Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

This week Google started working on a smart contact lens that monitors glucose levels within the wearer’s human tears, or more precisely, the moisture on your eye. The idea being that wearers of contact lenses which also happen to be diabetics, can monitor their blood sugar at all times. An interesting idea, but is it practical?

One thing that Google promised in their announcement on Thursday was that the data received concerning blood glucose levels would never be stored on Google servers. I find that really interesting that they understood that the public is concerned about their health information being made available on Google servers! At least Google’s thinking about the issue and is responding to that problem right up front.

Keep in mind that this device is a prototype, it contains a sensor that measures glucose levels in the tears and moisture through a tiny pinhole in the lens that lets tear fluid be analyzed by the device. Google says that the device can take glucose level readings once every second!

Now, I’m not sure that anyone needs to know their blood sugar level once every second. It seems to me that that would give you an opportunity to obsess about it! But the technology involved is pretty cool.

Google is a technology company, and prides itself on innovation. I suspect they’re working with this device as much to prove that they can do it, as to provide a useful service. Although I do believe that health monitoring is one of the next great frontiers for computer technology. In fact, there were a lot of health and fitness devices demonstrated at this year’s CES. So I think we have a lot to look forward to in that space. Maybe it won’t be long until we have really accurate, and useful, “Star Trek style” tricorders available!

A court decision this week has a lot of people concerned about whether net neutrality is dead. I’m pretty concerned as well. This whole situation got me thinking about the issue of net neutrality. A lot of people don’t understand what net neutrality is, so let’s talk about that.

Think of net neutrality this way, the interstate highway system, believe it or not, was originally set up to provide the federal government open lanes for military equipment to be transported within the country in case of an attack from the outside that required us to defend our cities. I know this sounds crazy to most folks, who drive our interstate highway system, and don’t think the thing about the military aspect. Some might say, that the military side of this equation was put in place to justify the expense of creating a large interstate highway system. And, there may be some truth to that! Politicians are experts at coming up with ways to justify getting large amounts of money for pet projects! But, putting that aside, I think we can all agree that the interstate highway system has been a benefit to the citizens of the United States. Why? Because when it’s time for you to travel on your vacation, let’s say to Disney World in Florida, you don’t think anything about jumping in your car and simply driving south! You have nice, open, highways that are convenient and allow you to travel inexpensively without paying any tolls.

Now, there are highways within our country that are privately developed and privately owned, and the owners of these roads charge a toll. The idea is that toll roads provide high quality roads that quickly connect things from “Point A” to “Point B.” And, since they are privately owned, or in some way subsidized by a private entity, we should pay them for developing the road. And, that’s fine, if I choose to use a toll road, for convenience sake, that’s my choice, and I can spend my money to do so. However, it’s nice to be able to use the Federal Interstate Highway System to go from that same “Point A” to “Point B,” perhaps having to go a little further around, in some situations; but by using it I have the option of a free trip (not counting wear and tear on my car… and gas prices, of course!)

So, why all this talk about interstate highways? Well, the Internet has been called the “Information Superhighway.” And, indirectly, that’s why Al Gore once claimed to have “taken the initiative to create the Internet.” You see, his father was instrumental in creating the Federal Interstate Highway System. He championed it. Al Gore, in somewhat the same way, was actually claiming to have championed the “Information Superhighway,” which we call the Internet. Now, he stuck his foot in his mouth, when he made the statement, “that he took the initiative to create the Internet.” I don’t believe his father would have claimed to have created superhighways. But, I might be wrong! The point is, that the Federal Government did create the superhighway system, and anyone of us can use it freely! In the same way, the Internet is open for all to use and “drive on” as we see fit. No one is charging us extra for using a certain part of the Internet while not using another part of the Internet. It is all free and open.

If I want to create a website, or service, and use the Internet to deliver it, that’s my business. I don’t have to pay anybody anymore than anyone else to put my business, or video, or audio, or website… whatever, on the Internet! This concept is the essence of net neutrality. That the Internet should be free and open for all to use just like the superhighway system of the United States is open for anyone to drive their car, or truck; and in the process, perhaps even make money, such as truck drivers do today on our highways.

So, this is the reason that I’m for net neutrality. I hope this recent court case won’t stop the innovation, the creativity, and openness, of our “Information Superhighway!” That would be tragic and it would restrict not just the flow of of ideas, but the innovation that I’m sure will continue as our linked information society continues to innovate in the Internet space!

YouTuber’s rejoice! YouTube has been working on a fix to it’s very unpopular change to it’s comments section!

YouTube Launches New Comments Management Tool

Techcrunch – “YouTube today launched a new tool for managing comments on its site that gives video creators a central inbox for all the comments their videos receive.

