Automation Adventures

Well, it’s been very busy here the last couple of days. At home that is, the blog was kinda quiet. The hectic schedule from a couple of weeks ago has changed into taking care of a new baby.

Last Thursday, at 7:58AM, we became the proud parents of a little baby girl, named Diana. We got home from the hospital last Sunday, and are now trying to adjust to taking care of 7 pounds of little woman. Mother and daughter are doing fine, but they are demanding a lot of my time.

So, posting on the blog will be a little slow these days/weeks. Bear with me (that’s what I tell my daughter too when I try to change her diaper, and so far, she has….).

Tags: blog, diana

A hectic schedule at work and at home has prevented me from reporting on the MacWord announcements Steve Jobs made in his keynote. A quick round-up:

• Office 2008 native on Intel
• Time Capsule, an external hard drive companion to Time Machine, with a built-in Airport Extreme base station. Two versions, 500GB ($299) and 1TB ($499), ships in February.
• iPhone update: SDK in late February, now maps with locations, SMS to multiple people, webclips
• iPod Touch has upgrade to get all this. Existing users have to pay $20 to upgrade.
• iTunes movie rentals. Regular $2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases. HD costs a dollar more.
• AppleTV take 2 – no computer required, but can sync to one. HD movie rentals. Integration with Flickr and YouTube. Price dropped to $229.
• World’s thinnest notebook – the Apple MacBook Air. 13.3 inch widescreen, 3 pounds, 0.76 to 0.16 inches thick, iSight camera, full size LED backlit keyboard, large trackpad with multi touch gestures (like on the iPhone and iPod Touch), 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 hours battery life, 1.8″ harddrive 80GB standard, 64GB SSD optional, 1.6GHz Core Duo. No optical drive – need to have it as USB connected drive, or borrow one from a PC or a Mac. Priced at $1799, and ships in two weeks.

Nice announcements, on top of the Mac Pro with 8 cores announced last week. The Apple Air is sexy and sharp, looks like you can cut someone with it. Time Capsule’s saving grace is the wireless base station, otherwise it’s just a high-priced USB drive. AppleTV v.2 might be just what AppleTV needed to take off, combined with the movie rentals. It sucks to have to pay $20 for an iPod touch upgrade, but it beats having your device obsoleted a couple of weeks after you purchase it.

Unfortunately, nothing earth shattering. Which seems to be reflected in the AAPL stock price: hovering around $177 beginning of this week, it now dipped down to about $163. That’s only a little higher than their three-month low of mid-November. I wonder what will Apple come up with around May (gut feeling they have “one more thing” up their sleeve)?

Tags: air, apple, appletv, iphone, ipod touch, itunes, mac, macbook, office 2008

Science Daily has an article describing how silicon nanowires can be used to capture body heat, and use that energy to power a wide array of devices. Some examples could be the Department of Energy’s hydrogen fuel cell-powered “Freedom CAR,” and personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell-phones and other electronic devices.

Apparently the human body generates over 25,000 BTUs in body heat, and more bioelectricity than a 120V battery. That should be enough to power a cell phone, and then some. Hopefully the machines won’t find out how efficient we are at generating energy…

Tags: battery, body heat, human, matrix, power

So, with all the dangers lurking out there, we all use https connections to our servers, have SSL sessions, use PGP keys to sign and encrypt our email, and run a plethora of scanners to keep our computers virus- and adware-free. But how about a keylogger that picks up your wireless keyboard transmissions?

This is not a new problem. A man in Norway saw his neighbor typing on his screen, because his wireless keyboard’s receiver was picking up his neighbor’s keyboard. In this case it was the same brand computer, and the same brand wireless keyboard. Encryption would prevent that from happening. But now that the Swiss security firm DreamLab Technologies has discovered that the popular Microsoft Wireless Keyboards use an encryption that can be cracked by a simple PDA, using even a so-called secure wireless keyboard becomes a serious security risk.

In the white paper mentioned in the press release, the two researchers describe in broad terms what happens between a wireless keyboard and the receiver, and how easy it is to eavesdrop on a session. The frequency used is in the 27MHz band, for which a large number of receivers is available. Most keyboards should have only a limited range, but under the right circumstances and with the right antenna distances of a mile have been achieved.

Not all wireless keyboards have the same problems, however. Logitech uses a different technology to encrypt the communication between keyboard and receiver. Also, Bluetooth keyboards are possibly more secure. The two researchers (Max Moser and Philipp Schroedel) are continuing to investigate the security of the different wireless keyboards.

In the mean time, I suggest not using your wireless keyboard for anything but the most innocent of traffic. If you want to control your media center with it, that’s fine. Just don’t go online with your bank, without hooking up a keyboard cable.

There is a demo video on the Dreamlab Technologies website, showing their exploit in action. Within a minute the viewer is watching two different keyboards being picked up and cracked.

Tags: cracked, dreamlab, keyboard, microsoft, Security, wireless

Microsplot has an interesting article contradicting Microsoft’s slogan “100 Reasons You’ll Be Speechless“. Au contrair, MS. People are talking more than ever about Vista, and not all of it is Wow.

Some of the items are not entirely Microsoft’s fault, such as not supplying disks with a new computer, but the majority of the issues are directly to be blamed on Microsoft. You can see a number of quotes from articles around the web for each of the points brought forward in the article.

The 100 things in a nutshell:

1. Vista is a flop. A disaster. Dead.
2. Vista is one of the 10 worst tech products of 2007!
3. Vista is the most disappointing tech product of 2007!
4. This took five years?
5. What happened to all the promised features in Vista?
6. Vista isn’t ready for release!
7. Vista? Yawn.
8. Vista? Why?
9. Vista: The end of the Microsoft empire?
10. Abandon Vista, Microsoft! (more…)

Tags: vista, Windows, wow