The AnswersThatWork Blog - September 2006 - Fun & Interesting ideas on computers, IT, Life, and other things, with a few interspersed technical tips (with RSS feed)

The AnswersThatWork Blog

Friday, 15th September 2006

Robots

Holy Robots Batman !

Come on down to Crazy Earl's Robot emporium !

We have self-replicating and repairing robots, robot fish, creepy robotic cats, dancing robots, prancing robots and of course.... Fembots & more Fembots !

Wow, this certainly isn't your average dad's erector set ("Meccano set" outside of the US). Shades of Blade Runner becoming reality..... Watch out Harrison, the Love of your Life is nearing resurrection.

Now, if they could just have them do something useful, we would be all set.

—— (DK) ÜberGeek

Thursday, 7th September 2006

Philips illuminates the Planet !

Check out the brand new Lumalive Fabric from Philips Research. LEDs are integrated right into textiles, making it possible to display dynamic text and images as part of the fabric ! How Blade Runner is that ?!?

Combine that with Bluetooth wireless connectivity, an SDK (Software Development Kit), and the possibilities would be virtually infinite.

I can see clothes interacting with one another like those Cube World Digital Stick People. Or, how about a child's comforter that doubles up as a night light and animates the latest Disney character ? When I told MC, he came up with the great idea of aquarium print furniture – Can you imagine having a sofa which can show 24/7 Live aquarium images from an aquarium thousands of miles away in Disney World ?

These new products would inevitably go the way of the dinosaurs like those Hypercolor T-shirts of the late 80s. When everyone on the block has clothes that endlessly rotate marketing ads, some of the charm may wear off.

Until then, however, it will be a lot of fun having another toy to hook into !

Hey marketing guys – are you listening ?

—— (DK) ÜberGeek

Monday, 4th September 2006

TUT 3.50 released

This Real World stuff is really keeping us busy. The proliferation of spyware, phishing scams, bogus antivirus products like AntivirusGolden, disreputable anti-spyware programs like Spyware Cleaner, web page borne viruses and Trojans, and good old fashioned viruses, has resulted in the average user protecting their PCs to the max.

That's a lot of users ! ☺ We've even seen TUT users running up to 3 or 4 anti-spyware programs at the same time and with concurrent real-time protection (which, incidentally, is not only overkill, but two real-time protection programs can and will eventually interfere with each other with the result that your PC ends up not being protected in the way you thought it was).

Anyhow, the upshot of it all is that, increasingly, TUT was having problems downloading updates, what with some anti-popup or anti-adware programs erroneously thinking the updater is a popup and preventing it from opening, or deleting it altogether (Gee!!), or TUT having to traverse various anti-spyware and firewall roadblocks, and router firewalls, before eventually being able to download an update. We, humans, would have given up long ago in the face of such hi-tech defences.

But TUT is tough, ☺, although not tough enough nowadays, so we had to produce this release which will now work out whether a firewall or anti-spyware is preventing TUT from updating, and it will inform the user accordingly.

Happy TUT'ting !