Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [September 26]
- Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks
- Top 10 Cool Uses For Old Computers And Laptops
- A Great Online Alarm Clock – MetaClock
- Geeks Weigh In: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?
- Technology Explained: How Do RFID Tags Work?
- Free Advanced Hard Drive Cloning Tool from Clonezilla
- Tag2Find – Tag Your Windows Files with Web-like Tags
| Cool Websites and Tools [September 26] Posted: 26 Sep 2009 06:00 PM PDT
(1) FORA.tv – There are numerous sites you could go to for current news in politics, technology, science and entertainment such as TIME or Cnet. However, FORA.tv is at the forefront of the online revolution with really interesting video interviews, talks, lectures, rants about politics, innovation and ideas from notable world leaders, political pundits, and industry leaders. Read more: FORA.tv – Watch Video Talks & Speeches by Leaders & Great Thinkers (2) MockFlow – If you are working on design of your website or software and looking for a quick way to sketch UI mockups, head straight to MockFlow.com. It is a web tool that makes the process really easy by providing all possible custom components. Simply drag and drop ’shapes and elements’ onto the whiteboard and then customize them. Read more: MockFlow – Create User Interface Mockups Online (3) Wordoid – Website which attempts to solve a common problem faced by almost everyone who is going to start a firm or a website/blog – finding a name which is unique and whose domain is available. Wordoid makes this process easier by presenting company name ideas which could either sound natural, almost natural or hardly natural. Read more: Wordoid – Get Company Name Ideas (4) SpareFoot – Innovative website which lets individuals as well as organizations rent out their extra room, parking place or workspace. So if you've got an unused closet in your house, you can rent it out through this site and earn some cash. Read more: SpareFoot – Turn Unused Home Storage Space into Cash (5) Raveable – When you want to book a hotel you never visited you can't really rely on information provided by the hotel itself. To get an independent opinion about a particular hotel, check out the Raveable.com. This little known website aggregates user hotel rating and reviews from popular travel sites, blogs etc and ranks hotels by location and class. Read more: Raveable – Quick Hotel Rating and Review Summaries
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks Posted: 26 Sep 2009 05:31 PM PDT
Check out the top picks from MakeUseOf Geeky Fun during the last week.
If you would like to keep up with all latest Geeky Fun additions, please subscribe to the Geeky Fun feed here. You can also subscribe and get the latest additions via email.
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Top 10 Cool Uses For Old Computers And Laptops Posted: 26 Sep 2009 03:00 PM PDT
Whether it’s a desktop computer or a laptop, whether or not it’s broken, and no matter how old it is, it can still be useful to you or someone else. So if you still don’t have any idea what to do with it, you might find some inspiration in this article. 1. Run a Geek BeamerIt’s an unlikely scenario, but say you had an excess TFT screen, maybe with a broken backlight so it remains black, you could still use it to build your own geeky projector. You will need a working overhead projector and a computer or laptop to run the movies or whatever else you want to watch with it. Here’s the how-to video: Unfortunately, Tom’s Hardware Guide took down the complete guide. 2. Create a Digital Photo Frame
You’ll find detailed instructions all over the net. Repair4Laptop.org provides an extensive list of instructions sorted by laptop models. Unfortunately, some links are outdated. If you have a spare G4 Powerbook, try this article at Instructables, and for the digital photo frame connecting to Flickr, Mike from PopSci used an old IBM ThinkPad T21 and Slickr, as described here. Shuttertalk has instructions using a LCD monitor and laptop. 3. Create an External Hard Drive
4. Make Money
It’s not a very unique use, but you may be able to save up some extra money to buy that cool tool you’ve been wanting to get. To learn more about the inside of your computer, try Karl’s Own PC Building Guide, a free MakeUseOf free guide. To succeed on eBay, apply my 7 Tips for Private eBay Sellers. 5. Make Someone Happy
You could offer the computer on your local FreeCycle.org group or ask friends, family, and people in your community whether anyone needs a computer for simple tasks. Alternatively, you could donate your laptop or computer through an official organization, such as Computers with Causes. Freecycle is mentioned in my post about 6 Amazing Web Communities for Exchanging Favors. 6. Donate CPU Time
The computer could sit in a dead corner of your house and would require a monitor only occasionally. You would invest as little as a bit of electricity and bandwidth. Ryan has composed a great article about how 10 Ways To Donate Your CPU Time To Science. 7. Try Linux
