Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Daily Crunch: On Off

1399Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: The HTC Puccini Tab Nears Release, But Is There Room For Yet Another Honeycomb Tab? After Price Drop: Nintendo Japan Sells 215K 3DS Units In 7 Days The CKIE Duet Has 8GB Of Storage Built-In DIY Device Mutes Your TV When Someone You Don?t Like Is Mentioned The Problem With Partners: Fake VisualHub Update Aims To Make Bank On Unsupported Software

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/17/daily-crunch-on-off/

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How Secure is My Password lets you know just that

howsecureismypassword
We've all heard it before; you need to select a lengthy password, one that's hard to guess. Not a dictionary word. And it has to have some capital letters in it too, and some digits, and a symbol or two won't hurt either.

That's a handy set of rules to keep in mind, but How Secure is My Password helps us understand why they're important.

It's basically like a full-screen version of one of those password-strength meters websites sometimes use. But instead of showing you a bar going from "weak" to "strong", it shows you an estimation of how long your password would take to crack. That's a much more visceral way to understand why your password is strong.

For example, when I entered "rabbit", it came back with "your password is one of the 500 most common passwords. It could be cracked almost instantly". "rabbit5" would take two hours, "$rabbit5" would take 38 days, and "$rabbitZ5" would take 237 years. It's quite enlightening to see what a difference three simple characters can make.

How Secure is My Password lets you know just that originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/05/how-secure-is-my-password-lets-you-know-just-that/

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Fetish: Prism Zero G Glider Kite

Fetish: Prism Zero G Glider Kite
This glider kite has a special design that enables it to float not only in light breezes, but also in no breeze at all, so you can toss it like a glider.
    


Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661457/s/2d70d12c/l/0L0Swired0N0Cgadgetlab0C20A130C0A60Cgl0Ifetishkite0C/story01.htm

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Google Voice Search learns Latin American Spanish, Indonesian, and Malaysian

google voice search
Google Voice Search has just introduced localizations for Latin America, Indonesia and Malaysia, enabling native language search for hundreds of millions of users.

Google's official blog post offers some interesting insights into the process of collecting and analyzing the speech data needed to expand support. Thousands of hours were spent gathering voice samples and choosing key regional accents to analyze, and International Program Manager Linne Ha is clearly very appreciative of the Google users who helped the company complete the expansion. Without an enthusiastic base of users to lend a hand, Google Voice Search's polyglot powers would have been nearly impossible to deliver.

Google Voice Search learns Latin American Spanish, Indonesian, and Malaysian originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/31/google-voice-search-learns-latin-american-spanish-indonesian-a/

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Amazon Makes Your Boring Facebook Birthday Posts Worth Something

Amazon Makes Your Boring Facebook Birthday Posts Worth Something
Posting a Facebook birthday greeting is the lowest level of well wishing. Now you can take the laziest birthday greeting and add something tangible, an Amazon gift card.
    


Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661457/s/2d764976/l/0L0Swired0N0Cgadgetlab0C20A130C0A60Camazon0Ebirthday0Egift0C/story01.htm

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Monday, June 24, 2013

Medical E-Booking Platform ZocDoc Opens Up $55 Million In New Convertible Debt

zocdocZocDoc, the company that makes a web-centric platform for booking health appointments, has drawn on $2 million of a new $55 million convertible debt note. In a phone call this afternoon, ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said that the debt note is being provided by a "handful of folks." He declined to provide further details on the entities involved.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/UiMUjPcMRKo/

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Author Barbara Ehrenreich Revisits Her 1987 Look at the Future of Sex

Author Barbara Ehrenreich Revisits Her 1987 Look at the Future of Sex

The January 1987 issue of the legendary (and sadly, now defunct) Omni magazine included predictions from 14 "great minds" about what the world might look like in twenty years. By the year 2007, musician David Byrne believed that computers would do little for future musicians outside of their bookkeeping. Noted rich guy Bill Gates wondered how much stimulation (read: overstimulation) people of the future might be able to handle. And feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich predicted that by the 21st century, ideas about sexual dysfunction and what constitutes a healthy sexual relationship will have changed dramatically.

I sent Ehrenreich an email to ask about her predictions. She responded with a note that the short piece attributed to her in Omni looked like something that was taken from an interview, rather than something she wrote. Either way, it's a fascinating (and rather prescient) look at the future of sex and relationships from the perspective of the 1980s.

