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Remember IBM? They may not be the premier computer manufacturer they once were, but the world’s oldest computer company is still skating on the cutting edge of technology. Their latest achievement? Two DARPA SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) funded prototype chips that can learn and remember in a way that “begins to rival the brain’s function, power, and speed.”
Can you say Skynet?
Ok, so we’re nowhere near AI-driven world takeover, but thinking computer chips that require very little in the way of size or power to operate is definitely a step in the bright direction. What these chips really represent is a shift in the way computers process information. They move away from the traditional Von Neumann architecture that relies on processing and memory to work separate to each other. Both chips have 256 neurons, with one chip containing the programmable synapses, and the other, learning synapses that can “remember and learn from their own actions.”
IBM’s end goal is to create a shoebox-sized chip/brain that has some 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses that runs on 1 kilowatt-hour of power (the human brain has 150 trillion synapses and needs about 20 watts). Eventually, they are looking to create cognitive computers that can take detailed input from multiple sources at the same time, process it and make a decision based on its own experiences as well as its programming. IBM has just finished phases 0 and 1 of the project and have already been experimenting with machine vision, associative memory, patterns recognition, navigation, and more.
Like I said, don’t take a hammer to your computer and networked devices just yet — the fun’s only just beginning. These brain chips could herald a whole new age of computing.
Thoughts?
New Computer Chip Modeled on a Living Brain Can Learn and Remember [Popsci]
If you have invested yourself into Google+ at all, you will be happy to know that, whether you stick with the service or not, there is an easy way to get a copy of all of your data (profile, contacts and circles, your stream, Picasa pics — even Buzz and +1s). It’s called Takeout, and it’s built right into your Google+ settings as a part of Google’s “Data Liberation Front.”
There’s no tricks to it, no caveats, and no amount of hacking genius required. It’s all a matter of a few points and clicks and a bit of hard drive space. Here’s how to do it:
There are two ways to get started:
1.) Head to this link to visit the Takeout page directly
2.) Go to Google+ settings (little gear, top right corner of the page) and select Data Liberation
If you choose the second option, you can either click on one of the services to jump to the services selection page, or can click the “Download your data” button to get to the Takeout page. Once on the Takeout page, you can click create archive to backup everything. You will find the archive available under the Downloads page, available by a three-button menu at the top of the page.
If you wish to be selective about what data you want to back up, then you want the Choose Services page (via step two or the three-button menu). Here, you can select one or all of the Google+ related services mentioned previously and create a custom archive. I suggest you head here, anyway, as this section of Takeout shows you not only the size of the archive, but the percentage each service takes up in the total download (this information is mostly available on the Downloads page as well).
The services will download as the following file-types:
- Picasa Web Albums photos: .zip
- Profile Data: .json
- Stream data: .zip
- Buzz data: .zip
- Circles and Contacts: .zip
Photos are organized by Album or Post Date, and Contacts are individual .vcf files that are organized by Circles. Your Stream data is delivered as a functional, standalone website complete with comments, images, as well as anything you have reshared.
Overall, I find Takeout to be fairly impressive as a means of manual backups or to walk away from Google+ with all of your data. The compression rate is pretty good, as well — Over 3,000 pictures in Picasa (I imported my Facebook photos, and have uploaded many more taken with my iPhone) and the total download size was under 500mb. Not bad at all!
Note: There was once small inconsistency in file size information for my photos. The Choose Sevices section said the download would be 778MB, while the downloads page said 449.8MB.
Have you used Takeout? What are your impressions? What do you think of Google’s Data Liberation initiative?
Posting your email on a website, or in a blog, social media, or forum comment, opens you up to a world of messages about making money online, viagra, the enlargement of specific body parts, and a host of other fun solicitations and potential virus links. We all know this, and we all know that the safest way to post an email link is this: don’t. If you absolutely have to, you can always try to beat the bots by posting it as an image (time consuming), or by killing the link and adding some brackets and such like this: myemail (at) adomain (dot) com. The trouble with this approach is that you are also making trying to contact you annoying for the people you want to connect with.
Here are three ways you can share your email safely and easily:
scr.im
Scr.im is a convenient and brand-efficient way to post a link to an email address. It provides you with a simple vanity url that is easy to share and doesn’t require any specific code in the link. When the link is clicked, the person — or spam-bot — is directed to a captcha page that shows an image of an alpha-numeric code and a game of match the code with one of the nine buttons on the right. If there is, for some reason, a problem with this method, you can simply click the link at the bottom to go to the tried and true “failsafe” captcha method of typing in the code from the image and clicking the “I’m a real human, honest!” button.
