Clean & Organize Any Room Quickly

Ah, the science of cleaning. Everyone gets a little messy with a place every now and then; some more, some less. In the end, though, we all need to pick up the clutter and organize it away.  No? Then you'll eventually have to climb like you’re in the Rocky Mountains to find your way around the maze of mess.  I will show you a quick method to organize any room's heavy mix of junk, treasures, trash, and other items that have all piled up over the months.

To begin, all you have to do is to form 5 different piles in the room.
These five piles will be called: Donate, Keep, Trash, Move, and Sell

Also be sure to process the piles before they look like this

Donate Pile: These are things too valuable to toss, but too difficult to sell. You can't relocate them either.  Donate them! Be sure they are legal to donate.

Keep Pile: These are essential items for the room that have to stay.  Make sure you actually use or appreciate these every month or two. Else they might be taking up space.   If they've been idle and unappreciated for over a year, they might be better suited for storage elsewhere.



Trash Pile:  This is the obvious trash that doesn't fit in the trashcan.

Move Pile: These are items you certainly need to keep but relocate elsewhere. Reassess and make sure you really do need them. 

Job well done depending on your feng shui tastes

Sell Pile: These are things you don't need, that you can certainly sell.  Check around on eBay or Craigslist for general pricing options.  Don't let them sit around too long either unless their quite valuable.  For instance, a huge $10 item might not be worth waiting on for half a year to sell. 

Your goal is to free up as much space as possible.  If the mess is huge, pace the process in daily segments of time to work.



I hope this guide helps simplify the mess that takes away time from more important things!

Cold War Ghost Signal Spooks the Airwaves

International conspiracy theorists and radio spotters gasp in awe to the eerie nature of this post-Soviet broadcast. With all the info traveling in radio waves, you'd except to have unknown signals, right?  Well this tops them all - baffling listeners across the world for over three decades.

It's called UVB-76 with an investigation community labeling it "The Buzzer." Spotters tune it at 4625kHz AM listening for rare interruptions that have recently grown more prevalent since 2010.  Originally broadcast as tones, it later switched to buzzes after the USSR demise.  The new sound features variable pauses of 1–1.3 seconds repeating 21–34 times per minute (a possible encryption?).

Beginning possibly around the early 80s, people know it's been relocated several times throughout Russia.  Currently, it's estimated to reside about 25 miles Northwest of Moscow. 

It's interruptions include robotic Russian voices speaking code words along with ongoing background noise.  To this day, no one knows what the signal is for or why it's been piercing radio waves since the early 80s. Without any confirmed info, this classified signal increasingly intrigues a growing number of listeners with its recently increased activity.

Listen to the live broadcast here: http://uvb-76.net/

Tech Quote: Software holds back Hardware

"It's hardware that makes a machine fast. 
It's software that makes a fast machine slow. "
- Craig Bruce

Whether your watching YouTube videos or browsing Facebook, your computer's performance is constantly held back by the amount of data it constantly has to manage. Performance is especially important these days with a media-centered internet.

In most cases, your favorite websites load most smoothly on the most simple and maintained machines. Always think carefully about whether you really need something stored on your immediate computer or on an external drive. Install only what is essential and only keep everything else as long as you need it.

Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson

Besides using virus protection and defragging cluttered hard drives, the mere practice of keeping most of your data on drives separate from the Operating System can seriously improve performance. Better yet, having the data on external drives that are only used when you actually need the data can improve things further.

It seems like no matter how powerful your system is, the more data and drives you have - the less performance you'll get. Operating systems are especially notorious for getting slow with both the age and quantity of software on them.

Even with speedy Solid-State drives, the data itself can accumulate new burdens on the system overtime.
 Then there's data corruption that can cause the most unpredictable bizarre behavior, unlike faulty hardware that usually just shuts off entirely.

The speed of storage is progressing slower than all the other parts because it is the most complex to deal with. There's all kinds of tweaks and tools to cash in on this issue, but the most simple and powerful matter is - and still remains - having as little data connected to your system as possible.

Tech Quote: Twitter Seismograph - Predict the Future?

Brian Solis Wiki

“Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph.”

                                                     
                       – Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks

A seismograph is an instrument for revealing & capturing various types of activity in the earth's ground (especially to forecast earthquakes).  Solis sees Twitter is the instrument used to reveal and capture the world's social activity and opinion.

The WebBot Project analysis of social trends

Some computer science projects - such as the WebBot Probject- even believe this level of specific information can forecast future events.  Just like the seismograph can forecast earthly events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc.  Can we measure social opinion to find patterns that predict the future?

