. There's no firm figure on how many SIMs are at risk, but Nohl estimates the number at up to 750 million. The GSM Association has been given some details of the exploit, which have been forwarded to carriers and SIM manufacturers that use DES. Nohl plans to spill the beans at the upcoming Black Hat meeting. If you're listening, fine folks at the NSA, tickets are still available.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: New York Times

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When the Leap Motion controller was revealed to the world, it brought with it the promise of a new and unique computer user experience. And, ever since we first got to see what the Leap Motion controller could do -- grant folks the ability to interact with a computer by waving their fingers and fists -- we've wanted one of our own to test out. Well, our wish was granted: we've gotten to spend several days with the controller and a suite of apps built to work with it. Does the device really usher in a new age of computing? Is it worth $80 of your hard-earned cash? Patience, dear reader, all will be revealed in our review.

Filed under: Peripherals

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It should come as no surprise that Google brought Cloud Print to its own offerings first, but now the service is ready to spread its wings a bit. The company announced today that Cloud Printer is coming to Windows apps like Adobe reader, letting you bypass the necessity for Chrome. Using the driver, you'll be able to see an entry for the service in your usual drop down of networked printers and, if all goes according to plan, print to your heart's content. More info on the offering can be found in the source link below.

Filed under: Microsoft, Google

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Source: Google Chrome Blog

When Apple's developer portal went down Thursday, there were a lot of questions left unanswered. One of the more notable was, just who was responsible for this attack on the premiere destinations for iOS and OS X developers? Turkish security researcher Ibrahim Balic is claiming he was behind the hack, but it wasn't his intention to cause any harm. Balic says that he reported the vulnerability to the proper Cupertino authorities but, for whatever reason, his efforts didn't end there. He actually exploited the security flaw he had discovered, which gave him access to the names, email and mailing addresses associated with developer accounts. In total he discovered 13 bugs, at least one of which he demonstrated in a YouTube video, that appeared to show him accessing a list of developer names and user IDs. That clip has since been pulled, as Balic was concerned about some of the information displayed on the screen. However, in a tweet he asserted that sharing the confidential data was essential to prove his point about the severity of the vulnerability.

The researcher does insist that his actions were legal and ethical. He told the Guardian that he only accessed developer account data in an effort to discover just how deep the rabbit hole went as part of a penetration test and will delete all of the data he collected. He claims that immediately after reporting his findings to Cupertino the dev center was shutdown, but that he never received a follow up from someone at the company. Instead there was simply an announcement of an attack, without any correspondance between Balic and Apple. So far Apple has not responded to our request for comment, and has neither confirmed nor denied Balic's account of events.

Filed under: Internet, Apple

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Source: The Guardian, NTV/MSNBC, Ibrahim Balic (Twitter), Firstpost

Fresh Paint, the digital art app born on Windows 8, has finally migrated to mobile devices, and starting today, aspiring artists running Windows Phone 8 can fiddle with its brushes to their hearts' content. This new, simplified version doesn't make any major departures from the Windows 8 application; you can still mix pigments to create custom hues, share your creations via text, e-mail and SkyDrive and add filters to your photos to make them look like paintings or sketches. It's worth noting that WP8 doesn't support styluses, so you'll have to make do with finger painting or a capacitive stylus without pressure sensitivity. To download the free app, head over to Windows Phone store, linked below.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Microsoft

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Source: Windows Phone Store, Windows Phone Blog

The new Nexus 7 sports an updated look, adds a rear camera

Here we go, folks. The first probable  pictures of what we believe is the long-awaited successor to the Nexus 7. We've had to do a little Photoshop surgery to protect the source (we'll just call the source, oh, how about "Brett"), but what we're seeing lines up with rumored specs, and what we'd expect to see in the follow-up.

Separately, we've gotten a look at some possible pricing, giving some hope that we might finally soon see the retail release of Google's affordable tablet. And then there's the Google event set for July 24 in San Francisco.

Ready for more? Read on.

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