Technology

I've recently become interested in the One Laptop Per Child project. It is based in my hometown of Cambridge, MA, and seeks to produce a laptop which costs $100. The idea then is to make sure that every kid who wants one can have one. Anywhere in the world. It is am ambitious project, and on the face sounds impossible on many levels. But the world's best minds are involved and they are making rapid progress.

For example, consider the power problem. namely, many kids have no easy access to electricity. So in order to use a laptop they must get power from some off the grid source. Check out the power source for the laptop - It is a pull cord!. Before you scoff, here are the specs from Potenco, its designer.

A minute of pulling the PCG (pull cord generator) generates enough energy for:

* 20 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone
* 1 hour of Ultrabright flashlight use
* 4 hours play time on an iPod Shuffle

Just pull for a few minutes and then compute. Brilliant!

Like my buddy Walkah, I always scan the internets looking for a better email client. Now I'm using GMail, and loving it. I made a few changes beyond stock Gmail which folks might enjoy.

• Google Desktop indexes my locally and lets me search it when offline.
• These Greasemonkey scripts are essential. They work fine in Flock or Firefox, and some have Opera ports as well.

I made one small change to the fine Gmail Macros script. To do a Mark all as Read, you usually to to Shift+X and then U and then R. That key sequence irked me a bit, so I reworked so you can just do W and then R.

See attachment below to see the changes. I'm open to suggestions for how to implement cleaner. It isn't too bad now though.

Google offers a solution for enabling users to chat with people who aren’t using Google Apps. You have to edit your domain records in a rather obscure manner. Here is the right configuration for register.com

I do a fair amount of development while seated in a Starbucks. I don't often drink the coffee or eat the food, but I do connect to the Internet using their fine HotSpot service. Up until last week, my Hotspot connection was a regular old unsecured Airport connection. That means that much of my traffic was sniffable by others in the vicinity. I didn't like that much, so I did a little digging. T-mobile offers Connection Manager software for Windows users which solves this need. Since I have OSX, this was of little use.

There was one sentence in the T-mobile security policy that suggested that a secure connection was possible without Connection Manager. So I called tech support and they were astonishingly helpful. The tech walked me through an Internet Connect setup which resulted in me connecting securely via TTLS. The process is a bit complex, so you might want to call them if you are unusre about the screenshot below.

Open Internet Connect and add a new 802.1x configuration as below.I I also had to do click the Configure button for TTLS and enter PAP as the 'TTLS INNER Authentication'. The other authentication methods are left as default.

I finally got scared enough about my password situation that I took action. And I feel so much better. Like many of you, I used the same password on many many web sites. Even admin accounts on my Drupal clients' sites and my admin account on drupal.org. I always used a different password for my financial accounts, but thats not good enough. Sharing passwords across service providers is a really bad idea because ...

I received notice from two of my service providers that they were hacked and don't know if my pasword was stolen or not. One recommended that I cancel my credit card. Those vendors are wush.net and dreamhost.com. Ugh. So I was faced with the prospect of changing my password everywhere or just praying. I'm not religious, so praying was out. I changed all my passwords, and used a different password on each site. But I still only have to remember one password. The magic is in a bookmarklet provided by SuperGenPass. Now when I have to provide a password to a web site, I just click the bookmark and it fills in my password. The bookmarklet uses the site's domain and my master password and a hefty dose of md5 scrambling to generate a site specific password.

The skeptical engineers out there will quickly ask - "what about when you are away from your PC - you can't login anywhere". Well, this is an easily solved problem. I put up a web page on my own site which will tell me my password based on the domain I am logging into. I just put my master password and ebay.com (for example) into the form and it spits back my password. Then I copy and paste into the login form at ebay.com and I am in. So traveling is no problem at all.

This system added no hassle, and much more security. I highly recommend it.

Great article about some students who have a slick automated system to podcast all lectures at their school. Usually this technology comes from MIT, but today's geek award goes to the University of Michigan School of Dentistry.

Yahoo has shared their Design Pattern Library with the world. Thats quite a gift; I bet there are thousands of hours of user interaction expertise summarized here. Thanks!

Here is a bookmarklet for blog posting in Drupal using a Mozila browser.

• create a new bookmark with this as your URL (all on one line):

javascript:u=document.location.href;t=document.title;
s='
'+window.getSelection()+'
';
pre='
[via '+escape('')+escape(t) + escape(']:
'); void(window.open("http://www.tejasa.com/node/add/blog?edit[title]=
"+escape(t)+'&edit[body]=
'+pre+escape(s),'_blank','width=
710,height=500,status=yes,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes'));

• change the domain above from www.tejasa.com to your own domain. it appears toward the end.