Seeing mistreated books just makes me hurt inside. No, don’t drip ketchup onto that library book! Broken spines, curses! Also, I have a deep loathing for mayonnaise (yes, I realize that many of you think I’m crazy, but I really do find it gross). So reading about the capture of this serial book defiler in Idaho was just painful.
A 74-year-old woman was recently arrested in Boise after being caught pouring a jar of mayonnaise into a library drop box. However, this wasn’t her first act of trying to turn innocent books into lunch – library employees had previously found books covered in corn syrup and ketchup.
This “person of interest in at least 10 other condiment-related crimes” faces a misdemeanor charge of malicious injury to property. Released from jail, she’s back on the streets – so lock up your books! And your mayonnaise!
Every so often, I get dragged into a meeting that goes way beyond its original 30 minute time slot. Minutes stretch into hours, and my once thorough notes slowly become doodles of my favorite mythical creature, the Uniclops. Now as I work in a office work environment, I love unusual ties, like the Audio Cassette Tie, but I usually don’t get any extra functionality out of them. BEHOLD, the Pillow Tie!
This is a normal tie, which has a small inflatable pillow tucked inside so you can lay your weary head to rest. Surprisingly, it’s not too expensive for a novelty tie, just about $20 dollars, and who knows you might actually get to use it in that long, long meeting.
Now, if they offered a guarantee that I’d get unemployment benefits after getting fired for sleeping through the meeting, I’d be 100% sold!
Their name isย Soluto and they sell themselvesย as “anti-frustration software.” ย Then again, “selling themselves” probably isn’t the best way to describe the Israeliย startup, because their software and service are totally FREE! ย The price alone makes me inclined to give them a higher rating.
Essentially Soluto aims to solve one of the problems that plagues all computer users: poor computer performance. ย If you’ve ever been working on your laptop and experienced lagging, crashing, freezing, or generally buggy software, you’re a candidate for Soluto. ย They also (at this stage in their development) focus a lot on your boot cycle, more on that later.
When you first open Soluto, which has a client interface as well as a background running tool, the app is pretty sparse. ย It is also Windows-only for the moment. ย The client is primarily dedicated to analyzing and optimizing your boot. ย After your first restart, the client will begin visually recording each program that started in boot and display this data in a graphical interface. ย It’s a very nifty feature because it’s easy to remove unwanted items from your boot, but, unlike other boot optimization apps, it also gives you the option to “Delay” items. ย The Delay feature places the item on hold until your computer has some idle time and THEN launches the app. ย This shortens your boot but keeps semi-important background processes a part of your system.
After several boots you can click on the history tab for a thorough graph of changes made to your system and how long each boot took. ย If the boot optimizer was the only function of Soluto, it would already be a great app. ย That being said, the long-term goals of the startup rest more heavily on what they call the “PC Genome.”
In an email conversation, Orit Balicer Tsur, the Marketing Director for Soluto, explained the idea to me:
“The PC Genome is a huge knowledgebase of PC frustration data, built automatically through the usage of Soluto software. Its objective and statistical information, gathered and analyzed by Soluto, is also editable by the community.”
That last part, the “editable” part, is really neat. ย Whenever a program comes up in the client that does not register with any pre-existing record, you have the option to add the background info yourself. ย It’s a wiki-style editor so it’s easy to changeย erroneousย information. ย If you are adding new info, a style guide pops up right along-side to help you craft your entry.
Only time will tell whether or not their project to map the PC Genome will be successful. ย If Soluto catches on with enough users, software manufacturers might start paying attention to the data generated. ย It would be certainly better than those reports that Windows sends to Microsoft after a crash! ย If you’d like to help map the aforementioned genome, you can check a little option in the quick launch contextual menu to participate in “ongoing frustration research” (which, as far as I can tell from Orit’s email, is a distributed computing network).
Overall, I think Soluto is a great app and while I’m not yet convinced of the PC Genome project’s future success, the boot configuration tool is easy to use and more user friendly because of the handy wiki information. ย Go over and grab it today!
Have thoughts on Soluto? ย Share them below in the comments…we’d love to hear what you’re thinking!
Did you know that on average, a typical American worker wastes around 1.7 hours of work time per day and that employers end up paying $759 billion per year because of this? Hit the jump for more stats on slacking.
It’s not the opening line of a joke, but the line up of an awesome cameo’s for the clever advertisement campaign for Adidas’ Originals Star Wars 2010 shoe collection.
I’m not sure if this is staged or not, but it seems that this guy doesn’t really appreciate having all his beloved WOW characters suddenly disappear on him. I just hope that his girlfriend won’t get the same treatment as his monitor, else he’ll have the police knock on his front door in no time.
French Canadian journalist Maxime Johnson, who’s currently visiting the “Display Taiwan” exhibition in Taipei, brought LiteOn’s upcoming LED “mobile lamp” to my attention today. As most LED light bulbs, the “mobile lamp” is compatible with traditional incandescent light bulb sockets, but what sets it apart from similar products is its internal battery, which can keep the light powered for up to two hours in the case of a power failure. The bulb can also be turned on and off when running on battery by gently tapping its base.
Unfortunately, the “mobile lamp” is still under development and will not be released to the market until next year, but when it is, it will be priced in the $50 range. Kind of expensive at first, but considering that the device’s lifetime is around 30 years and that all it consumes is 7w of power, it’s probably worth the investment.
The security researchers who uncovered part of AT&T’s list of iPad users have inadvertently brought out the big guns. No, not Steve Jobs and his Apple cohorts, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin told the AFP news agency that “The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions and has opened an investigation to address this potential cyberthreat.”
Clearly nobody would argue that law enforcers shouldn’t investigate what certainly appears to be a case of data theft, but it’s something of a surprise to see the big boys getting involved in what, despite the high-profile nature of the case, is hardly a piece of hacking with serious security consequences.
What’s actually been taken from AT&T (the security breach has nothing to do with the iPad device itself) is a list of around 114,000 iPad user’s e-mail addresses and the serial number on the corresponding SIM card.
What could have been done with this information in the wrong hands? Well, for a start it’s probably worth a fair price in the spam market: one thing you know about the people on this list is that they’ve likely got a bit of cash to splash, which always catches the interest of spammers.
Other than that, you have to stretch a bit. About the worst that anyone’s managed to conceive so far is that malware spreaders could send bogus e-mails with malicious attachments which appear to have come from AT&T or Apple and refer to the iPad, safe in the knowledge that the recipients are more likely to believe they are genuine.
The real fallout of the affair might be that we come one step closer to answering the long-running question of whether Apple products are inherently more secure or simply offer a less attractive audience to hackers. Esche Aurenheimer of Goatse (Google that at your peril…) Security, which uncovered the list, told CNET: “I think that Apple users now have an unrealistic expectation of protection that is going to be quickly shattered as they become a more sizable minority.”
While the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico is far from funny, the following clip making fun of BP’s apparent inability to stop the oil spill disaster is just hilarious. Check it out:
Seeing mistreated books just makes me hurt inside. No, don’t drip ketchup onto that library book! Broken spines, curses! Also, I have a deep loathing for mayonnaise (yes, I realize that many of you think I’m crazy, but I really do find it gross). So reading about the capture of this serial book defiler in Idaho was just painful.
