After reading an article today on making your iPhone more secure by adding a duplicate digit to your lock code, I though that perhaps I should look at my fingers’ tell-tale signs. The article describes how that someone could potentially look at your finger residue and determine which digits you use to unlock your phone, thus eliminating much of the guesswork to hack in.

While it appears I’m safe from this type of finger press detection, at least at this moment, I did find it interesting to find that I do leave tell-tale signs on how I most often interact with the phone.

The top section has mostly down-swipe strokes. This would be bringing down the notifications area.

The mid-top section is mostly untouched.

The mid-bottom section mostly consists of right-swipe strokes. This would probably be moving forward through news and social updates.

The bottom section consists individual presses. Most likely from using the virtual keyboard and app icons.

The search and back permanent buttons are the most used where as the home button is used a little and the menu button is rarely used.

I’d have to say most of these impressions came from my right thumb. I wonder if there’s any long-term effects to my poor thumb leaving all its skin oil behind and all that dragging?

Anyway, this natural heat-map methodology is kind of gross. Time to clean the screen.

I update my host file a lot due to many VPN connections and locations I commute to.

Normally I would have to open notepad as an administrator, hope the etc path is still remembered, if not traverse those multiple directories, change the file types to any, open hosts, modify, save and close.

But I finally thought of a way to same me some time by creating a simple shortcut on my desktop.

1. Create a new shortcut
2. Update the Target property to “%windir%\system32\notepad.exe C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts”
3. Rename the shortcut to something like “Edit Hosts File”

Now each time just run the shortcut as the administrator and no having to track down the hosts file anymore.

I still remember being amazed by the stunning video of Earth from space while watching one of the few IMAX productions I’ve seen in life. It was probably back in 1997 with the “Mission to Mir” IMAX documentary. Shown on a specially coated silver screen stories high shot with large format film; It was the beginning of high-definition video.

Since then we’ve grown used to being able to see house-wide images from space on our computer screens and smart phones. The view of Earth has become mainstream and lost a bit of its artistic appeal – until Michael Konig pieced together 18 time-lapse video shots from the International Space Station from August to October of 2011. These time-lapse videos where taken with a low-light camera and bring back the art of the Earth at night including clips of the Aurora Borealis.

This is a must see check it out in full-screen mode.

As some of you may know I am a volunteer EMT with a small town in Nebraska. About a year ago we, along with many other departments, purchased an upgraded Defibrillator unit.

Many picture a Defibrillator being those two paddles that jolt you back to life. While those still exist in many different forms, the more common unit is much more simple, yet much more complex. They’ve replaced the paddles with a set of pads that stick to your skin. Just slap them on and free your hands for other use.

Another misconception is that the jolt the Defibrillator magically starts your heart. It actually does the opposite. When you have what’s called a “shock-able heart rhythm” your heart is actually beating too shallow, too fast, randomly, or out of sequence. The shock delivered actually stops your heart so it can reset itself. It’s kind of like when the power goes out on a server and then automatically turns back on when the power comes back on.

It used to be that shocking you would literally cook part of your heart and surrounding tissue because it was such an overpowered and inefficient power surge. They’ve since then fixed that automatically tuning the power output and frequency to be the most efficient and least damaging as possible.

But outside of adding a computer to regulate the shock and changing out the paddles the concept has pretty much stayed the same. It’s a proven way to save a person’s life with specific and deadly cardiac issues.

What has changed is what’s considered the STEMI (ST segment elevation myocardial infarction) Alert. When you have a blocked artery providing the necessary blood flow to the heart every second counts. Each second that passes means more heart muscle that dies. In this case the national goal is to get you into surgery within 90-minutes of onset.

Lets say you are having chest pain and an ambulance arrives. There is the possibility that you may get the attention of either an EMT such as myself or a Paramedic. EMT’s will use the automated features of the Defibrillator. If you are going into cardiac arrest we place the two pads on you and let the computer take over advising us when to shock or to perform CPR. We can also place additional leads to get an all-around picture of your heart. However we are not trained to read or interpret the wave segments that those leads produce.

Technology now steps in. Either via a wireless modem or a Bluetooth connection to a cell phone we can transmit your EKG readout to the hospital we are headed to. There they can interpret your readout and prepare further if needed. The hospital can now advise a cardiologist or get the Cath Lab ready to receive you.

