Chad's News

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that are becoming popular here in the United States. They can contain text, web links, calendar events, vCard addresses, and much more. Some people even put them on their gravestones! You scan them with your smartphone to pull up the desired information.

The linked website allows you to create custom QR codes. Josh, a friend of Chad’s News, suggests making one that contains your vCard data and then setting that image as the lock screen for your smartphone. Should you lose your phone, your contact details are right there for anyone who finds it and wants to return it.

Link: http://www.qrstuff.com/

The Chromebook is a “nothing but the web” laptop that runs Google’s Chrome browser on top of Google Chrome OS. It has the capability to upload and download files to a thumb drive but has almost no local storage. Any programs you run on it must be web applications that can be executed within a browser. With the increasing popularity of the cloud, however, it’s not too difficult to work within these constraints. Note that Chromebooks are manufactured by several different companies, and that Google itself is not one of them.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

Last New Year’s Eve, a suicide bomber in Russia was preparing to blow herself up amongst the crowds in Red Square. The bomb was to be triggered remotely by a handler, who would send a text message to a cell phone attached to the explosives. Unfortunately for the bomber, the phone received an unexpected and unwanted text several hours before the planned detonation. The bomb exploded, killing her and no one else.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

A man named Rodney Knight broke in to the home of Washington Post journalist Marc Fisher and stole two laptops, $400 in cash, and a winter coat. That alone does not qualify him for the coveted Chad’s News “stupid criminal” tag. What does qualify him is that, using one of the stolen laptops, he posted a picture of himself (with the coat and cash) on the Facebook page of Fisher’s son. Knight has been sentenced to 44 months in jail for the burglary and an unrelated charge of carrying a pistol without a license.

Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/…
(via Neatorama)

Google and Facebook are offering two-factor authentication to help prevent your account from being hijacked. In both cases, you give them your phone number, then when you log in using your normal username and password, they send a code to your phone. You must enter the code as part of the login process. Gmail does this for every login, while for Facebook it’s only when you log in from a device that hasn’t already been verified.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link #1 (Gmail): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…

Link #2 (Facebook): http://www.facebook.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Did your metal screw strip out the wooden hole? There are many ways to fix it, but a quick and easy method is to line the hole with toothpicks. Depending on the size of the hole, a golf tee may also do the job.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

One of the advertised benefits of cloud computing is high availability and redundancy. Back in April, however, some of Amazon’s cloud storage services suffered an outage that lasted for about three days, bringing down websites of several high-profile customers.

The initial problem was quickly fixed, but oddly enough, the extended outage was caused by the cloud management software attempting to prevent the loss of data. Amazon essentially performed a denial-of-service attack on its own storage servers which took three days to fix.

This event brings up an inherent problem with cloud computing: complexity. As a programmer, I know that error-handling code tends to go untested (or has minimal testing), just because it can be difficult to create the errors necessary to exercise the code, or because it takes too much time and money in a competitive business environment. It’s obvious that Amazon did not test for the type of situation that occurred on April 21^st. The linked article makes the argument that cloud computing systems have much more complexity than would the individual systems in a non-cloud environment. So cloud providers, to prevent these types of outages from happening in the future, will have to learn how to better deal with complexity.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Russian scientist Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski has the distinction of being the only person to ever stick his head into a running particle accelerator. The linked article explains all.

Link: http://www.todayifoundout.com/…
(via mental_floss)

It’s been my experience that most lists of Word tips aren’t all that useful. The linked article, however, is an exception. It explains, for example, how to perform a vertical text selection, undo automatic changes, and move table text up or down.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…