After 2.5 years in development at University College London, the “Optag” was put on trial at the Debrecen Airport in Hungary. Using RFID to keep close tabs on airport passengers.

What’s next? RFID implants?

Vonage is the talk of the Internet these days. With it’s services, it will cut down on traditional call services dramatically.

A great forum based on Vonage provides wonderful and in depth reviews on their products. Don’t just purchase something because the manufacturers tell you it’s good. Get the low down from real users themselves.

A great site with updates news on VOIP. The communication technology of tomorrow.

Dell and Apple notebook batteries are not the only ones hit. Now an IBM ThinkPad seems to be the latest victim. It cause quite a scene at the busy LAX.

So we’re waiting for a flight in the United lounge at LAX, the flight next to ours was heading to London and in the middle of final boarding, when suddenly this guy comes running the wrong way up the jetway, pushing other boarding passengers out of the way, he quickly drops his laptop on the floor and the thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire. About a hundred other people in the lounge jumped up and began a mix of gawking and general panic, I clearly heard a few fleeing individuals saying something about terrorists. The fire burned for a minute while everybody just stared at it, then another flare up, this one much larger than the first, drove a larger group of gawkers away. Eventually, the high intensity flaring calmed down and a larger fire kicked in, all the while letting off a thick cloud of white smoke that was slowly filling the terminal. Finally, an employee came over with a fire extinguisher and put it out of its misery.

So you think that Bill Gates’ 3 monitor rig is cool? The guys at e-consultancy rigged up 9!

Now how’s that for efficiency? If you wanna experience multi monitor environment without extra hardware, try MaxiVista. You need to have at least 2 computers though.

Update: Bah … just noticed that pic above is a Photoshopped version of Danny Sullivan’s rig. Lame attempt. Karma removed.

This guy is awesome. He’s got his whole home all wired to the net.

Do you want to know how many times he flushed his toilet? How much energy, gas and water he’s using? Perhaps listen to his answering machine. Or check out who’s at his door.

I guess the only thing he’s not showing publicly is his hydroponic garden(kidding). But who knows … it’s Holland! Show us your bud farm man!

Domonica

Tags : home automation, tracking, web, energy, water, gas, toilet flush, webcams

SATA drives. Hate them? I do.

Adding a SATA drive nearly drove me nuts!

A few days ago, I discovered that I’m running out of space. Solution? Pop in a new drive.

I wanted to install a fresh set of Windows on the new disk. The current C drive is running super low on space and as all of you know, cleaning up your junk won’t solve the problem forever.

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I just had a pair of Linux ext2 drive sent in for data recovery. Both the HDD are on RAID 1 so the data inside should be identical. They were indentical allright … right down to every CRC error.

Data recovery is a delicate, stressful, variable and time consuming task. Every recovery process is different and the steps below will not necessary work for your case. I will not answer any questions or be responsible if you damage even more of your data.

I must always stress that it’s absolutely important that you do not do any recovery on the damaged HDD. That would just put your data in an even more dangerous situation. Being overwritten!

Before attempting the feat, I mounted a new HDD on /mnt/recovery for recovery then began to copy an image of the damaged disk.

dd if=/dev/hdXX of=/mnt/recovery/damaged.img conv=noerror,sync

The param conv=noerror,sync will ensure that when the system encounters an error on the damaged disk, it will just write a nulls on the image and continue the task.

Once the image is ready, I removed the damaged disk and label it “DAMAGED - DO NOT USE“. The hard disk should be only used for display or as paper weight. Trying to reuse the damaged disk would be sheer stupidity. Be sure to wipe it clean first so you won’t be leaking any sensitive data to the whole world.

Now what I have it an image of the damaged drive minus the damaged parts. This is where Foremost comes in.

Foremost is a console program to recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures. This process is commonly referred to as data carving. Foremost can work on image files, such as those generated by dd, Safeback, Encase, etc, or directly on a drive. The headers and footers can be specified by a configuration file or you can use command line switches to specify built-in file types. These built-in types look at the data structures of a given file format allowing for a more reliable and faster recovery.

Foremost is a tool released by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and The Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research.

I am not going to document how to use Foremost to repair your damaged files. Read the man page instead.