Tag: hard drive

Eye Video Camera

On By Michel McDonaldIn TechLeave a comment

Filmmaker shows off eye-mounted wireless video camera – Source Dvice.com

Check this out.  This filmmaker invented an eye mounted wireless video camera that he can plans to use to film a documentary.  He lost an eye as a child and so he has a prosthetic eye.

This would have a very good use for blind people, that is if it had a chip that attached to the brain so that the blind person can see everything that the bionic eye can see.  They could remove the blind eyes and put in 2 prosthetic eyes with the camera installed into them.  I don’t see how you would be able to move the eyes though so I don’t know how that would work.  Although, they could just remove 1 eye because you probably only need 1 good eye to see.

I can see some other uses for this like for example video making, since it’s wireless you can have it recording to a hard drive in your pocket like the size of a USB drive then when you are finished recording you can put it on your computer to edit.

But the con side of that is you could be intimate with someone and they won’t know that you are video taping and then you could put it all over the internet and that person would be humiliated forever.

But, I can also see a good side.  If you are robbed at gunpoint or maybe even killed the police can look at the video to see who robbed and or killed you.

Piracy would be so much easier with this too.  People would go to the movies and be video taping it with their eye, they’d have to keep real still, don’t sneeze.  Then put it out there for all to see.  Same with concerts.  It’s bad enough that there are too many pirates out there stealing money from the movie industry by selling illegal DVDs, I can just imagine that they would find out that they are using a bionic eye then they would have an eye scanner all over the place so you can’t record.  But what if you are blind?  What then?

There are many pros and cons to this and I’m not exactly sure if this will ever happen but who knows, it might be sooner than you think.  I’m sure it will cost several thousands of dollars and it will only go to those who can’t see and there probably won’t be a hard drive for video taping but more a chip attached to the brain for blind people to see.  That’s fair enough.  If they knew it could be used for illegal purposes then they would become illegal to have very fast.

Amazon Kindle 2

On By Michel McDonaldIn Books, eBook, Kindle, TechLeave a comment

In my previous blog about e-books I talked about the pro’s and con’s of e-books.  Well, most of the day I’ve been obsessively researching e-book technology and I have to say that I’m really excited about the future.

E-books use e-ink.  They don’t hardly use any power so the battery lasts a whole week.  You turn it on, press the menu and find the book you are reading, and by the way it shows in that menu the page you were on so you don’t have to find where you were at, it keeps it bookmarked from the last page you were reading.  Then you click the book you want to read and start reading.  Once that page is loaded it stops using any of the power from the battery.  You can have it sitting there for an hour on that page and it won’t use any power.  Once you press the button to turn the page then it uses power to turn the page then you see the words change and then no more power usage.  The battery will last basically a week before you have to charge it at all.  And when you do charge it, it takes about 2 hours to charge.

If however you are flipping through the Amazon website and flipping through pages of a e-magazine then yeah, it’s going to use a lot more of your battery and it will probably last 2 or 3 days before needing charged.

I love the idea of waking up every morning and the newspaper is already downloaded on your kindle.

It would also be good if the catalog companies would deliver their catalogs directly to your Kindle so that you don’t have to 1, wait for them to come in the mail and clog up your mail box and 2, waste paper when you throw it out.  This way you can flip through them then delete the file when you are finished reading it.  That is if you decide you want to, you can keep it if you want.

Another thing I want to obsess er um I mean discuss is the hard drive.  The previous Kindle 1 from last year only has a 256mb hard drive allowing you to store 200 e-books but the new Kindle 2 has a 2GB allowing you to have a hell of a lot more.  I don’t know exactly how many but it’s a lot.  Can you just imagine maybe in another year or 2 when they come out with the Kindle 3 it might have 2TB.  Then you will have a crap load of books and magazines and newspapers.  You won’t ever have to delete anything because you will have tons of room.

As I said in my last post, I’m waiting for it to be cheaper, in color and have touch screen.  Well, I watched a video today of the guy who invented Amazon talking to Martha Stewart and she kept mentioning color e-ink and he said it was in the labs.  Not their labs but in labs period.  Well, I’ve been seeing e-books with color e-ink so I know it is possible and I’m sure in Kindle 3 it will have color e-ink.

My other issue is about the touch screen.  I think it is a lot better than buttons.  I saw an e-book from Dvice.com that was touch screen, all you do is press and drag the page and it turns the page, or you just press the right side of the pager to flip it.  And also when you are on the website trying to buy a book you touch the screen for the keyboard and it comes up so you can type the name of the author or book title.  I think the Kindle keyboard is just too much.  Although it does have more of a use than just buying books, you can make notes in your books.  You can also highlight sentences.

XP Antivirus 2008

On By Michel McDonaldIn Computer, Scams, Tech1 Comment

I was looking at a website and it said that I needed to download active-x or something to view a video and we had to go to the grocery store real quick. When we came home I noticed Norton Anti-virus was going nuts saying it was blocking a virus and I saw this program running called Antivirus XP 2008 on my screen saying I had all these viruses on my computer and wanted me to click something to get rid of them. I knew something was wrong because I didn’t install that program and for some reason it wouldn’t allow me to uninstall it through the control panel. I used the laptop to search for it on Yahoos search engine and found this:

http://www.xp-vista.com/spyware-removal/xp-antivirus-2008-removal-instructions-xp-antivirus-2008

Please, take a look at the pictures and memorize them so if this happens to you then you will be able to arm yourself. You don’t have to bookmark this site or keep the email if you don’t have this issue but just remember to search for it through a search engine so you can be able to get rid of it. I was able to get rid of it but I had to follow the instructions on this website. I hope for your sake you don’t get this but in case you do make sure you get rid of it right away. Oh, one of the things you will notice is that your screen will be blue or maroon, your wallpaper will be gone. That is a good indication that you have problems.

Update: After I went through all the steps to remove this thing I went to lay down on my bed to watch TV and I noticed that it went to the Windows Login screen so I got up and clicked my name and went to see the screen saver settings, I right clicked the desktop and clicked Properties and there are 2 tabs missing.  Desktop and Screen saver.  They are gone!  I don’t know how to get it back.  If I have to reformat my hard drive I’m gonna be pissed.

Another update: I get these email supposedly from CNN.  They are usually 1 line emails with a link and I clicked it to see the video for a news story and it said that I needed the active x thing and that is what happened.  I was trying to see a news story.  I am not going to click any of those emails ever again and just assume it’s a link to a virus.  My Norton is still finding virus’s left over from that and deleting them.  So, if you get emails from CNN make damn sure they are really from CNN and not a fake website.  Just go directly to CNN.com instead just to be safe.

My Laptop

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

My laptop has been driving me nuts cause it’s so slow when it loads. Last night I made a backup of the hard drive onto an external drive so this morning I can reformat but the DVD drive wont read the windows cd so I just decided to just clean it up which is what I should have done in the first place. The hard drive only had 7% free space and now it has 32%.