Surface computing brings multi touch sensors to your home

I have been following this multi-touch sensor based computer technology pretty closely. I am fascinated by the thought of these types of devices to replace our current constraint prone desktop and laptop computers. The file transfer feature has got to be one of the coolest features of the coffee table computer shown in the video. I dream of a day when wads of cables become non-existent.

Browse photos in a whole new way with Photosynth from Microsoft!

Photosynth is an online pilot application for some new photo viewing technology from Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth takes a collection of photos of a place or object and uses a computer algorithm to arrange the photos in the order they would appear in the real world. This creates a virtual 3d representation of the object or place in the photos. Currently Photosynth appears to be a test application providing several test collection of places. The project does not currently allow you to use your own photos. However it is a very nice little piece of software and I would encourage you to check it out.

Link to: Photosynth website

Preventing Bad Grease Monkeys from changing your prices in eCommerce sites

I spoke with Gina Trapani on Wednesday about my concerns on this issue. The problem is that many online shops are using hidden fields in forms to pass information such as pricing, shipping, and quantity to their online checkout systems. Now I love Google Checkout for its sheer simple integration methods, but there is also an option to auto approve the payment and this concerns me. So I am writing to you today to illustrate some of the methods I have came up with which will hopefully prevent this sort of attack. Here are three ways you can circumvent this little flaw in many online stores.
(more…)

Space Saver Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard

The new Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard should be on your top to get list this Christmass and I’ll tell you why. This handy little gadget projects an infrared overlay of a standard qwerty keyboard onto any flat surface and monitors your fingers to calculate keystrokes. Featuring bluetooth connectivity you could set this away from your PC and still use it. If thats not enough to sell you on this item it also has added simulated keystroke sounds to provide a realistic keyboarding experience.
ThinkGeek Buy Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard

New “Corner Shot” Firearm Shoot’s around corners

This is an interesting invention. It is a firearm attachment allowing the gunman to see and shoot around corners. Cleverly named “Corner Shot”, this piece of equipment can adapt to virtually any firearm. With features including a 40mm grenade launcher this is by far the coolest thing since the tank.

[TAGS]Future Weapons, Hi Tech Weapons, Guns, Custom Guns[/TAGS]

GET CABLE SIGNALS TO A TV WITHOUT RUNNING CABLES

Have you ever noticed the effect an array of coax can have on the look and feel of your living room? Well now you can minimize the cables with this handy gadget.

These units are designed to take an audio and video signal from an A/V device (like a VCR, DVD player, or some cable boxes with audio-video outputs) and send it to another part of the house. There are two parts to this system, a transmitter that is attached to the AV device and a receiver that goes next to the remote TV. The transmitter takes the signals from the Audio and Video jacks on the AV device and beams it over to the companion receiver next to the remote TV.

I found an interesting product over at SmartHome.com that is perfect for the job. The 2.4GHz Wireless Video Transmission System was just what the doctor ordered after deciding I wanted to run cable to my garage. I am working on having Windows Media Center up and running in my garage. With the weather getting warmer I wanted to spend more time outdoors while still maintaining my websites and emails. I wonder if this could be used to transmit cable internet from the main cable box to my cable modem ? I know you could just setup a wireless network to get internet to a garage or other part of your home. However that was not going to solve my no cable issue. This device is affordable and very well worth it I recommend it.

[TAGS] Home DIY, DIY, Wireless Cable TV, Home Theater, Garage Gadgets[/Tags]

Surf anonymous with AnonyMouse.org

When we use the internet to look for resources, shop for gifts, and other online activities every aspect of your surfing habits are usually stored in a sites web server logs including IP address, browser type, operating system, and even what site you came from. For some this may be no problem, for others it is a direct invasion of privacy. Well now you can surf anonymously using www.anonymouse.org. There are a lot of these types of proxy sites which allow your IP and computer information to be masked. If you are concerned about your privacy online you might want to use one. If you are really concerned about privacy there is software such as hideip that run on your computer continuously masking your info using different proxy servers.

