Fake Caller ID, Change Your Voice, Record Calls Spoof Caller ID – SpoofCard.com: SpoofCard calling cards offers you the ability to change what someone sees on their caller ID display when they receive a phone call.
Key Benefits: Make calls truly private, Ability to record calls, Change your voice, Fun and inexpensive, Easy to use and fast to set up.
How long before this gets used in a domestic violence case?
If this video is to believed, the traditional lock and key is an obsolete security system: something called the “bump key” opens most locks in seconds. More details in this paper by Barry Wels and Rop Gonggrijp, whose abstract reads,
How to open Mul-T-Lock (pin-in-pin, interactive, 7×7), Assa (6000 Twin), DOM (ix, dimple with ball), LIPS (Octro dimple), Evva TSC, ISEO (dimple & standard), Corbin, Pfaffenhain and a variety of other expensive mechanical locks without substantial damage, usually in under 30 seconds, with little training and using only inexpensive tools.
The authors, incidentally, identify themselves as members of Toool – The Open Organization Of Lockpickers.
Tom’s Hardware Guide — the Internet authority on computer hardware, compares a budget and premium motherboard. The result is surprising, even given they’re both made by the same well-regarded manufacturer:
The low-budget and the premium motherboard provide exactly the same performance when using comparable components.
The only difference that mattered is the feature set, but the $69 board had everything the average user would need, meaning that the $219 model makes no sense unless you are a serious overclocker, plan to use many hard drives, or have a special need for one of the other extra features.
The marvelous Captology Notebook updates us on Current and Ongoing Projects, including the Mobile Jokes Project:
In our increasingly mirthless world, it's sometimes difficult to know what's funny. Relief is on the way. Our lab is creating a free service that will play jokes for you over the phone – any phone. Waiting in line? Stuck in traffic? Need to appear busy? Just call in, listen and (we hope) laugh. However, the project isn't just fun and games, it's hard research. Once callers listen to a joke, they're asked to rate it. Once we have enough ratings, we'll start to analyze the data to determine which jokes are funniest to people in general, which jokes college students like, what jokes do women prefer, and more. You get the idea.
So what's the point? First, we're exploring how humor can persuade callers and/or reward them for specific kinds of behavior. The second purpose is to create a new system for evaluating content. Our first evaluation system was deployed on the web last year and it's proved extremely useful. As a result, we've decided to extend this evaluation to capture data from mobile phone users.
When our joke engine service is ready, we'll send out the phone number.
Jessica, Ari and I are going to be in Japan a little later in the summer, and we thought we'd visit a buddy of mine who has a hole-in-the-wall restaurant/bar on the northern outskirts of Tokyo. It's been a bunch of years, though; we weren't sure if he was still in business. So we googled his old phone number on www.google.co.jp, and — sure enough — we got a hit. It appears (my Japanese isn't what it could be) that the page is some sort of listing of businesses in his neighborhood (I believe on a single street); we were happy to see that my friend's restaurant was included in the listing (and thus, presumably, is still there).
We wanted to know more, though, and ran the page through Google Translate, which generated this. It turns out that in this very neighborhood, I can shop at businesses including “The circle of the umbrella it is clear,” “It increases and,” and “Love raw hall pharmacy.” I can cut my hair at the “Seeing and it is dense haircut store”; I can buy blue fruit at the “Eguro blue fruit store”; and, most enticing of all, I can eat spirit meat at “The meat it is astringent and.” I'll be there in a couple of weeks. I can't wait.
Slashdot reports on the Cockroach-Controlled Robot:
The latest issue of Make Magazine volume 2 from O'Reilly publishing has an article on a cockroach controlled robot. Roboticist Garnet Hertz has mounted a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach that drives a small mobile robot around by walking on top of a Kensington trackball. There is a row of proximity sensor triggered LEDs that shine light in the roach's eyes, making him steer the robot since roaches instinctively avoid light. Garnet's web page 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine' details the project with several images of the roach in action. Debugging the project is inherently impossible.
Does this means that Miami will be come the world leader in robotics? We certainly have a very large supply of one of the raw materials.
Jotwell Blenderlaw