Donate Idle Computing to Benefit Humanity

 On November 16, 2004, IBM launched a project called World Community Grid in an effort to collaborate idle computers into benefiting humanity.  It shares project resources and processing tasks across multiple computers through a concept called grid computing.  There over several dozen projects to choose from including research processing for AIDs, Cancer, Alternative Energy, Clean Water, and Muscle Dystrophy.  The software can currently run on all the major operating systems including:  Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. You can even configure it to only use a small fraction (like 10% of your power) when the system goes idle (which can also be configured).  The program immediately pauses once your system resumes from an idle state to give you back full performance.  Setting it to use a small fraction of your computer's idle power shouldn't raise electric bills much at all either.  Download the World Community Grid software here at: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp.

Live Global Statistics for World Community Grid:

Techie Sleep Tips 3: Improve your Sleep Quality

A study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley found a correlation between MRI brain scans of people with severe sleep deprivation and documented emotional disorders.  The scans of sleep deprived began to mimic those of clinically depressed. Tired participants also began showing greater involvement with negative thinking.  Here are some tips to reduce/avoid these complications by improving the quality of your sleep.

Photo from ChugginMcCoffee

1- CUT THE LATE CAFFEINE & ALCOHOL - Some obvious things to generally avoid before sleep are caffeine, heavy meals, heavy liquids, and alcohol.  Alcohol may help you fall asleep faster, but excess can fragment sleep and especially reduce the quality during a hangover.  Caffeine also has a half life of relatively 5 hours in your system so try avoiding it after 3pm.

Photo from GreenLife

2- DRINK DECAF TEA - Drink decaf tea to reduce stress and balance your mood during sleep.  Many teas, particularly green tea, have something called theanine that contains healthy efficient stress reduction (almost sedative) for the mind and body when it comes to sleep.  Oddly enough, it also combines very well with caffeine during the day to counter its side effects like anxiety and tension. Drinking Kava tea during the day can also help combat daytime stress that interferes with sleep later.

3- CUT THE LIGHT & NOISE - Reduce as much light and noise as possible in sleep environment – that includes even the most subtle light and noise.  Shutting off those LED lights on many electronics and buzzing fans of computers. In fact, one study actually discovered certain colors of light (like white and blue LEDs) suppress our melatonin production which can seriously disrupt our quality of sleep.  You can read more about melatonin here.  It might be tough, but take a week or two to train yourself sleep with the TV off before going to bed and see if you feel a difference.  If need to run a lot of overnight computer tasks, I recommend running them on a laptop or desktop in another room that doesn't interfere with your sleep environment.  Laptops are usually quiet but the fan(s) do cut on and off unpredictably and noise-proof desktops require expensive cases and fan controllers.  Your best bet is to just not have them run overnight in the same room.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

Techie Sleep Tips 2 : Improve your Sleep Duration

A recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation revealed 95% of 1,500 surveyed Americans used some form of electronics before bedtime.  43% of them also said they rarely/never get enough sleep; and 60% said they also experienced one or several chronic sleep problems.  The National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR) estimates 70 million Americans have sleep problems from insomnia to sleep deprivation. 

In regards to the number of hours someone needs to sleep, it’s highly debated that people over 17 need somewhere between 6-10 hours depending on your chemistry and sleep quality. The numbers are even more crucial for athletes who require additional sleep. In fact, one study by the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic discovered athletes who got 10 hours of sleep held even greater physical and mental performance compared to getting 8 or 9 hours.  Learn which hours you need and respect them most nights in your schedule. With this being said, here are some tips to improve your hours of sleep:

Fitsugar.com POLL: How Many Times Do You Hit Snooze?

1 - TRANSITION TIME: Take into consideration the transition time it takes you fall asleep and wake up. Add these transition times to your sleep schedule in addition to the hours you want to sleep. Unless you immediately collapse to sleep and spring out of bed in the morning, you need to respect these transitional periods also as they can deceive you of how many hours your really getting.

2 - COMBAT INSOMNIA: If you have insomnia that makes your hours unpredictable, plan at least an hour or two ahead and develop a sleep ritual that involves no electronics and very little light such as reading under a lamp. Or perhaps take a brisk walk or jog outside in the dark for 20-40 minutes and reflect on your day. Many studies say people shouldn’t exercise too close to sleep, but insomnia is a special case where extra exercise and meditative rituals (perhaps meditation itself) are certainly more necessary and beneficial.