Linux on your Xbox

The Xbox Linux Project aims to provide a version of GNU/Linux for the Xbox, so that it can be used as an ordinary computer. Linux should make use of all Xbox hardware and allow to install and run software from standard i386 Linux distributions.

The Xbox is an IBM PC, with one difference: It only runs code authorized by Microsoft, i.e. all executables have to be signed with Microsoft’s private key. That’s why Linux won’t run if you simply insert the Xbox Linux install CD into a standard Xbox.

But now, there are several ways to circumvent this limitation:

* The 007/Mechassault method
* The Dashboard method
* The onboard TSOP method

Please note that depending on your local law, these methods might void your warranty. We will not be responsible for any damage done to your Xbox - or yourself…

Resources

Read the wiki howto
Download Files

Linux on the Xbox 360

[TAGS]Linux Xbox, Linux Xbox 360, Xbox Hacks[/TAGS]

Password protect your computer with a bar code reader

Barcode readers can be used for a lot of useful things, inventory products, and store information. One of my favorite things to use a barcode reader for is password protection on my computer. In order to do this you have to first find a usb or inline keyboard barcode reader. I recommend checking ebay they are usually pretty cheap on there.

Then all you have to do is generate your password in barcode format. There are several software titles out there that will do this for you. I use Barcodes Inc. to generate all my barcodes for me. It is a fast way to make one, it’s FREE and you can’t print it when you’re done. Now since we are going to be using barcode values to type our password for us we won’t even actually need to know our password. So go to “Barcodes Inc.” generate your barcode and print it out. Now with your barcode reader plugged in and responding go to your change password prompt for whatever operating system you are using (Windows/Linux/MAC OSX) and click in the new password field then scan your bar code. Your password has now been set to the value of the barcode. In addition to this you could type and additional pass phrase to add a two part authentication system in case you ever lost your barcode someone could not access your system. Also another tip is you may already have a barcode you could use laying around. Many grocery stores carry customer loyalty programs and on the back of the little plastic cards are barcodes. Try and find one you could keep on your keychain for convenience. Be sure to have a duplicate somewhere if your barcode contains a hard to remember random string as its value. Doing so will ensure that you do not render your computer useless.
[tags]Barcodes,barcode readers,technology,DIY,passwords,authentication,login, Computer Security, Passwords [/tags]

Lost? Get maps from Google Mobile Maps on your cellphone

Now you can get gps directions anywhere from your cellphone. Google Mobile Maps is the latest tool from Google featuring the familiar Google Maps interface in the palm of your hand. To use Google Mobile Maps point your mobile phones web browser to http://www.google.com/gmm and download the free software. Then you only pay for the data transfer fee from your provider. You can usually get a plan to lower the cost of data transmission. For full instructions and an online tour visit http://www.google.com/gmm

[TAGS]Google, Google Mobile Maps, Google Mobile Phone, Google Cellphone, Google Maps, Travel Tips[/TAGS]

Pentagon 911 video released

Wheres the plane?

[TAGS]Pentagon Video, 911 Videos, George Bush, Pentagon Plane Video, Pentagon[/TAGS]

Dial 911 with a disconnected cell phone

As some of the readers know I also work full time as a cellular agent for U.S. Cellular. Every day or two someone comes to me and say’s I would like to buy a cell phone to have in my car in case of an emergency. They also tell me that they don’t want to pay $40 a month to have this added bit of comfort when on the road.

Many people don’t know that the FCC regulates cell phones and has mandated that all cell phones regardless of current service status will be allowed to dial 911. You also have the option to bill your call to a credit card the next time your out of gas or similar.

