A life less private

Posts Tagged ‘Science and Technology’

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Waterproof and Eco-Friendly Concrete?

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I have to say, this sounds like quite the little product, and a great example of green tech being better than its substitute.  Hycrete has found a way to make waterproof concrete, which will greatly its versatility and longevity as a building material, improving how and where it can be used.  What’s more:

Hycrete allows contractors to not use plastic membranes, which in turn lets the builders earn points under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. The more LEED points you get, the greener your building is.

Green tech is better tech.

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More Pondering on Email

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

All-around smart girl and former co-worker Amy asks a question that’s been on my mind recently (as I alluded to here): Why does email suck so much?

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Comcast Caught Hanging Up on P2P Networks

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

I’ve never been more thrilled to not be a Comcast internet customer than right now.  For all that money that their customers pay for their broadband, you would hope they were at least getting that broadband without Comcast sneakily filtering any of it.  Well, put that pipe dream out of your mind, because the Associated Press did some testing and found that Comcast has been screwing around with peer-to-peer downloads on their network (also here, with more technical depth).

The tests involved transferring a copy of the King James Bible through the BitTorrent network on Time Warner Cable, Cablevison, AT&T and two Comcast connections (in Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco). Only the Comcast-connected computers were affected.

This is significant. The Gutenberg version of the King James Bible is only 4.24MB, which is relatively tiny and indicates that Comcast was singling out even small files.

This is yet another battle in the fight over network neutrality.

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Gaining Control Over My Inboxes

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Drowning in an ocean of information is easy to do these days — especially email.  For a while I had known about the existence of the theory of “Inbox Zero” made prominent by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame, but never took the time to actually find the time to learn about it.

Once I learned of the existence of a video presentation Merlin did for the Google Talks series, I decided to bite the bullet and give it the hour of viewing time.  Ever since, I’ve found my digital life to be a whole lot less cluttered.  And some of these same principals can be applied to other kinds of info, such as the daily digesting of feeds from other sites.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to dealing with it.

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Bionic Arm and Arm

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

It’s not often you can tie together video games and prosthetic limbs into a single posts, but both these things crossed my screen today, and in light of my previous post, I’m feel pro-bionic anything right now.

On the entertainment side of things, Capcom is bringing the Bionic Commando franchise onto the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. The new art style they’ve seemed to take with it is pretty good, especially that wicked looking arm.

Of course, it’s not quite as awesome as the work Dean Kaman and his people are doing on behalf of DARPA’s robotic prosthetic arm project. I dare not think what those who lose limbs on the battlefield have to endure, but it’s good to know that there are still those who strive to try and improve their quality of life.

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