Stefan has written a Linux guide for Newbies, which will guide you through setting up Ubuntu and your first steps with it. 8. Use it as File or Print ServerTransform your old computer into a workhorse with only the essential software components, including Windows File and Printer sharing. Next, hook up all your external devices to it, such as an external hard drive or printer, and make them available to all other computers in the house. 9. Set up an external Firewall or Router
Lockup has a guide on how to turn your old PC into a NAT firewall router. At Associated Content, you will find an article that explains how to use free software to set up a first class firewall. And finally, Instructables has a guide on how to build your own gateway firewall. 10. Turn it into a Media Station
There are many more options of how you can use an old computer for entertainment purposes, just be creative! To help you set it all up, we have some material in store for you. Will wrote about the Top 5 Free Media Players For Windows. Ryan covered the Best Sites To Watch TV On Your Computer Over The Internet. Using a wireless connection, you could set up this additional “internet TV” in the kitchen or office. If you would like to record music, read my article about 3 Easy Tools to Record Streaming Music as MP3 Files. And I’m sure you’ll discover many more resources on MakeUseOf. Can you think of even better ways to use an old computer or laptop? Let’s hear! Image credits: ryas, dolar, svilen001, ilco Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| A Great Online Alarm Clock – MetaClock Posted: 26 Sep 2009 01:00 PM PDT
I was looking at Google Analytics reports and have noticed a lot of people searching around for a simple cross-platform Online alarm clock that they could use to wake themselves up. This would be something that is not installed but runs through a web browser giving it the cross platform ability. When looking for an Online Alarm Clock, I needed a few features. First and foremost, obviously, is the ability to wake me up. It should allow me to choose a tone and pop up a website so I can check the weather before I get dressed. It looks like I found the program I was looking for on the first try. In addition to those meager features I was looking for it also threw this tip at me – forgo the alarm noise and wake yourself up to a youTube video – this is awesome! Let's take a look at MetaClock. Let's navigate on over to their website and see what it is all about.
To set your alarm, first you need to tell MetaClock what time you want to wake up.
Next up you will need to select a tune to play – if you are going to utilize a YouTube video to wake you up you can uncheck the check box next to the “With the tune” drop down box.
Here is where I get to put in my weather website as well as a youTube video. You do NEED to make sure pop-ups are enabled for this web site and if you are having problems with that simply click the “How?” link next to ‘Make sure your browser supports pop-ups’. Then list your urls in the standard www.site.com format one on each line.
You can also choose to show random did you know facts, today in history and a countdown on your browser letting you know how much time is left until your alarm is activated and your websites are popped open.
The count down timer looks like this:
If you are using FireFox you will need to leave this countdown window on top of all your windows. It needs to have focus to launch the alarm music or spawn your pop up windows. So if you are using FireFox make sure you do this or your wake up will be converted into an epic fail…
You can see the YouTube video I choose to wake me up… Just for a good laugh How do you wake up in the morning? Do you use a standard alarm clock? Do you have a geeky alarm clock or some out of this world method for getting your lazy ass out of bed? If you do we would love to hear about it from you – simply leave a comment in the space provided below and we will be sure to add our witty banter to your comments! And if you missed that url it is www.MetaClock.com Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Geeks Weigh In: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer? Posted: 26 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT
What a question. Just think of the necessary evidence that one would need to produce in order to prove, or disprove, that statement. In fact, what is the question about really? Is it whether a human brain or a computer is faster, or is it which form of information processing is better? Is it even a fair comparison? Today, I’d like to engage MakeUseOf readers into a debate on this subject by first providing my own take – and then asking for yours. The Question: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?The question itself represents the fallacy of how people think about computers. When a person uses a computer, if it’s slow then it’s junk. But there are certainly other factors to consider when examining intelligence – what about image recognition, language recognition, multi-tasking capabilities or self-learning and self-healing features?