To get set up with scr.im, head to their site, enter your email address, click “Protect my email” and go, share, be merry. They will generate a url for you, but if you want some extra awesome, then type in your own vanity url tail in the provided field. Scr.im will automatically let you know if the url is available or not.
reCAPTCHA Mailhide
You are probably familiar with reCAPTCHA, especially if you own a blog. They have put together one of the easiest and most powerful (and best looking) captcha protections out there. They are also owned by Google, now, which I only recently became aware of. Whether that makes you feel more or less comfortable will be determined by how many Google services you already use , and how evil you feel Google is, but the reCAPTCHA Mailhide solution is a great way to safely post an email link to a website.
If you want to try it out, head to the reCAPTCHA Email Protection page and enter your email address in the given field and click “Protect It!” You will be taken to a page that provides the URL of the reCAPTCHA that will need to be solved before anyone can send you an email — which you can then share anyway you like. You can even take the (crazy, long) URL and plug it into your shortener of choice to create an nice and easy to share link. Once the captcha — which can only be solved by humans — is correctly entered, people will be presented with a page that contains an untrackable link to your actual email address.
Web security is important to the people clicking your fancy email link, as well, so if you want to assure them that they are heading toward an email address, you may want to use the customizable HTML code that is also provided by Mailhide. This code will display your email with the first four letters of your address, followed by a clickable “…” and @yourdomain.com. This code can be customized to your liking — which was especially handy in my case, as I used an address with “butter” in the beginning. Posting an email link to butt…@gmail.com is not likely to gain me more than a few laughs. (Note: the clickable … previous is for aesthetics only. It is not an active link to my email address)
If you want to know the technical protocols used by Mailhide, check out this API link.
Google+ Profile Link
If you aren’t using Google+ yet, you should be. Yeah, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid — and it’s sweet, refreshing, beautiful, and I hope it lasts. Aside from the Picasa integration, circles and other neat network and privacy controls, and the fact that social games are finally done right, Google+ also makes one hell of a way to share your email without getting attacked by spam.
The first step is to make sure your Google+ Profile (okay, okay, if you really can’t stomach using Google+ yet, you can always just use a regular old Google Profile) has a visible “Send an email” button just below your picture. To do this, you go to the settings gear in the top right, then click on “Profile and privacy,” and then the “Edit visibility on profile” button beside “Public profile information.”
Step two is click on the “Send and email” area below your profile picture, click the check-box that is next to “Allow people to email you from a link on your profile,” and then click on the dropdown that sets your visibility preferences. For the broadest case, you will want to choose “Anyone on the web” as it will allow you to safely share a link to your email with anyone. Save, and then click the “Finished editing” button at the top of the page. People can now send you email right from your Google/Google+ Profile page.
The final thing to do is to share your Profile link with others. There are a number of ways to do this, including the secure (long) Google Profile URL, using a general URL shortener or a vanity URL, or even by using your profiles.google.com/username — though that may defeat the purpose a bit if you don’t want people to know your email address (seeing as the username + @gmail.com = is your email address).
Bonus – Bugmenot
If you are after a way to sign up for services without getting spammed, none of the above methods will work for you — so check out Bugmenot, instead. Bugmenot is the perfect way to check out for a multitude of “sign up first” services using dummy emails and passwords set up by other people. It’s a great way to avoid spam and solicitations, and it saves time. You could also just use your own dummy email address.
There you have it! Three easy ways to share a link to your email address without painting yourself as a target for spam bots. If you know of any others or have had experiences with any of these methods, please share them in the comments!
8/20/11 UPDATE: Just a few days after this post went live, the developer of MenuWeather Lite announced that MenuWeather Lite would be discontinued. His web site indicates that it will remain in the App Store for a month or two, but I can no longer find it in the App Store. The paid version, now $1,99, is still there.
If you want to be able to quickly check the weather on a Mac, check out MenuWeather Lite. The app places an icon in your menu bar that displays the temperature and general conditions, such as cloudy or sunny, at a predetermined location. Click on the icon, and a dropdown list appears, showing you more detailed current conditions, and a five day forecast. The drop down also contains a link to a 10 day forecast, hour by hour forecast, radar map, and weekend and monthly forecasts.