No company out there wants to admit it, but the fact is, there’s always a reasonable chance they’ll get hacked. If they don’t encrypt your data, those hacks reveal all kinds of information about you very easily. So, to see who’s doing encryption well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation decided to come up with a chart that looks at a number of the big companies. Read more…
See original article:
This Infographic Shows Which Sites Properly Encypt Your Data
Half of the fun of the holidays is ripping into presents from family and friends or watching someone else do it . We might feel just a twinge or two of guilt as we crumple shreds of once-pristine paper waste into a trash bag and toss it to the curb for garbage collection, but what the hell, you’re on much-needed vacation and you left all of your cares at the office. Wrong. The facts: In 2011, Great Britain alone racked up 227, 000 miles of wasted paper after the holiday season. (That’s enough paper to wrap the world nine times over around the equator.) And according to a study done by Stanford, if every American wrapped three presents in reused materials, the saved paper would cover 45, 000 football fields. The upshot of the guilt trip is that it leads to solutions like wrapping your gifts in the comics section and recycle it when the present party is done, or, say, reusable packaging . UK-based agency BEAF does the DIYers one better with Eden Paper, wrapping paper for the rest of us that you can plant once you’re finished tearing into those gifts. It’s simple: By planting the used paper in some soil and watering it like a regular potted plant, you’ll see sprouts in no time. As with Democratech’s sprouting pencil and plantable OAT Shoes , the gift wrap is produced with the seeds embedded right into the paper. The brand is currently offering the paper in five flavors—chili peppers, onions, carrots, tomatoes and broccoli—but looks to include various flowers and herbs in the future. The gift wrap looks good, too—as good as it tastes, I’m sure. Design-wise, it’s a much-needed upgrade from a lot of the holiday wrap you see around the time of year. There’s only so much you can take when it comes to iridescent snowflakes and glittery ornaments. (more…)
Read the original post:
Eden’s (Plantable) Paper Takes the Cake When it Comes to Holiday Gift Wrapping Must-Haves
The original Kindle Paperwhite. Cesar Torres Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX tablets have already broken the 300 PPI barrier, but the sharpest of its E Ink readers sits at a much lower 212 PPI. According to a report from TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, that may be about to change—Amazon is apparently working on a new version of its backlit Kindle Paperwhite with a 300 PPI display of an unspecified size and resolution. Since E Ink screens are meant to mimic the printed page, a sharper screen would bring the e-reader that much closer to the experience of reading an actual book. While the new e-reader is still apparently “several months away,” we know a little more about its other planned features. On the hardware side, Amazon will reportedly be adding an ambient light sensor to adjust the device’s backlight based on the light in the room you’re in, and hardware buttons for page turning will be making a return (the current Paperwhite relies on touch input for page turning). On the software side, the device’s UI will of course be upscaled to take advantage of the high-density screen, and Amazon will be introducing some new fonts and other tweaks to improve the Kindle’s typography. Finally, the new Paperwhite’s design will be tweaked to bring it more in line with that of the newest Fire tablets. Amazon isn’t the first to bring a high-density e-reader to market. Kobo’s Aura HD has a 265 PPI, 6.8-inch screen and has been out since May, though Kobo is a bigger presence in its home country of Canada than it is in the US. (The Aura HD was supposedly a limited-edition product, but it’s still on sale for $170 six months later so it’s clearly not that limited.) The newest Paperwhite will however be the first E Ink reader with access to Amazon’s gigantic e-book library and the Kindle brand, two potent weapons in the battle for e-book market supremacy. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Read More:
Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen
Let’s play a little game called Good Idea/Bad Idea. Round One: Saving money. That’s a good idea! Round two: Saving thousands of dollars in a Bitcoin wallet that’s highly susceptible to hackers and heists. As the customers of Bitcoin payment processor BIPS will tell you, that’s a bad idea. Read more…
Continue reading here:
$1 Million Heist Reminds Us That Bitcoin is Neither Safe nor Secure
Performance-minded PC users frequently want both a fast solid-state drive for crucial apps and a regular hard disk for everything else, but that’s not always feasible in the tight space of a laptop. Western Digital is making that two-drive option a practical reality through its new Black2 . The design puts both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB spinning disk into a single 2.5-inch SATA enclosure, offering more speed and capacity than you’d find in a typical hybrid drive . It’s potentially an ideal blend for gamers and small form factor PC builders, although they’ll pay for the privilege — WD is shipping the Black2 today for $300, or roughly as much as the two drives by themselves. [Thanks, Metayoshi] Filed under: Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Western Digital
Read the original:
Western Digital Black2 drive packs both solid-state and spinning storage
Blue Screen of Insomnia. Designers Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff analyzed screen colors in tons of science fiction movies, and concluded that future computer screens would be tinted blue. Which is bad news, since our eyes are hypersensitive to blue light, and it keeps us from sleeping . Read more…
Read this article:
Blue Screen of Insomnia.
It’s been about four months since the OneNote app for Windows received a significant update. Today, though, Microsoft is adding several key features, with the biggest being the ability to scan images and then search them using keywords. This new Camera Scan feature, as it’s called, automatically crops and rotates photos, removing shadows and sharpening the image where necessary. Then, it uses optical character recognition (OCR) to search for words in scanned images, making it easy to find those meetings notes you took the other day. Additionally, the update now allows you to save things using the Share Charm. And if you want a shot of the entire screen (and not just a specific item, like a recipe), you can use the Share Charm in a Windows app and then select” screenshot” from the Share Charm drop-down. (In desktop mode, screenshots are already the standard option.) Finally, the app now has both a full-screen view and a ” Recent Notes” option, which shows all your notes in the order you last used them, regardless of whether you were viewing them on Windows, iOS or Android. These are accompanied by short previews, making it easier to zero in on what you want. And that about sums it up — to get the latest version, hit up the download link below. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Source: Windows Store , Microsoft
Visit link:
OneNote for Windows 8.1 now uses optical character recognition to search scanned images
So long, jetpacks! Our self-driving car has arrived. Burkhard Bilger has a rundown of the fascinating build-up to the self-driving car and its future in the New Yorker — and in this case the future is now. Now, the question is, are we really ready to start using it? Read more…
Read More:
Here Is Your Self-Driving Car! But Do You Want It?
Oxford University academic Dr Stephanie Dalley believes she has identified the precise location of the fabled Hanging Gardens of Bablyon : near Nineveh, hundreds of miles north. Dalley’s hypothesis has the gardens built not by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, but by Assyrians under Sennacherib about 2,700 years ago. Nineveh’s ruins now lie on the city limits of modern-day Mosul.
Excerpt from:
Hanging Gardens of Bablyon "found" … at Nineveh
When it comes to super materials, graphene seems to get all the attention . But a team of researchers has developed Stanene: a single layer of tin atoms that could just be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computers work at. Read more…
Read the original post:
Move Over Graphene: The Wonder Conductor of the Future May Be Stanene