First, to partially answer the “speed” question we need to examine data transmission. In the Hartford Examiner, writer Joy Casad answers the question, “How fast is a thought” by describing the chemical/biological propagation of “thinking” neurons before getting to the point in the final paragraph – these neurons transmit signals at 0.5 milliseconds. That’s pretty fast! In 2006, the fastest reported fiber optic transmission rate was 2.56 terabits a second. Okay, but a bit is nothing more than a zero and a one. Well – the current state of the art is the cutting edge subatomic technology created by Stanford researchers representing one bit with 35 electrons, or 35,000,000,000 electrons a millisecond. Due to the fact that axon/neuron electrical transmission depends on the chemical and biological environment it is in, data transmission of one neuron is actually millions of times slower than the fastest electrical transmission rates over copper electrical wire, and even slower compared to fiber optics. Score one for computers. What About Processing Power?The question of processing is a tricky one. According to the Top500 list of super computers, the fastest one as of 2009 is the RoadRunner BladeCenter at 12.8 GFlops (floating point operations per second).
A GFlop represents a billion operations per second. Now, you’re thinking of that Monday morning in class when your professor asked you to perform a simple calculation and your mind went blank. You’re ready to chalk up another point to computers, right? Wrong. While the transmission of electrical impulses may be slower in the brain than over wire, the processing power of the brain is represented by not one, but thousands of processors backed into one major super computer. One example is the retina, which is sort of like your computer web cam, in that it transmits light (images) to the brain for processing. Except the retina itself has its own processing power, sort of like a subprocessor – 100 million neurons packed into a one centimeter by one millimeter space.
This stunning little processor is capable of processing ten images, each of about a million light points, every single second. Not only that, the data isn’t transmitted over a single fiber of nerve cells, but over a cable to the brain made up of a million of these fibers, all transmitting bits of data at the same time in parallel. If you multiply the processing power of this volume of neurons by the overall size of the average 1,500 cubic cm human brain, the overall processing power of the brain is about 100 million, million operations per second. For those of you who are trying to do the math with your super computer brain – that’s over 100,000 times more processing power than today’s cutting-edge super computer. Image and Language Recognition, Learning and Common SenseIf our brains are such super computers, then why do we feel so dense and so slow sometimes? I don’t know about you, but I’m horrible at doing calculations in my head. The problem is that people think of computers only in terms of how many calculations it can do per second. The truth is, when it comes to intelligence there’s so much more to process than calculations alone. How do you calculate what the tone of someone’s voice implies they are really saying? How do you calculate the irony of a joke that, when taken literally, makes no sense at all? This is where the true power of the human brain makes itself known.
Author Gary Marcus writes, in his book on the human mind that, “The fundamental difference between computers and the human mind is in the basic organization of memory.” What he means is that a computer organizes information in a logical way. To retrieve data, the computer uses logical storage locations. A human brain, on the other hand, remembers where information is stored based on cues. Those cues are other pieces of information or memories connected to the information you need to retrieve. This means that the human mind can connect an almost unlimited number of concepts in a variety of ways, and then sometimes disconnect or recreate connections based on new information. This allows the human to step outside the boundaries of what has already been learned – leading to new art and new inventions that are the trademark of the human race. There are a lot of other ways the human mind blows computers away – it can self repair itself, it can produce chemical reactions within its host body to induce instinctive reactions and protect itself from danger, it can handle every last function required to operate the machine of the human body while simultaneously processing information from outside that body, and most importantly it can continue learning and building new connections within that contextual storage array in ways that seem infinite. In short, the answer to the question “Does a human think faster than a computer?” is yes. And it can also do a whole lot more than that. Geeks out there – weigh in with your opinion in the comments section below! Image Credits: cbowns Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Technology Explained: How Do RFID Tags Work? Posted: 26 Sep 2009 09:00 AM PDT
So what are these things for? Well, they are a way of assigning unique data to whatever they are applied to. Like a barcode or an ISBN number in some ways. The problem with things like bar codes is that they can get damaged or even switched. Some people do that to try to get expensive things cheaper – highly illegal. An RFID tag can be as small as a grain of black pepper and be embedded right into a product’s packaging, or the product itself. So you can start to see some of the benefits here. Most RFID’s do not have an internal power source, like a battery, but some do. I’m going to cover the ones that don’t, as they are the ones that are most popular. The transponder is the part of the RFID tag that converts that radio frequency into usable power, as well as sends and receives messages. When the transponder is hit by the radio waves, the waves go up and down the length of the transceiver, oscillating. You might know that when a wire passes through any sort of magnetic or electric field, it can convert and conduct that field down its length. Like those flashlights, where you shake them and a magnet goes back and forth through a copper coil, creating electromotive force.