Now before you go out and get yourself a 911 phone let me give you some insight on the limitations of dialing 911 from a disconnected cell phone. If you do not have a signal you may encounter complications when placing your call. Also be sure to state your location (as best you can) to ensure the dispatcher knows where to send assistance. When you call 911 from a disconnected cell phone no CID (or Caller Identification Data) is sent as with landline 911 calls. Another tip is to keep a good charge on the phone and have it powered off in the glove box. In addition you may also want to purchase a battery boost. This will give you an emergency reserve battery supply incase you are stranded for a prolonged period of time. The battery boost or cell boost are relatively cheap and can be purchased at most Radio Shack stores.

Backup/Edit your cell phone data

The goal of this article is to enlighten you to the concept of backing up/modifying data from your mobile phone (e.g. Contacts, Picture(s), Video(s), etc). Using a free open source tool called bitpim and a data cable you can easily download and edit your mobile phones contents.

If you have ever had the joy of switching cell phones only to find that all your contacts will now have to be added to the new phone by hand then this article is for you. Bitpim allows you to easily update, add and delete contacts from your phone book using your computer. Compare that to using the keypad of your phone to update you 1000 contacts in your new Motorola Razor phone. You can also save your phonebook and anything else you fancy to your hard drive and then upload it to a different phone. This is extremely useful if you have developed a nice list of contacts in outlook and want to quickly transfer them to your mobile phone. Also an additional feature to Bitpim is it’s ability to add calendar events to your phone using a computer.

What you will need

1. Your Mobile Phone
2. A data cable (Can be purchased at most cellular providers retail outlets) or visit http://www.cellularfactory.com
3. Bitpim free for download here

First things first check if your phone is supported by Bitpim you can do so by reading the supported phones list here.

Then you just connect your mobile phone to your computer, launch Bitpim, select your phone from the drop down menu in the software’s interface and browse through the data. I wont go into details explaining how to use Bitpim they have already done the work for me here http://www.bitpim.org .

Public Web Stats - Dont let competitors get the upper hand

Anyone who has used a web statistics program should understand that to a competitor the statistical data found in a web stats page is very valuable. Something this valuable should be kept safe from prying eyes right. Well in some cases web stats can be extremely insecure and need further configuration beyond the default settings. This article deals mainly with the Awstats program. I am most familiar with Awstats and I am sure the majority of readers are too. With that said lets get started.

Overview

• How to search for web statistics via Google Hacking
• Ways to prevent your stats from becoming public.

How it works

Ok go to Google and do a search for inurl:”awstats.pl” I came up with 296,000 pages with public stats using just that search string. As you can see everything about these sites is made public thanks to Google and poor web administration practices. So now you see the problem, now I am going to show you some methods to prevent this sort of snooping on your own site.

How to prevent it

First and foremost many websites are hosted on shared hosting accounts. The web stats are installed either automatically or using some sort of installer such as Fantastico etc. For these users you will need to start by contacting your web host. Some other methods of preventing you web stats being made public are to restrict search indexing of the cgi-bin and other sensitive directories within your web space using a Robots.txt file. This will prevent search spiders such as Google and the like from spidering your stats pages. Another way would be to use .htaccess to prevent access to that directory all together. For the purpose of example and simplicity I will explain only the latter. The Robots.txt file mentioned before is a simple text file that search engines look for as a set of guidelines for proper indexing of the site. The Robots.txt file tells the spider where it is welcome and where it is not welcome. Now I am not going to go into major details on how to setup a Robots.txt file. I will give a quick overview on how to protect your cgi-bin with a Robots.txt file. First things first start by creating a plain text document in the root folder of your site and name it robots.txt. Open the file and on the first line type User-agent: * then on the second line type Disallow: /cgi-bin . Explanation : Ok so the first line tells me the user agent (i.e. the search engine reading the file). Using a star or “wildcard” makes the rule apply to all spiders. There are literally thousands of spiders out there so here is a list of spiders I found

Most Well Known Spiders

• GOOGLEBOT - http://www.google.com
• SLURP - http://www.yahoo.com
• MSNBOT - http://www.msn.com

Ok so far we have learned how to make a robots.txt file that will disallow all spiders from spidering out cgi-bin directory(I chose this directory because it is the primary location where most stats scripts are installed). Now let’s learn how to disallow just one spider.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin

ok the above instructions tell Googlebot the spider to exclude the /cgi-bin directory of the site from its crawl. You can change the user agent to whatever spider you want and set specific instructions for the spider.