When YouTube made the controversial switch to Google+ comments, it also added a number of new tools for managing these comments. With this change, however, it also took away the ability to manage comments from the YouTube Inbox and moved comment notices to alerts instead.

YouTube’s users weren’t all that happy about this change, so as the company announced today, it ‘fast-tracked the development of a new comment management page that lets you see, respond to and moderate your comments all in one place.’ This change essentially brings the old YouTube Inbox back.

Using this page, video owners can quickly scan their comments, remove offensive ones, flag comments for spam and give comments a thumbs up. The new comments inbox is divided into areas for published comments, pending comments and those marked as spam.

None of these changes will make a big difference for those who simply hate the new YouTube commenting system, but it will make life a bit easier for those who publish their videos on the site.”

Once again this year we had full coverage of CES from the Techpodcast Network team! I really appreciate all their hard work and efforts to bring us coverage of this huge event! It’s no walk in the park going to an event like this and trying to cover the whole floor. I’ve been to many events like this and it can be tiring, in fact, exhausting! But, for us, it was quite rewarding to be part of their network of coverage that was available all week here on the Dr. Bill.TV web site. It’s times like this when being part of a network is a tremendous blessing. There’s no way I could’ve taken the time or spent the money required to go to Las Vegas this past week and try to cover this event myself. But being part of this network allows us to take part in their coverage of the event. Thanks to all the guys and gals at Tech podcast network for their real good coverage all week long!

Pictured at right is Daniel J. Lewis of “The Audacity to Podcast” reporting for Techpodcast Network and speaking with a representative of Nady about their microphone technology. Nady is a manufacturer of wireless microphones and instrument systems and an extensive line of audio gear including amplifiers, mixers, speakers, headphones, hardwired mics and portable PAs. Their product line also includes motorcycle intercoms and communicators.

So, stay tuned, to our show Dr. Bill.TV, and all the rest of the Techpodcast Network shows for the latest, and greatest, in tech news and information!

I love this! Open Source based right out of the box!

Linksys announces the audacious-looking WRT1900AC Dual Band Wi-Fi router

PCWorld – Michael Brown – LAS VEGAS – “The engineers at Linksys jumped into the way-back machine to design the new WRT1900AC Dual Band Wi-Fi Router. While the stackable enclosure sports the classic blue/black color scheme of the classic WRT54G 802.11g router, you’ll find all-new hardware inside, including a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM processor, 128MB of flash memory, and 256MB of DDR3 RAM.

The new router looks like a beast—it weighs in at a staggering 5 pounds—and it sports a feature set that owners of the the WRT54G could never have imagined, including one USB 3.0 port; one eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port; support for just about any hard drive format, including FAT, NTFS, and HFS+; and four external, removable antennas. It will have a four-port gigabit switch and a gigabit WAN port. The router will be capable of sharing both USB storage and a USB printer over the network.

Four antennas; three spatial streams
There will be immediate comparisons to Asus’s unannounced (officially, at least) RT-AC87U, the existence of which was revealed in a press release from 802.11ac chipset manufacturer Quantenna. One of the key differences is that the Quantenna chipset delivers four spatial streams and can provide a physical link rate of 1.7 Gbps. To take advantage of that speed, of course, you’ll need a client adapter that can also support four spatial streams, and I haven’t heard of any such animal.

Either way, the Marvell chipset Linksys chose for the WRT1900AC is limited to three spatial streams and a physical link rate of 1.3Gbps on the 5GHz frequency band using the 802.11ac protocol. The router will support throughput of 600 mbps on the 2.4GHz frequency band using the 802.11n protocol.

In a pre-CES briefing, Linksys VP of product management Mike Chen told me that the WRT1900AC will use all four antennas to determine the best combination, and it will then turn off whichever single antenna delivers the least throughput. Chen said they’ve seen TCP throughput of 900 mbps in their lab tests, when the router and a client connected to a second router configured as a wireless bridge are in relatively close proximity. Chen also said the WRT1900AC delivered 30 percent better range than their current best 802.11ac router, the EA6900.

It was the WRT54G that got the open-source community producing open firmware in earnest—with projects such as DD-WRT—and Chen said Linksys will have an Open WRT SDK (software-development kit) ready when the new router ships later this spring. Linksys is also working on various peripheral devices that can be stacked beneath the WRT1900AC (not on top, lest the router overheat). The company might also offer optional antennas.”

Darren Kitchen of Hak5 introduces us to the “wearable reference platform!” This is another CES 2014 announcement. Is this your next cool, tech toy?

Info from the warpboard.org web site:

“WaRPboard.org is a nonprofit community based organization providing service and support for the wearables reference platform. The solution’s hardware and software will be open sourced and community driven. No closed development tools or licensing fees are required when used in conjunction with open source resources.