Now that the RFID has some power to work with, it wakes up the transponder. The transponder immediately upon being woken up, spews out all the information it has stored on it. This whole process can take as little as a few milliseconds. Imagine having friend who was hypnotized to wake up upon hearing a code word, tell you his name and phone number, and then fall immediately back to sleep. Yet he wouldn’t do this no matter what else you said. Funny, yes it is. That’s pretty much what an RFID tag does.
The amount of information that the tag stores can vary. Passive tags, like we’re talking about only store about 1024 bytes of information, or 1 kilobyte. That might not seem like a lot. However, my full name, address, phone number, birthday, social insurance number, place of birth and mother’s maiden name is only 130 bytes of information in plain text. That’s enough information to steal my identity and ruin my life. Now, are you seeing the tin-hatter applications here? Add to that, some people are for implanting these things in your body. Now imagine they are embedded in your household items. How hard would it be to hack your own reader and walk around a person or their home and get a full inventory on them? These passive tags have an unspecified lifetime, anticipated to be at least a few decades. I’m not saying that they are going to be used for nefarious purposes, but the potential is certainly there. Consider that Hitachi can make RFID tags that will hold 128 bits of information, enough for an identification number, like a SIN number, that is small enough to possibly be inhaled. Certainly, it could be put on you, or anything else, without you noticing. In the picture, all those dots are the Hitachi Powder RFID’sand the black line is a human hair. To me, that’s scary.
What do you think? Do you think RFID’s have their place, or would you rather we just stuck to barcodes and such? Would you allow yourself to be ‘chipped’ with an RFID? Why? Or, why not? Let’s chat it up in the comments, shall we? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Free Advanced Hard Drive Cloning Tool from Clonezilla Posted: 26 Sep 2009 07:00 AM PDT
In a cloning project I worked on, my favorite freeware product from my googling journeys was Clonezilla. Clonezilla is free! Clonezilla is a good tool for taking a snapshot of a system and reverting back to it later as a backup or to get things the way you once liked them. When you have a new computer and begin installing software that you enjoy using, that would be a great time to image the hard drive in case something happens later. This can save time instead of having to reinstall your operating system if there is a virus or corruption in data. Creating a copy of a hard drive can also save you from ruining the state of a computer due to tinkering, installing software, etc. If you do PC repair for customers or as a hobbyist, you can also use this software before beginning work on some computers in case you would need a point of reference for any reason. Clonezilla, clones a 40 gigabyte hard drive in about 15 minutes. Clonezilla has two forms, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla ServerEdition (SE). Clonezilla live is used for cloning single machines while Clonezilla SE is for multiple machine deployments. This article is about Clonezilla live. When using the Clonezilla live version, I burned it to a CD and then set the computer to boot from that CD. The first screens after Clonezilla begins, let you choose video resolution, language and keyboard layout.
The following screen is where you will select to “Start_Clonezilla” or “Enter_Shell” which is to enter command line mode, to make things easier on myself I selected “Start_Clonezilla”.
At the next screen I selected “device-image”. The other option is to go direct from partition to partition or disk to disk or any combination in between, in case your choice is to only clone a single partition of a drive to another drive. I wanted to clone the whole enchilada so I selected “device-image”.
The next screen was selecting where to place the image that was going to be created. Because I was saving the image across our network, I did not choose the more popular option of “local_dev” to save on a local hard drive or USB drive. If using "local_dev" you will just need to ensure the storage device has sufficient space for the image being cloned. The option that worked for me was selecting “samba_server” which is, in this arena, equivalent to a shared folder on a Windows network. You must allow write permissions on the shared folder for the account that is chosen.
