A homeless man and his dog

A homeless man and his dog

I ran across this powerful picture which lead me to a bit of research on the homeless problem. Although difficult to measure, it is estimated that between 2.3 and 3.5 million people will experience homelessness.

IFTTT Remote trigger system ties all your “services” together

Iftt.com. It stands for (if this then that). It’s basically a “trigger”system that ties into tons of services including RSS, Dropbox, Evernote, Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, general email, Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Read it Later (which I love), Wordpress, etc. It even has triggers for text messages, phone calls, stocks and bonds, and the weather.

Google engineer mistakenly posts internal memo to public forum

Making the equivalent of mistakenly hitting the reply all button, Google Engineer Steve Yegge posted a very well written rant on the importance of architectural planning and the importance of building products around a platform. The neat thing about his post is that he is almost “spot on” with his logic. Long post but well worth reading.

New 3D Tri-Gate chips coming from Intel

Silicon wafers used in computer chipsets (processors) have typically been two dimensional. On May 4, 2011, Intel announced a 3-D transistor technology, called Tri-Gate, that ensures Moore’s Law, which predicts that chipset transistor density doubles every two years, keeps pace. Dense chipsets allow Intel to pack more computer cycles (with less power usage) onto a single chip. By building above the chip’s surface, Intel can build chipsets that are smaller, faster, and use less power. The Tri-Gate transistors will be used in a line of 22 nanometer processors (code named Ivy Bridge) and ready for production use by 2012.

Universal Studios California Backlot Tour

One of the most interesting things we saw on our 2001 Southern California vacation was the backlot tour of Universal Studios. Below are pictures I took during the tour of the Universal Studios California Backlot Tour. Tours are given in trams with a guide narrating the scenes. Depending on when you go, areas of the backlot are sometimes closed while they are filming.

Remotely monitoring your children’s computers using iTalc

Using iTalc on your private home network, you can monitor your kid’s activities and keep an eye on what websites they are browsing, what they are doing on social networking sites like Facebook, and even watch as they read their email. There are other tools that offer similar functions such as keylogging tools and web site blockers, but iTalc is a perfect addition to your arsenal of child protection tools.