Now if you have a Paramedic respond to your situation they are trained to interpret your EKG readout and take additional actions. Not only can they inject potentially life saving drugs but they can activate the STEMI alert. At this point they alert the hospital of the elevated ST segment on your EKG and then also send the EKG readout wirelessly to the hospital for a team to confirm the STEMI.  This essentially bypasses the emergency department upon arrival and sends you directly to the Cath Lab.

In a recent case a man had a life-saving balloon in his artery within 26 minutes of onset. That’s 1/3 the time of the 90 minutes national goal. This is thanks to the remote view the hosptial had of the patients heart while en-route to the hospital. Some departments have gone a little further and provide a direct audio/visual link between the patient/responder and the hospital staff.

We will continue to see remote technological innovation in the health care industry from an emergency response to in-home care. Doctors already have the ability to use their smartphone to bring up a hospital patient’s live EKG and vitals from anywhere in the world reducing response time to a potentially life-threatening or life-diminishing situation.

In Omaha there a quite a few supermarkets to choose from for groceries including Bag and Save, Bakers, Hy-Vee, No Frills, Super Saver, Walmart and more. But I’ve taken notice of one lately: Hy-Vee. They have started to make a move similar to Walgreens and Walmart; they have begun rebuilding or remodeling their stores from cookie-cutter box stores to a more inviting and unique stores.

This transition includes promoting more healthy and organic foods, kind of a middle-man between store XYZ and Whole Foods (which I’ve never been to). But was has been bringing me back more and more is their prominent displays of the NuVal scores. They are an easily recognizable icon next to each product’s price bar that contains a number from 1-100. The greater the number, the healthier the food choice for that food category.

What has caught my attention are facts such as Kraft Fat Free Italian Dressing is has a worse rating than the original. Another example would be noticing the salted and non-salted canned green beans. I’m going to put the same amount of salt on my green beans after I cook it, so I might as well start with none, thus increasing the product’s NuVal score by quite a few points. Even going after the frozen broccoli, some have a higher score because they are preserved or seasoned differently.

Continue reading →

In Feb 2007 WP.com (WordPress) blogged they where running:

• 152 Physical Processors
• 511 GB of RAM
• 174 Hard Drives
• Several Tera-bytes of Storage

Now 4 years later they are at:

• 2,475 Physical Processors w/ 8,291 CPU Cores
• 8,200 GB of RAM
• 1.3 TB RAM Drives
• 1.3 Peta-bytes of Storage
• 8.9 TB of Solid State Disks
• Plus Amazon S3 as a Backup

So here’s my two cents to add to the load: That’s pretty impressive numbers for a blogging service.

I have a Word 2010 document that is pre-populated as a template for writing specifications. It’s nicely laid out with headers, footers, and numbering for sections and sub-sections.

However I can’t get a screen shot to paste correctly for the life of me. I tried using Jing, Alt-Print Screen, and copying from Paint.

Here’s how I can get it to show up:

• Create a new document and paste
• Randomly select different parts of the document and the image might show up on random parts of the document either full length or cut off the page.
• Save the image and insert it into the document using Insert > Picture

None of the above will help me though.

Here’s what I tried, but will not work:

• Switch to a different document view
• Try every type of Text Wrap
• Made sure the placeholder option was disabled
• Bring Forward, Send Backward
• Align to Page, Align to Margin
• … and much more

I know it’s on the page “somewhere” because if I open the “Selection and Visibility” view it’s there and I can format the “invisible picture”. If I give the image a “Picture Layout” I can sometimes see the image being formated.

I searched and searched Google. Turned off smart pasting. Now I’m giving up and saving the image to insert it that way.

If you’ve run into this before, I would love to hear your suggestions as this is a huge time waster! Thanks in advance.

Today in the local news there was a headline “Ring Tone Triggered Dog’s Attack, Owner Says”.

Say what?

Apparently this dog has never shown any signs of aggression before. (lost count how many times I’ve heard this before)

The owner’s friend’s cell phone rang, which mimic’s a dog in distress. Thus the dog thought something was wrong and attacked the source.

So moral of the story, unless you don’t like parts of your body intact, don’t set animal sounds as your ring tone that might prompt attack!

The city voted, and let the owner keep the dog due to the circumstances. Which for the record if you name your dog “Tank” I’m not so sure it’s the sweetest dog in the world.
http://www.ketv.com/news/27024435/detail.html