Chad's News

This is really neat! Get the Scrabble app for the iPad, and you can use iPhones as the tile racks (via the Tile Rack app).

Link: http://www.engadget.com/…

If you want to view 3D television at home it’s not necessary to shell out big bucks for new HDMI 1.4 cables. High Speed HDMI 1.3 cables, which many people already own, can support all HDMI 1.4 features except the HDMI Ethernet Channel. It’s the HDMI 1.4 protocol that’s required for 3D television.

Link: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/…
(via The Consumerist)

Here at Chad’s News, we’ve mentioned Despair, Inc. before. But they’ve outdone themselves with a new t-shirt that takes advantage of the BP oil spill. The shirt has a BP logo and says, “BP – We’re bringing oil to American shores.” This is just one parody of many.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.despair.com/…

For the geek in your life, Victorinox is releasing a Swiss Army Knife that includes a secure USB drive.

Link #1: http://www.realwire.com/…
(via engadget)

Link #2: http://www.swissarmy.com/…

An Oregon man has broken the all-time high score in Asteroids, reaching 41,336,440 points. It took him 3½ days without sleep. Go ahead and put that on your resume!

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Walt Disney World is hosting several Star Wars Weekends this year and has been promoting them with the ads in the linked article. The Darth Maul poster is hilarious!

Link: http://www.starwars.com/…

Despite my college classes in electrical engineering, I’d never heard of memristance. First theorized in 1971 and only recently actualized, a memristor essentially has a variable resistance dependent upon the amount of charge that has passed through it.

At this point you may be asking, “And how does this relate to me?” Scientists at Hewlett-Packard have created memristors that act as persistent memory, much like the flash memory used in USB drives, iPods, smart phones, etc., but with improvements. The memristors created by HP match the speed of flash but can pack more memory into the same space. So depending on how this technology is marketed and licensed, we may actually see a successor to flash.

Another feature of HP’s memristors is that it’s possible to juxtapose the CPU and memory, where they use the same memristors for both functions. In addition, memristor-based logic circuits are capable of reprogramming themselves in a way that’s reminiscent of the human brain. These abilities don’t have an immediate market but are full of potential. And we all know that real programmers write self-modifying code.

Link #1: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via engadget)

Link #2: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #3: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

It’s normal to think of hackers as highly-talented individuals working from a basement in some foreign country. The reality, as indicated in the linked article, can be much different. Innovative Marketing Ukraine was a business—with a human resources department, holiday parties, and call center—that created malicious programs for use by hackers. The majority of the software was scareware, where it infects your computer, disables your anti-virus software, makes it almost impossible to use the internet or run programs, tells you that you have a virus, and offers to remove the virus for a fee. But it gets worse. For the people who actually pay, there’s a good chance that someone will sell the credit card information.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.reuters.com/…

The nice thing about Apple products is that they’re easy to use. Apple is the master of user interface design. The bad thing about Apple products is when you need to do something they don’t expect you to do. Case in point: I moved my iTunes directory to a different hard drive, removed the old hard drive, and then expected everything to work.

I was able to change the directory in iTunes, no problem, but my library still thought most of the songs were on the old hard drive. I figured I could export the library, make changes, and then import it, but I was wrong. You can export via iTunes, but you can’t import—go figure…. After some investigation, I found the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file (a text file) and changed its entries to reference the new drive. That didn’t work either. After launching iTunes, it un-did the changes.

I learned that iTunes stores the library information in a file named “iTunes Library.itl”, which uses a proprietary binary format and cannot be easily edited. The XML file is generated from the library.

A web search found the linked article, which discusses how to restore an iTunes library from the XML file. The secret is to replace “iTunes Library.itl” with an empty file. iTunes will then recreate the library from “iTunes Music Library.xml”.

Link: http://hifiblog.com/…