This is by no means the most secure way of preventing access to your cgi-bin folder. It is however a simple precaution to make the public viewing of your stats pages less probable. To prevent access using a more secure method use the .htaccess file to restrict access to the directory.

I hope that this tutorial has brought to the attention of web master’s that their competition could very well know their next move or even their latest clients and should take precautionary steps to prevent it.

US Cellular free text messaging

US Cellular free text messaging

I have designed a nice php script to send sms messages to U.S. Cellular subscribers for free. This is a convienient thing to have on your site for your visitors to quickly contact me. Using php is more secure if you dont want people to view your phone number in the source. Anyway here is the source code for the form.

Message Sent“;
}else{
 echo “Please fill in all the fields and re send your message.”;
 }

?>




Send Tim Matheson a text message 













        Your Text Message

      

osCommerce moving products from one store to another using phpMyAdmin

I ran accross this excellent tutorial for moving products from one osCommerce installation to another. This has been a task I unfortunately took on by hand. I found this tutorial and it kinda made all that work seem worthless. Anyway if anyone is interested here is the link.osCommerce moving products from one store to another using phpMyAdmin

How do I drive traffic to my blog?

So you have a blog now what to do with it. Well you coul show it off to a few friends or relatives or you could turn it into your prime source of income. It’s really up to you. I am just going to try and give you some tips that I have learned over the years as a web developer/part time blogger.

First off if your not already using Word Press I would recomend it above all other blog scripts. Why do I recomend it? Well I guess it’s a matter of personal preference. Moving on let’s get some visitors to your site so your hard work doesnt seem so pointless.

Note: These tips for driving traffic to your blog are primarily driven towards Word Press user’s. However feel free to read along if nothing else you could walk away with a better understanding of how search engines work.

Ok open a browser and login to Word Press. Now look accross the top for the Options link click it then find the Permalinks sub menu and click it. Set permalinks to this /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and save the changes. What does this do for my traffic results? Well it wont guarantee a flock of click happy net navigators to come splashing in like a Tsunami wave after a 8.0 earthquake. However you are one step closer to having a more search engine friendly Word Press blog. You see search engines have always been picky and they should be. So you have to play by the rules and make sure your playing by all the rules. By adding permalinks we are insuring that all our Word Press post URL’s are going to have our post title keywords in the URL of the post. This is a more search engine friendly approach to blogging. Google(and search engines alike) pay strong attention to anchored keywords meaning links with keywords in the link itself. The permalink structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ will make a post titled “How do I drive traffic to my blog?” to http://www.timmatheson.com/2006/05/how-do-i-drive-traffic-to-my-blog/.

Thats all for this post next post we will learn how to add your site to several RSS directories and how to get indexed faster in Google,Yahoo,MSN and ASK faster and achieve a deeper crawl.

More Video with Flash FLV’s and WP-FLV Plugin

I like the idea of having more video on my blog. So in future post’s I plan to use more video. For anyone wondering what player I am using. I downloaded the Word Press Plugin WP-FLV and use FLASH 8 to encode the FLV files. FLASH 8 has really made streaming video accross the internet very easy.

VW Commercial - Drop it like it’s hot - Un Pimp the auto

I love these VW commercial’s thought I would share them with my visitors. This has proven to be a very effective viral marketing campaign for VW.

Apple to run Windows XP

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Computer Inc. shares climbed almost 10% Wednesday after the company unveiled software that will let its newest Macintosh computers run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, a watershed decision that may help boost its share of the PC market.

This was a long time in the making.