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NeuroSky MindWave: Fun with Brainwaves

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:00:00 +0000

In last week's Gearhead I discussed, in part, the science of electroencephalography or EEG … the detection and measurement of the neurological activity of the brain via electrodes attached to a subject's scalp.

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Smart hat monitors brain waves to watch fatigue levels

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:13:28 +0000

I just read an interesting article in Gizmag, an online technology newsletter, about an unreleased product called the SmartCap from Australian company EdanSafe. The SmartCap is worn as a cap and analyzes brainwaves to ascertain fatigue levels, one obvious use case being to monitor commercial drivers to reduce road accidents.

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AirPrint to almost any printer

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:00:00 +0000

If your printer doesn't support the Apple iOS AirPrint, the Lantronix xPrintServer may well be a cheaper and more useful alternative to buying a new printer

Back when I was young printing was complicated. Printer drivers were a nightmare of options and standards were rare. Now there are all sorts of standards for printing but the nightmare still continues. Even printers that sell for $50 have multiple drivers, often support various printing protocols, have multiple driver updates, and then there is the printer installation software.

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A tablet for under a Benjamin?

Mark Gibbs — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:52:43 +0000

Product names are tricky, there's no doubt about it. If you're not going to use a meaningless string of characters such as "X77-P73" then you've got your work cut out for you because it's hard to find a good name that isn't already taken by some other company. Even internal project names have to be researched, checked that they are OK to use and vetted by lawyers for liability.

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Gmail Backup, a recipe for happiness

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Before I get to this week's main topic I must give a big thumbs-up to a book that all of you who like to cook will thoroughly enjoy: "Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food" by Jeff Potter (pub. O'Reilly).

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The amazing shrinking computer

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:08:57 +0000

The quest for smaller and smaller computing devices usually involves a tradeoff between processor power, battery life, communications features, memory and storage. While the product I'm looking at today is in some respects the result of the intersection of a vision with compromises, the WIMM One from WIMM Labs is one of the slickest miniature computing devices I've seen to date.

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Cracking MD5 ... with Google?!

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The MD5 algorithm has a new vulnerability: Google!

Here's a piece of news that will worry anyone interested in security (which should be pretty much everyone who reads Network World): A programmer by the name of Juuso Salonen has created a Ruby script called BozoCrack that cracks MD5 hashed passwords with remarkable success and with very little effort.

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Finding yourself ... more iOS maps

Mark Gibbs — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:32:32 +0000

A while ago I got over-excited about maps on the iPad and promised more of the same in the future and now, the future has arrived.

This week I have two iOS map apps that I think are really good. The first is Navigon North America published by Navigon AG which works on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Grazing: Better browsing under iOS

Mark Gibbs — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 05:00:00 +0000

If you use an iPad or an iPhone and you're at all technical you'll probably have a love-hate relationship with the default Safari browser. The problem is that Safari does the job but it just seems so, well, simplistic and lacks a certain desirable "nerdiness." You can do all sorts of cool stuff with other browsers on other operating systems, but Safari on iOS? Yawn. But I have an answer!

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Programming in Lua

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:03:52 +0000

I haven't talked about programming languages for a while so here goes: We start this week with the free, open source (MIT License) Lua language.

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