The WaRPboard implements a hybrid architecture to address the evolving needs of the wearable market. The platform consists of a main board and an example daughtercard with the ability to add additional daughtercards for different usage models. In this hybrid architecture, the guts of the design is done on the main board with Freescale’s i.MX 6SoloLite applications processor, and a secondary microcontroller, Freescale’s Kinetis KL16 MCU, is implemented on the daughtercard which is used as a sensor hub as well as a wireless charging MCU.”

This week’s GSotW will help you fix your disk drive’s Master Boot Record (MBR!)

MBRTool – Web Site

Partition trouble?
If you have problems with partitions and/or the MBR and you don’t have a backup to restore, take a look at DiskPatch. Rebuild your partition tables and the MBR from scratch, safe and simple.

MBRtool version 2.3
MBRtool is a utility designed to backup, restore and manipulate your hard disk MBR.

The MBR could easily be seen as one of the most important sectors on the disk. If anything happens to the contents of this sector, the data on your disk could be unreachable. Or the computer might simply not start anymore.

MBRtool is not an automatic recovery program but will allow users to prevent data loss (caused by MBR corruption) by backing up the MBR, and offers power users all the power they’ll ever need to work with their MBR.

MBRtool is freeware.

Features:

• Backup, verify and restore the MBR
• Backup, restore, wipe and clean track 0
• Edit or blank the MBR partition table
• Refresh, remove MBR boot code
• Write MBR signature bytes
• Display MBR to screen or dump to file – Do all this for either the original MBR or backups
• Create and work with ‘blank’ backup files
• Change partition attributes (active, hidden)
• Manipulate NT/200x/XP/Vista disk admin signature
• MBRtool can be operated through a menu as well as through command line arguments
• If operated through command line options, return codes can be used in your batch files
• Supports the first 4 hard disks in the system

Okay, we all want really cool electric cars! Well, we do! At least I do! And, at this year’s CES Toyota announced a new hydrogen powered electric car that looks really cool. Plus, it was announced that this car will be available in 2015. Yes, that is future, but not distant future! So, that means before too long we will actually be able to drive a 300 mile range electric car powered by hydrogen fuel cells that is actually practical. Of course, what will make it more practical, is having fuel stations to buy the hydrogen that powers the fuel cell that makes the car work. Hopefully this will happen over time. California has an initiative to spend $200 million installing hydrogen stations throughout the state, starting in Southern California and expanding from there. Whether other states will get on board with this initiative remains to be seen.

I must say, ever since my elementary school chemistry class, or was in junior high? I’m not sure. However, whenever it was, I remember dreaming of a hydrogen engine in a car based on our studies of hydrogen being the most freely available elements in the universe and the fact that when it burns it produces only water as an “exhaust.” My young brain quickly seized on the idea that this could give us cars that were efficient, and clean, even way back then! What can I say? I was ahead of my time. Anyway, my dream could soon become a reality! At any rate, you have to give it to Toyota for coming out with this technology! They also announced at CES, that the same technology would be used soon in buses for mass transportation.

From Toyota’s web site:

“The fuel cell vehicle (FCV) is the nearest thing yet to an ‘ultimate eco-car’ that offers solutions to energy and emissions issues.
FCVs are powered by fuel cells, which generate electricity from hydrogen, which is not only environmentally friendly and highly energy-efficient, but can also be produced using a variety of readily available raw materials. Thanks to these characteristics, fuel cell vehicles are ideal for achieving sustainable mobility. Therefore, Toyota is striving to make this vehicle technology widely available as soon as possible.

The Toyota FCV Concept is a practical concept of the fuel cell vehicle Toyota plans to launch around 2015 as a pioneer in the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles. The vehicle has a driving range of at least 500 km and refueling times as low as three minutes, roughly the same time as for a gasoline vehicle.

The vehicle’s exterior design evokes two key characteristics of a fuel cell vehicle: the transformation of air into water as the system produces electricity, and the powerful acceleration enabled by the electric drive motor. The bold front view features pronounced air intakes, while the sleek side view conveys the air-to-water transformation with its flowing-liquid door profile and wave-motif fuel cap. The theme carries to the rear view, which conveys a catamaran’s stern and the flow of water behind.

With Toyota’s proprietary small, light-weight FC Stack and two 70 MPa high-pressure hydrogen tanks placed beneath the specially designed body, the Toyota FCV Concept can accommodate up to four occupants.

The Toyota FC Stack has a power output density of 3 kW/L, more than twice that of the current “Toyota FCHV-adv” FC Stack, and an output of at least 100 kW. In addition, the FC system is equipped with Toyota’s high-efficiency boost converter. Increasing the voltage has made it possible to reduce the size of the motor and the number of fuel cells, leading to a smaller system offering enhanced performance at reduced cost.
Fully fueled, the vehicle can provide enough electricity to meet the daily needs of an average Japanese home (10 kWh) for more than one week.”