Pensieve: The Human Memory Assistant

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Your own human memory could soon have a digital backup.

IBM is working on new software that collects pieces of information during your day, then uses them to help you remember things later. The project sounds like something that could have come straight from Dumbledore’s quarters — and not just because it’s named Pensieve, either.

The utility starts by picking up images, sounds, and text from your cell phone, GPS system, and other mobile devices. It then uses “associative recall,” IBM says, to understand the context and make connections between bits of related information.

“This is like having a personal assistant for your memory,” lead researcher Dr. Yaakov Navon explains. “Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, Pensieve helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget,” he says.

An example IBM gives, illustrated in the video below, is if you were to meet someone new at a conference. If you took a picture of him on your phone, then took a picture of his business card, Pensieve would tie the two together — and help you later recall the guy’s name, plus where and when you met him.

I don’t know about you, but this kind of technology could definitely save me from mountains of memory-related disasters. I know I’ve had plenty of forgetful faux pas — though I can’t, of course, seem to remember any of the specifics.

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Edit your photos online with Yahoo’s BrowserPlus

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Most of us have our own favourite photo editing programs – I know I do.   I mostly use ThumbsPlus and sometimes also Picasa and GIMP.   But I am always on the lookout for a decent online browser alternative.

Yahoo has something in beta at the moment called BrowserPlus which is pretty basic right now and is geared more towards Flickr uploading.  But I have to admit it doesn’t do such a bad job with basic photo editing and it has one unique feature – it allows you to drag and drop photos onto its interface (which is handy for transferring photos off a USB stick)   This alone was enough to intrigue me to download the small browser plugin and give it a test drive.

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Storm Worm virus using FBI and Facebook spam emails

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

It seems that a deadly computer virus is doing the rounds again, this time using emails containing references to the FBI and Facebook to entice people to open it up and install it.

The email subject line is “F.B.I. vs. Facebook” and the email has a link about an article allegedly about the FBI and Facebook.    But if you click on the link, what you would actually be doing is downloading the Storm Worm virus.

The FBI press release advises the usual – don’t click on links you don’t fully trust, type in the company URL yourself in the browser and so on, blah, blah.    It would be worth passing this onto anyone you know who is inclined to click on these sorts of links just in case they’re unlucky enough to get one of the emails themselves.    Otherwise you might find yourself getting called out over the weekend to fix their computer!



Meet “Anton,” the Robotic Tongue

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, British scientists have come up with “Anton,” the animatronic tongue.

This squirming creation was designed to help better understand how the human tongue works and thus improve speech recognition software. See for yourself:

I feel it’s necessary to quote the following line from New Scientist Magazine:

“The pink, fleshy tongue curls up and down inside the bare skull’s jaws…”

Hang on here. Is this a medical research device, or something else?

Come to think of it, I think my ex-girlfriend might have had one of these…

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Minimalist Linux to Confuse the Masses

By Mackenzie Morgan
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Sometimes it’s fun to just make people think “WTF?” when they see your computer. That’s “WTF?” in a good way. It’s not hard on Linux to make people say “woah,”, but it’s even easier, if you know the command line, to make people look at you typing away on your laptop and think you’re some kind of crazy hacker having a go at the Gibson.

The first step is to ditch GNOME or KDE. Get a nice, minimalist window manager. I recommend a window manager over a regular tty for two reasons. The first is that even with screen in a tty, it’s inconvenient. The text is huge unless you sit there rebooting over and over trying to get the right framebuffer settings. The second is so you can have a nice wallpaper. I prefer Fluxbox for this. It’s just like Openbox or Blackbox, except it’s got tabbed windows like pwm and a toolbar. Other possibilities include tiling window managers like Xmonad. Ion2 is a tiling, tabbed window manager, based on pwm. I don’t know about the others, but as a Fluxbox user, I can tell you that there is no really useful menu configured by default. Your Fluxbox menu configuration is in ~/.fluxbox/menu and uses a syntax like this, and no the indentation doesn’t matter:

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Making my own Bucket List

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Watching The Bucket List movie a few weeks back really moved me to consider writing my own list.   In case you haven’t watched this very funny movie yourself, it’s about two terminally ill men (played by Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson) who decide to make a list of all the things they want to do in their life before they die (kick the bucket).  This includes driving fast cars, climbing mountains, staying in nice hotels….you get the idea.   They then set out and do it all.   Then they die happy and satisfied.