After this step in the process, another thing that has to be decided is how to get an IP address, either statically assign one or send out a DHCP broadcast in search of one so the computer can begin talking on the network. Then the next option is choosing the location where the Clonezilla image is going to be stored. You can either enter an IP address of the computer where the image will be stored or you can enter the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the computer, which might be something like “cloneserver.internaldomainname.com”. The next step is to choose which domain that computer resides on. Keeping with the previous example, I would enter “internaldomainname.com”. Then you will be prompted to enter a username that has permissions to that save location. The name of the shared resource must also be provided, Clonezilla by default will elect to use a folder called “/images”. You must ensure that your shared resource and the response here match. We were placing our images in a folder named “CLONEZILLA”, so we would change “/images” to “/CLONEZILLA”. Make sure yours match also; if you get red letters in a message, there was a problem. Now you will be prompted to hit Enter to put in the password associated with the account you chose. You will see a password prompt but when you type, no asterisk marks “***” will appear. Hit Enter after typing your password correctly. You must also select beginner or expert mode, since I had never used it before and I like doing things the easy way, I selected beginner mode. In our project, when I wanted to copy a hard drive and save it as an image for use on other computers, I selected the “savedisk” option. When you want to restore an image to a hard drive, the process is very similar except at the option page where you originally selected "savedisk" you would select “restoredisk” instead. Some of the options after choosing to restore are not there; like you won't be prompted to name the image but rather select it from a list of image files that are detected on the shared resource.
Then you must give the image a name. Which hard drive you are making a replica of, or pulling an image to, must also be selected, if there is only one hard drive to clone or overwrite then it will already be selected for you.
Then you can begin the restoring process, by hitting Enter a couple of times, and confirming the actions. For other freeware cloning alternatives you could try nLite, PC Inspector Clonemax,Marcium Reflect Free Edition, or Odin and let us know what you think. Check out the software and documentation from the Clonezilla website. What software do you use to clone your hard drive over a network? Let us know in the comments. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Tag2Find – Tag Your Windows Files with Web-like Tags Posted: 26 Sep 2009 05:00 AM PDT
Tagging is commonplace around blogs and websites. We all agree that it's a speedy way to scour out a web resource; nearly single click in its utility. We are so used to it that we perhaps miss it as a feature in Windows. Windows XP was born much before Web 2.0 came about. So, there's the easy explanation. Vista of course has file tagging and Vista Quick Search as a feature but with a leaning towards only Office docs and a few limitations for certain file types like TXT, RTF, and PNG etc. Even then with all ifs and buts, Vista's search is better for it. Windows XP meanwhile lags behind, huffing and puffing in its file search. To plug the want, there is always one or the other software. You might have tried out the previously mentioned TaggedFrog. Another of its type is Tag2Find. There was a brief mention of it some time back. So, let's take a closer look at how Tag2Find saves us XP users (why not Vista’s too?) some grunt work. Tag2Find (ver. 0.10.2.5) is a 2.23 MB freeware that allows us to add tags to Windows XP contents and make our search less tedious. According to the site, it's still in the technical preview stage and the developers are looking to make further improvements. The first stepsThere are three pre-requisites for installing Tag2Find on your machine –
For installation, you need administer privileges on your system. The installation runs through a few configuration screens for setting up the location of the internal tag database which stores all the tag info.
Another sequence of steps is for selecting the files/folders and the extensions you want to tag during the initial setup (The Intial Tagging Wizard). That done the installer shows a brief video clip revealing how tag2find should be used. Don't worry, it's a cinch.
Tag2find covers all locations for ease of instant tagging – desktop, explorer toolbar, system tray and the right click context menu. Quickie tagging…During installation, the Initial Tagging Wizard helps out by letting you select the files, folders and extensions which you want to include in your tags. The wizard can be opened later on too. You can tag your files by a selection or a drag and drop using three different approaches –
Going for any of these three processes opens up a Tag2Find window. The window displays the entire tag list, some suggested tags and info on the file that is to be tagged. Clicking on Details gives you additional file information and a preview if available.
Tag2Find also makes it simple for new files by actively monitoring selected file locations (watched folders). The New File Monitor pops up like an alert box and gives you a quick way to tag the file.
Find them out using tagsTags wouldn't be of much help if we don't have an equally easy way of using tags to shortlist the files we want. Fill in the tag search term in the Tag2Find field box to display the files labeled by the tag in the Results Preview. Open the files from within the preview window or drag and drop it elsewhere. You can also view related tags by entering a comma after the first one. A plus is the graphical bar which is color coded to indicate the relative usage of the file in terms of the tag.