Image from  North Shore Medical Central

3 - STOP OVERSLEEPING: It's possible you might be getting too many hours of sleep.  You may oversleep till noon or take a long time to get out of bed and continue rolling back to sleep.  To combat this, you can retrain yourself to spring out of bed by as soon as you wake up near the time you intend to.  If your full of energy before your intended wake up time, go ahead and wake up anyways and reward yourself with a nice breakfast.  It's also important to plan ahead and give yourself a comfortable amount of time to transition from sleep to wakefulness after you get out of bed. You need to have a comfortable morning routine to adjust with – whether it takes 10 minutes or an hour. Give yourself something very motivating to wake up to.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

4D Plenoptic Cameras Revolutionizing Photography

Photo from Geek.com

Ever take a photo only to later discover something went wrong with the focus and/or exposure?  Ever hate the difficulty of taking pictures in dark or extremely bright scenes?  What about images with too many things to focus on and not enough time to capture the multiple focus levels?

This can all be solved with a plenoptic camera. A revolutionary new camera technology that essentially captures a full range of lighting and focus levels (or a 4D light field) for adjustment later.  Not only do these devices save the trouble of getting the right focus and exposure on the spot but they will reduce the time needed for setting up equipment and leave more time for actual shooting.

So which cameras use plenoptic technology? This Lytro Light Field Camera is the latest buzz of the news right now.  It captures 4D light information with an array of micro-lenses that capture 11 million rays (or 11 megarays) of light at once. In terms of the image quality, these 11 megarays produce professional 22 megapixel images in addition to the 4D light field capturing. You can view a large gallery of the plenoptic captures (or "living pictures") to see just an example of this camera's raw photography power.  I'm betting we'll also have plenoptic video cameras soon enough to revolutionize the film industry as well - reducing the number of retakes needed due to focus and/or lighting.

Acoustic Cryptanalysis - Keylogging through keystroke sounds

When it comes to keystroke logging (keylogging), a lot of people think of software and hardware that secretly records all of this input.  But what about recording and interpreting the sound of the keystrokes themselves?  It's called acoustic cryptanalysis and with the right equipment, one can literally record and interpret audible keystrokes - particularly with computer keyboards.

The Silent Keyboard EX

One obvious reason for each key having a unique sound is their location on the keyboard and most computer keyboards are relatively universal (especially with their letters and numbers).  Of course, an attacker would still have to know the keyboard's region settings and the language being typed.  Basically, the decryption process requires a fine tuned algorithm that can intelligently differentiate & identify keys in the sound of typing.  A study by the University of California, Berkeley even confirmed this security threat with 96% accuracy on the recovered keystrokes.

Acustic Cryptanalysis can also decipher other machine noises

So how could someone prevent this kind of attack?  There are many simple methods of covering up or preventing the sound monitoring in the first place.  One humorous but effective method is to have prerecorded audio of scrambled keystrokes from the same keyboard play while you type (as long as the speaker quality isn't terrible).  Another is to blast loud white noise or music that distorts the same frequencies of sound produced by the keys. Then there are the opposite methods of typing information with no discernible keystroke sound, such as typing on a touch-pad or writing on a piece of paper.  If anything, it's good to at-least be aware of this potential surveillance - especially with an increasingly number of electronics such as laptops including built-in microphones near the keyboard.  It's also wise to first consider how much of a target you really are to this threat before worrying about it.

Van Eck Phreaking - Remote Viewing of Display Monitors

When it comes to privacy and security of computers, there are some areas that still remain highly overlooked and unsecured.  I recently came across information on how someone with the right equipment can literally view what's currently displayed on a computer monitor from a remote location.  The equipment basically reconstructs a monitor's radio waves (all electronics give these off) to see what it's currently displaying.  This apparently applies to all monitors - even the latest ones.  It's called Van Eck Phreaking and it's named after the Dutch scientist Wim van Eck who first discovered the phenomenon in 1985.

So what's the problem with this phenomenon?  There's still no personal computing security measures against it.  One difficult solution is to use a Faraday cage around the monitor (or you and the monitor so it doesn't block your view) to contain the radio waves.  Professionals dealing with highly sensitive computing may have radio-wave blocking materials integrated into their buildings to protect themselves from attacks such as Van Eck Phreaking.  Perhaps having several monitors on at the same time could also make it more difficult to hone in on a single monitor's displayed information.  

