A better way to charge your stuff

Way cool charging thingy.

It's not a new idea that technology created for the developing world might find its way back to the United States. It was true of the so-called $100 laptop -- which actually cost $200, but who's counting? It might happen with MRI machines developed for China market at half the cost. What's to keep them from being sold here?

Well, here's a bit of encouragement for cell phone users and others. Chargers proliferate around my house like weeds. The phone companies will happily sell you a car charger for their phone for $35. It won't work with anything else. Pretty good work if you can get it.

Now a company called Fenix International has developed a charger for use in Uganda and other developing world countries.

It's part of a whole suite of products Fenix designed to help local people to become one-stop electricity providers. But you can use it yourself, too. 

Here's how the device works. Instead of using some proprietary cord conversion system, the charger just has little contacts that can clip onto almost any Li-Ion battery. 

The charger can plug into any computer or USB wall adapter, but Fenix designed it specifically to be plugged into the ReadySet, an all-in-one "intelligent battery" that can take in power from a variety of sources (bicycle generator, solar, the grid), store and smooth it, then spit it back out to charge phones or other appliances.

The one downside to the Fenix charger is that it requires you to pull the battery out of your gadget to charge it, which means that you can't use it with your iPhone.

Get with the program, Apple.

Way cool charging thingy does a camera battery.

Take it and leaf it

I recently noted that you can now order earthworms using your smart phone, and now comes another app for the high-tech naturalist: it allows you to identify leaves.

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

A free version for the iPhone is available now. Apps for the Droid and iPad are coming soon.

Here's a video.

This is spooky

This is sort of a big deal, Nathan Goulding writes. Apple is, without your consent or any warning labels, logging all of your iPhone’s location data and then transferring it over to your computer when you backup or sync your iPhone. 

The information is easily accessible — unencrypted and in a standard database format. (The option to encrypt is there, though I haven’t tested whether this option obscures your location data.) 

Upshot? Any program you install or anyone you let on your computer could access this data, giving that program or that person full access to where you were and when you were there. 

What does it look like? We tried it out on one of our employees:

This person drove from Winnipeg to New York City. Had a weekend trip up to Montreal to visit friends. Spent most of the time in New York City.

Think I'll duct tape my phone on my Crazy Lab to see where she goes.

What if Moses had the Internet?

(Thanks, Lainey)

Don't talk to strangers

If a stranger came up to you on the sidewalk and asked for your Social Security number, you wouldn't give it to him. If a stranger on the sidewalk invited you to go through a door into a building with him, you wouldn't.

So when an email asks for some personal information, or invites you to click to go somewhere else, why would you?

The subject comes up, because a security breach that exposed the email addresses of potentially millions of customers of major U.S. banks, hotels and stores is more likely than traditional scams to ultimately trick people into revealing personal information.

Security experts are alarmed that the breach involved targeted information -- tying individuals to businesses they patronize -- and could make customers more likely to reveal passwords, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data.

Smart Money has some insight.

“Now the bad guys know who you do business with,” says Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at online security firm Sophos. “The likely outcome as far as fraud is concerned will be people impersonating the institutions they’ve compromised. If they contact you it will likely come in the form of a phishing attack [an email, or phone call if your number is listed, asking you for more information] or try to lure you online to a malicious link.”

And some advice. Read the whole article, but here is some of it.

When to do nothing: Don’t reply to emails that ask for personal information such as passwords, bank account or credit card details – even if the email mentions Epsilon and tried to scare you by saying your account is compromised. No legitimate company would ask you to do this. If you receive a suspicious phone call from your bank, hang up and call the bank yourself. Don’t let curiosity get the better of you either: don’t open email attachments or follow links by email, Twitter or Facebook, even if they have been “forwarded” to you by a friend.

When to take action: If you already use your email as a password for an online account, change it. If you use your name, or an easy variation of your name as a password like JohnDoe123, change it. But do this on the company’s own website. Never do this if asked to by email.

What to do in the future: Use secondary, less important email addresses when registering online accounts. Keep one for this and others for businesses, friends and family. If a secondary account starts receiving spam, it will be easier to shut it down without too much inconvenience.

Toss those cookbooks

I've been going through the business throwing stuff away. Seems I've saved every telephone I've ever owned. There are three computer printers down there. And more books than the Library of Congress. What to keep?

An article in the New York Times has some advice, including this on books.

Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries. 

But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies a $5 app for the iPad, is the wave of the future. Every recipe has a photo of the dish (something far too expensive for many printed cookbooks). 

Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. When something needs to be timed, there’s a digital timer built right into the recipe. You can e-mail yourself the ingredients list to take to the grocery store. The app does what cookbooks cannot, providing a better version of everything that came before it.
Now all Martha has to do is make a decorative splashguard for a tablet and you will be all set.