This feature in Esquire magazine, 75 Things Every Man Should Do Before He Dies, has definately sealed the deal, and I have now already started writing my list.    I think some of the ones in Esquire are pretty lame though.   Repair a household appliance?   Are you kidding me?   Then they go from that straight to flying an aeroplane!   I’ll take the plane but leave the washing machine if you don’t mind thanks.

I’m sure some of you will accuse me of being morbid talking of death, but death should not be a taboo subject.  You live and you die, end of story.   So there’s nothing wrong with planning what you want to achieve with your life.     You’ll find as you progress with your list that it’s a project you will get deeply involved in and you may end up even getting relatives and friends involved in what goes in and what goes out.

Have you made a Bucket List?   If so, what have you put on it?   If you haven’t made a list, what would be number one on your theoretical list?  My number one is flying a Cessna plane.   It’ll be tough since I am epileptic, but I’ll get up there.    Just you watch me – then I’ll put the video on Geeks Are Sexy for you all to see.

The Solar Billionaires: Who’s Made Mad Money off of Solar Power?

Clean, green energy is the way of the future, and of course one of the leaders of the renewable energy scene is solar power. Early forms of it were first developed in the 1860s, and it long took a backseat to polluting energy sources like coal, but solar power is now enjoying a renaissance. Solar power’s future is looking undeniably bright, and some investors and businessmen who jumped on the solar bandwagon early are already swimming in pools of money. Here are three lucky men whose billions came courtesy of their efforts in the solar energy industry.

Shi Zhengrong, Suntech Power


Dr. Zhengrong is the wealthiest person in China with a personal net worth of $2.5 billion US dollars, all earned through his solar energy company Suntech Power. He’s been dubbed ‘The Sun King’ and ‘China’s Sunshine Boy’, and was the first person ever to reach billionaire status via solar power. His success is an inspiration to many, but Dr. Zhengrong never expected to make so much money. He told an AP reporter, “I never thought this solar business could take off or become commercially viable. I thought I just needed to concentrate on my research and publish papers to do my job as a scientist.”

Suntech started in 2001 with 20 workers and its workforce has now expanded to 3,500. Its solar panels are used in a broad variety of applications including military, transportation, housing and communications.

Frank Asbeck, SolarWorld


The chairman and founder of Germany’s SolarWorld holds a stake in his highly successful business estimated to be about €1 billion euros, or nearly $1.6 billion US dollars. Asbeck credits the success of SolarWorld partially to the fact that it’s family-owned, saying “In family owned companies decisions are quicker to be made. This is an advantage in business, where a quick decision can generate lots of money for the company. Boards that are discussing too long fail to gain opportunities.”

SolarWorld has delivered a return of more than 10,000% to shareholders in the last five years, and the business is expected to continue growing at a rate of 25% per year.

Xiao Peng, LDK Solar


Xiao Peng’s journey to billionaire status began only three years ago, when he decided that solar energy was the way of the future. Peng’s company, LDK Solar, has had its share of controversy in the past year as it was accused of accounting fraud, though an audit cleared them of any wrongdoing. Investors expect LDK Solar to quickly become the world’s most successful solar company, partially due to the low manufacturing costs it enjoys as a result of operating out of JiangXi, China.

As the solar energy industry continues to expand, we can undoubtedly expect the list of solar billionaires to grow. It’s considered one of the most promising forms of renewable energy, and it’s constantly being improved upon. While the high cost of the materials used to create solar panels have limited its success in the past, engineers are making breakthroughs almost daily as more funds are being poured into the industry’s research efforts.

Stephanie Rogers writes for EarthFirst.com, Weburbanist.com and Eco-Chick.com.

Introducing the $10 Laptop

Would you like a laptop with that? India’s getting ready to debut a notebook computer at near-McDonald’s-level prices.

The laptop, now under development in Bangalore, will sell for $10 US currency. It’ll be marketed toward “higher education applications” — college students, we assume. Government officials revealed the plans for the product at a conference this week but did not elaborate on what kind of features the computer might have (let’s hope it’s not running on a 486 chipset).

India is also working on offering free broadband access for everyone, limited to only usage related to “educational purposes.” Hey, learning about the birds and the bees is part of a complete education, right?

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