I find it interesting how there's a great emphasis on encrypting wireless internet radio waves but not the waves of other electronics - especially monitors.  The unencrypted radio waves from monitors of all kinds sounds like a serious security flaw but you have to remember they only emit what is currently visible unlike wirelessly hacking into a shared computer and potentially gaining access to everything stored on it.  Interestingly enough, the Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in many new electronic magnetic cards are also remotely viewable with the right equipment.  To protect these, you can create a Faraday Cage Wallet (or perhaps a aluminum fitted wallet).  You can read more about this phenomenon in this PDF document titled Electromagnetic Eavesdropping Risks of Flat-Panel Displays.

Techie Sleep Tips 1: Cut Night Owl Habits & Reduce Daytime Stress

Many of us know the obvious negative effects of not getting enough sleep.  Then there's the lesser understood quality of sleep.  One specific factor of this quality I've been more curious about lately is the case of being a night owl. It seems pretty obvious that technology influences this habit for more people now with internet social media connected 24-7 and essentially so much to do besides sleeping. Being a full time college student with five classes, homework, twenty hours of work, and social life can certainly make this habit harder to avoid, but it's still not impossible to change.  So I looked into some reasons why I along with many should probably take care in reducing our night owl habits.


Think about it - it's obvious that when we go to sleep later, we also have to finish up our sleep while everyone else wakes up.  A night owl's last few hours of sleep are generally exposed to more noise and light than earlier risers.  This wouldn't be a problem if everyone had a night owl schedule but they clearly don't.  Unless you live in a house in the middle of nowhere with night owls (or no one) and dark drapes, your night owl sleep could be getting more interruptions than you think.  Several studies have discovered that those who generally went to bed after midnight also shared unusually higher arterial stiffening which raises the risk of heart disease.  Those who went to bed before midnight had much less (if any) arterial issues.  Getting between 6-8 hours didn't effect these results either - going to bed past midnight was the problem.  However, those who slept less than 5 hours were at a 40% greater risk of heart disease as well.  Getting the right quality and quantity are both necessary to loosen the arteries and probably relax more in the day with smoother blood circulation.

Wikipedia: Sleep Deprivation

As for the mental side effects,  I think it's safe to say that less sleep leaves one with less focus, mental alertness, and less control of emotions because of this fatigue.  It makes sense that chronic fatigue could lead to a depression over being less able to engage in life because of this lack of energy.  What's really interesting is how depression and many sleep disorders share a lot of the same symptoms. These sleep problems include: sleep apnea, circadian rhythm disorder (seasonal affective disorder), and general insomnia. Perhaps taking the challenge of not being a night owl for a few weeks could produce some interesting personal results in our daily lives.  For those who have physical ailments that make it less possible to obtain good quality sleep,  I say continue the battle against them to reduce these conflicts. Whether if it requires medications, new exercises, lifestyle changes - continue to reduce them.  As for how our day effects our sleep, Leonardo da Vinci once said, "A well-spent day brings happy sleep."  Perhaps we can counter a downward spiral of being a night owl with an upward spiral of being an early riser.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

Scientists use mirages to create an 'Invisibility Cloak'

Artistic Depiction by Liu Bolin - Urban Camo Art

Most of us have heard about the mirage effect in hot settings.  The optical phenomenon of light rays bending to form a reflected image (or optical illusion) that covers something up.  In the desert, it is commonly seen as fake water on the ground from a distance - which is actually a displaced image of the sky above.  This simply involves the temperature of the ground being significantly hotter than the temperate above the ground.  Now imagine if the circumstances of this phenomenon could be emulated upon command.

Artistic Depiction by Liu Bolin - Urban Camo Art

Scientists at the University of Dallas, Texas have done just that! They started by constructing a panel of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). These are basically tightly rolled up sheets of carbon as thin a single molecule.  These CNTs were equipped with electrical heat generators and fine controls for the heat's dissipation to surrounding areas.  Finally with just the right heat settings per-configured, these scientists could instantly switch on a steep temperature manipulation that literally bends the light of objects surround the CNTs to form an illusive mirage in front of them.

A powerful illusion of invisibility is formed by fluidly mirroring nearby sources of light.  The scientists also discovered that combining this device with water (or putting it under water) enhances the illusion even further.  Although it doesn't produce absolute invisibility, this device still surpasses many previous attempts for cloaking devices with great potential for future applications.  The two images featured in this article are merely artistic deceptions of this technology's future potential for camouflage clothing.  See the video below for an actual demonstration.

More info here: http://www.iop.org/news/11/oct/page_52313.html