How the Japanese people are communicating with each other

App for your smart phone.

When the earthquake hit northern Japan on Friday, voice calls from mobile phones became immediately unavailable in order to leave room for emergency calls, The Japan Times reports. However, in the Kanto area, mobile Internet connection was mostly kept on, and many people turned to the Web to exchange information.

On Japan's main social networking site, mixi, some communities were set up soon after the quake to keep people informed. The largest onenow has over 300,000 members and it has guides to communities by region and purpose.
Mixi also has a function that displays how recently your friends logged in, so you can check if your friends have accessed mixi after the quake. Another feature, ashiato (footprints) — which was once one of the key attractions to mixi — shows when another user viewed your page (profile/diary/message/etc). While it is possible to send messages to your most important family and friends, features that do not require any direct interaction meant that even those who are not close friends can see who is OK. 

Twitter was heavily used as well. When most railways stopped in greater Tokyo on Friday evening, many office workers were isolated in central Tokyo and decided to either stay put or walk back home. A lot of assistance was offered over Twitter by stores, restaurants, campuses and even people in houses along main roads who tweeted that help was available. Twitter even set some official hashtags to help identify your tweet, such as #jishin (general earthquake information); #j_j_helpme (requests for rescue or other aid); #hinan (evacuation information); #anpi (confirmation of safety of individuals, places, etc.); #311care (medical information for victims). And although it is not official, #jishin_e seems to be used for English, too.

Meantime, I've found another smartphone app for earthquakes.

Earthquake Lite, which is free for Apple or Android. (If you hate ads, buy the $2 iPhone version). The software displays global seismic activity in a nicely designed format, and offers lists of events that you can filter by location, magnitude and time. 

On Thursday, for instance, the app listed the afternoon’s most recent earthquakes, including nine significant tremors near Japan’s east coast, and one in western China. The map view lets you dial down to see the epicenter.

Where to get real-time news on Japan

I consider myself fairly sophisticated about the news, but it's hard to sort out the rapidly changing situation in Japan. Curt Hopkins at the blog ReadWriteWeb has compiled some sources of real-time news about the crisis.

@timeouttokyo The Twitter account for the Tokyo version of the weekly entertainment and event guide is focusing a lot on what's happening and what residents and visitors should do, reflecting the focus of their website.

@survivinginjapan Ashley, a Seattlite teacher and writer in Shizuoka, usually gives out expat advice. These days that advice is more urgent.

@ambassadorroos John Roos has been the U.S. ambassador to Japan since 2009. A good source for information on official U.S. actions, such as the Marines delivering a Forward Arming and Refueling Point for use in the assistance operations.

@Matt_Alt Writer Matt Alt's tweets are more analytical, giving some background into the actions of Japanese press, politicians and industry.

NHK English The English channel of Japan's most prominent television network provides text and video news updates from all over Japan.

Crisis Commons. The crisis network has put together a Honshu Quake wiki.

Donating. Rick has pulled together four excellent resources for those wishing to donate.

Ushahidi Crowd-sourced crisis map on the Ushahidi platform. (In Japanese.)

Google Person Finder Google's released a Japanese version of their people-finding service for anyone having difficulties getting a hold of family and friends. The Red Cross has their own, called Family Links.

WNYC News and explainers regarding the Fukushima nuclear plant from the New York-based public radio station.

Your laptop can detect an earthquake

Yikes!

If you drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. Researchers are putting the chip to work detecting earthquakes with a network of volunteer laptops that can map out quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers.

I can't determine whether smart phones can be used on this particular network, the Quake-Catcher Network. But I found this one: the iShake Project.

With the Quake-Catcher program, a laptop monitors local activity and only alerts the network for strong new signals. If the network's central server receives a bunch of these all at once, then it is likely that an earthquake is happening. If the server receives a notification from only one laptop, it knows the laptop was shaken by something smaller and more local (like your sister running by, or the door slamming).

You can check all of this out, and sign up, here.

Disaster: there's an app for that

New app saves the day.

It has always seemed to me that these smart phones everyone is carrying around these days can do more than tell your friends you're eating a bacon cheeseburger at Cardiac Shack.

I found an article, via Instapundit, that points to a few apps that seem interesting. One is a manual of advice for all sorts of disasters. The iPhone version, the Droid version.

Another is a first aid manual from the American Heart Association. For iPhone, for Droid.

And an emergency radio scanner: for iPhone, for Droid. Those link to the pro version, but there's a free one as well. Might be fun when you're watching a rerun of Law & Order.

While you cower in your storm shelter, you can always connect to the source of all life here.