Here's what she had to say a quarter century ago:

Sex will continue to be on center stage in the next 20 years. There are good reasons for that. It's only recently that large numbers of people have begun to think of sex as a pleasurable part of their lives, quite apart from some function such as reproduction. For many years we've had birth control, but the realization that sex can be something that is not connected to some other purpose in life is just gaining hold. People are understanding their own particular sexual needs for the first time.

A redefinition of heterosexual sex is occurring in which sex will be less bound to genital interaction. It's no longer just foreplay plus intercourse. The women's sexual revolution declared that women were not getting enough pleasure, and what is evolving is a much more varied kind of encounter that does not have to culminate in penetration and ejaculation by the man.

Our present notions of sexual dysfunction will look archaic in 20 years. It will seem incredible that all of our notions of sexual dysfunction came from a narrow notion of sex centered on intercourse.

We will, of course, continue to move away from a medical model of sexuality, which separates sexual activity into normal patterns over here and the dysfunctions or the illnesses over there. As we develop a broader definition of sexuality, it will appear particularly quaint to talk about dys- functions.

We won't rely on doctors or sexologists to define the problems or provide the answers. The biggest change in sex in the last 20 years has been that ordinary lay-people have begun to write about their experiences and have begun to introduce the subjective element.

In 20 years more people are going to have long periods of time when they are not in a marriage or other long-term sexual relationship. They should have options that do not depend on getting emotionally involved. You just might want to rent an exciting videotape instead of having an affair. I also think the sex-products industry will become important to people in monogamous marriage relationships and help keep those relationships together by an active interest in sexual possibilities.

There are issues that barely have been uncovered or discussed during the recent so-called sexual revolution. Why does our culture limit the idea of what is sexually attractive? Why do we limit it to people who are young and pretty in a conventional way? How do we begin to change that so that the possibility of being a sexually assertive person is open to all of us who fall outside the bounds of conventional attractiveness? American culture is already showing that its members are not ready to be asexual when they're fifty.

Twenty years ago I really believed that by this time we would be a much more egalitarian society. I really believed that by 1987 we wouldn't have about 20 percent of our own citizens in a state of poverty. In 20 years we have gone backward.

In response to how accurate she thinks her prediction was, Ehrenreich said, "I think was more or less right. Look at gay marriage!"

And aside from some minor nitpicking about the technology behind the "rent an exciting videotape" part, it does seem like she got a lot right. The most notable absentee is internet porn, and who could've predicted that before the world wide web even existed?

Source: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/author-barbara-ehrenreich-revisits-her-1987-look-at-the-552097723

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Thumb Your Nose at the NSA With Raspberry Pi

Thumb Your Nose at the NSA With Raspberry Pi
Adafruit has created a handy how-to to help you build a wireless access point that anonymizes your internet browsing using Tor and a Raspberry Pi.
    


Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661457/s/2d4d0a26/l/0L0Swired0N0Cgadgetlab0C20A130C0A60Cthumb0Eyour0Enose0Eat0Ethe0Ensa0Ewith0Eraspberry0Epi0C/story01.htm

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Have Your Next Suit Fitted With Computers, Cut With Lasers

Have Your Next Suit Fitted With Computers, Cut With Lasers
Chicago company Proper Suit is bringing a dash of technology to the tailoring world.
    


Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661457/s/2d6b1977/l/0L0Swired0N0Cgadgetlab0C20A130C0A60Creview0Eproper0Ecustom0Esuits0C/story01.htm

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BattlePaint is an addictive geometric shooter game

battlepaint
In BattlePaint, you play a cube. In fact, you're not even a cube -- just a square. But boy, are you fast! And you can shoot in all directions. That's important, because there are baddies coming in from all over the place.

The "baddies" are swarms of other squares, in all sorts of pretty colors. They track you all over the screen, and you run around very quickly and just shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. If that doesn't sound very emotionally deep, it's because it isn't. But it's fun!

After you shoot a baddy, it splashes paint as it disappears. You need to skate across this blob of paint and "eat it up" to get points. This game is fast. It clocked in at around 60-70 FPS on my system, and was loads of fun to play. It does tend to insult you when you die, though, but don't be offended -- I don't think it's personal.

BattlePaint is an addictive geometric shooter game originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 09 Mar 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/09/battlepaint-is-an-addictive-geometric-shooter-game/

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