Get the big picture using the TagBrowser
The TagBrowser is like the centerpiece for all your tags. Browse, sort or filter your tags from the explorer like browser window. TagBrowser is also the tool for mass management of all tags. Edit tags or set new ones for a bunch of files for rapid organization. One click filters easily set apart documents from other file types like movies and music. What's a tag without a tag cloud? The TagBrowser has the option of displaying all your tags either as a tag cloud (with the relative sizes for importance) or as a list. This is not all there is to it the free software. Some little extras can be found within the settings for TagBrowser. Decide on the color of the tags, set the transparency of the Floating Tag Box, import export tags, auto-play and preview media files in TagBrowser or the tag detail pop-up make it quite a rounded application. First impressions…On first install and use, some users might just stop short, just because we are so used to web tags. The initial pause done away with, Tag2Find provides lots of flexible ways to tag all your files. Searching by tag is also snappy. It's almost like an Explorer replacement… addition of an Explorer-like directory structure might just make it one. The PDF help file provided on the site makes the learning curve less acute. The beginning looks and feels good. If you are an old XP hand (or even a Vista user), give file tagging with Tag2Find a shot. Who knows it might be the ticket for a better organized computer. Image Credit: rooneyjohn Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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So you finally bought a new computer and your old one sits in the corner and is collecting dust. That’s too bad because there are a number of things you can do with an old computer.
If your old laptop screen is OK and if either the hard drive or CD/DVD drive are working, you can use it to build a cheap digital photo frame. With a working wireless connection you could even make it show your latest Flickr photos.
If parts of your laptop or desktop computer hardware are broken, you can salvage the working parts. So if the hard drive is still working, you can dismount it and transform it into an external and portable hard drive for your new computer. You’ll have to invest in a USB caddy, which can be acquired cheaply through eBay, Amazon or your local hardware dealer. Be sure to get the right format and connector for your hard drive. For a laptop hard drive, you’ll need a 2.5″ IDE or SATA caddy. For a regular hard drive, generally a 3.5″ IDE or SATA caddy is in order.
You can dismantle your entire broken computer or laptop and sell the working parts on eBay. Hard drive, RAM, A/C adapters, motherboards, graphics and audio cards, and even an intact case will return some cash.
The next best way to use your still working old computer is to make someone else happy!
If you would rather donate to something bigger, such as science, you could hook up the old computer to the internet, install a program such as 
If you’re a Windows user, having an extra computer to play with is your prime chance to get familiar with Linux. And you may just be surprised by how smoothly Linux runs on your old machine. The reason is that Linux demands much less power.
Separating your firewall from the PC you are using, and running it on a standalone computer that sits between the internet and your actual operating system, is a powerful way to protect your data. With Linux as the firewall computer’s operating system it’s almost perfect.
Load all your music and videos onto this computer, if necessary supply it with an external hard drive, set up your favorite media player, listen to Last.fm, install a TV tuner card and record movies, record music from radio stations, download MP3s, stream music throughout the house using wireless speakers etc.
What do you use to wake your self up in the morning?
While many people stereotype geeks as only being interested in using the computer all day, the truth is that a geek is actually a person who often contemplates many of the deeper questions of the universe while busy installing the coolest new 
Have you ever had a friend who was such a genius that they could perform the most astounding calculations in their head, or they could fathom the most complex equations or problems imaginable – yet when faced with the simplest common-sense joke, they just didn’t get it? This is the major difference between a human brain and a computer.
As a self-confessed tin-hatter and someone who has worked with asset management and inventory controls, I’ve got a lot of interest in RFID tags. Why the tin-hatter bit? I’ll get to that in a few paragraphs. First off, you need to know what RFID is an initialization of – Radio Frequency Identification Tag. The initialization is pronounced ARE-FID.
The RFID system has two components – the reader and the tag. The reader has two parts – a transceiver and an antenna. The transceiver generates a weak radio signal that may have a range from a few feet to a few yards. The signal is necessary to wake or activate the tag and is transmitted through the antenna. The signal itself is a form of energy that can be used to power the tag.
Imaging hard drives is the process of taking a hard drive and copying it bit by bit to create an exact replica, in a way an "image" just like a photograph of a person is a snapshot of them at any moment in time. The cloning part is the process of taking that "image" of a hard drive and placing copies of it on one or more other hard drives. 
Tagging is something your pipsqueak pigtailed sister did with you when you were in your tweens. That kind of ceaseless trailing was pesky. The Web 2.0 version though saves us a lot of bother.
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