By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

My biggest problem is remembering what charging brick goes with what device. So many are generic and if you throw a few items in a bag or drawer, it’s hard to remember what powers what. The solution for me was a simple label maker. I now write “Western Digital Hard Drive” on the brick, and confusion is history.

But what about the mess of cords plugged into your power strip? How can you find your monitor cord without yanking the cord to your CPU? Or will you re-set your alarm clock, when you simply wanted to unplug the lamp? Luckily there is hope with the ID Pilot Wire Identification Labels. The vinyl stickers come in three themes “Office,” “Electronics” and “Household” and each pack has simple graphics of gadgets, computer equipment, and appliances. $6 a set. Source: Spoonsisters via FreshPilot

We Say: What else? Not re-booting by accident: priceless.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Office coffee mugs are a hot commodity (no pun intended.) To protect your mug from thieving pirates, here’s a somewhat clever invention: the lock-able mug. You carry around the round locking rubber plug on your keychain and the exposed hole in the side the mug renders it useless to others. Lock the plug back in and it’s coffee time. Concept design only from Effrat Gommeh Industrial Designs.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I can admit it. When I was very little, I went out to our backyard and tried to dig to China. I was a literal child and I guess, not much has changed. Here’s a handy site that shows exactly where you would end up if you dug through the earth to the other side.

Key Learnings: China is not even close to where I’d end up if I dug from San Francisco straight down. I’d be washing ashore in Madagascar or Cape Town, South Africa. But the best part about the world being round, is that the bottom of the earth is also the top and the side when you move the start location around. Makes the experience more 3D than even me with my little yellow shovel.

Try It Here
Source: ubasics.com

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I switched to Vista and basically yawned and got back to work. But a guy named “Felix8406″ has written up a pretty decent list of features and tips on Vista that got my attention.

1. How To Change the Way Pages Print from IE7
2. How To Easily Share Folders in Vista
3. How To Use Vista’s Speech Recognition Feature (or Talk to Your Computer)
4. How To Hide Messages You’ve Already Read in Windows Mail, Outlook Express, or Windows Live Mail
5. How To Use the People Near Me Feature
6. How to Use Windows Meeting Space for Collaboration Sessions
7. How To Select Which OS to Start If You Dual Boot
8. How To Independently Control Volume Levels for Each Application
9. How To Quickly Batch Rename Photo FileNames Using Windows Photo Gallery
10. How To Set Up Vista Parental Controls

More

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Let’s start with the bad news first: you can’t buy this product. It’s the brainchild of a geeky and obviously very sleepy modder named Roger Ibars who took an old light gun and devised a way for it to shoot an alarm clock to the off position each morning.

We say: Wake Up Roger and make this a reality. And one last question: if you miss, does it activate a snooze function? Source: Make via nerdapproved

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Time for some fun and a possible office prank. Download StartBtn Renamer and simply type in a new word or phrase and hit enter.

Hilarity ensues.

Start Button Renamer
via No Heat

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

“Secure” card maker HID Corp. is complaining and making legal threats about a presentation at this week’s Black Hat Federal security conference, saying that it could make it easy to clone many proximity door access cards. The presentation is going to address security issues with RFID proximity cards that are made by HID and other companies for such things as secure building access, he will demonstrate how easy it is to steal access codes, store them and then use them to fool the card reader.

“These systems are installed all over the place. It’s not just HID, but lots of companies, and there hasn’t been a problem. Now we’ve got a person who’s saying let’s get publicity for our company and show everyone how to do it, and it puts everyone at risk. Where’s the sense of responsibility?” Carroll said.

Asked why HID hasn’t addressed the issue in more recent proximity card systems, after knowledge of RFID threats became common, Carroll said that doing so would cause “major upheaval” among customers.

Inertia is a more likely cause, said Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive. Source: Battle brewing over RFID chip-hacking demo

We Say: Where is the sense of responsibility indeed. If everyone is at risk, but not everyone knows about it, why not fix it before everyone does? The main reason in this case is probably backwards compatibility and loss of revenue, as existing customers would have to upgrade, and, heck, they still have stuff to sell them.

By Kyle Reasons
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

General

• at

• Runs a command or script at a given time

• Shows the jobs that are scheduled to run

• Used to remove a job that is scheduled to run

• Runs a command or script and is really a subset of the at command that takes you to the at>prompt if you type only batch

• Displays the contents of a file to the screen

• Changes to another directory

• Changes the group associated with one or more files to a different group

• Controls file security

• Changes file ownership

• Sets your login shell

• Used to compare two files

• Copies a file to another directory (and you can rename the file at the same time)

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