Entering passwords on a system can be risky if done in a public place where onlookers are watching what you do. A new system has been created that adds a swarm of moving cursors to the screen so that it helps mask and confuse onlookers as to which mouse cursor is the real one.
Apple Maps
Now that millions of people have installed iOS 6 on their iPhone or iPad a number of problems have been spotted with the Apple Maps. Problems include town names being in the wrong place down to air ports found in farmers fields etc… The list goes on and on.
In iOS 6, Apple dropped Google Maps as the standard and then switched to Apple Maps so that it had more control over the whole service. Although it has good points such as free navigation built in for latest gen and last gen devices, it still lacks in many areas. One notable example is no street view and even more so, the problem of the maps not being accurate.
NASA Curiosity Landing on Mars video interpolated to increase frame-rate
You might have seen the video that NASA produced which showed the Curiosity being dropped from space down to Mars. The original was taken with a still camera capturing images 4 times a second. Although the results were impressive as they showed Curiosity being dropped down to the planet, they were still a bit clunky as the frame rate was extremely low.
One person, Dominic Muller, decided to use a technique on that video called interpolation. What that means is that the frame rate can be increased to make the video look smoother. This is achieved by putting artificial frame mixed in-between the regular real frames. The results in this case take it from 4fps to 25fps and with that, the video is also enhanced to show a bit more detail and look a little less dull.
Evernote partners with Moleskine and makes a Smart Notebook
Evernote has a few tricks up its sleeve at the moment. They already announced Evernote Business at a conference and also at that same conference they also announced Smartbooks in a partnership with Moleskine.
For those of you unaware of what Moleskine does, the company makes notebooks (the real paper type and not electronic type). The notebooks are used by a good number of people due to the high quality build.
Evernote of course is aiming to get rid of paper although Phil Libin himself (CEO of Evernote) commented that he still uses paper to take some notes.
Evernote for Business coming very soon
The very popular Evernote service will soon be opening up for business users. The aim behind the new product is to get small and medium sized businesses online, or even small businesses within a large business.
Evernote Business will work with groups of users who will have access to documents on the server. Each business user will have his or her private notebook area, but will also be able to tie in with the main business and share/edit documents stored more widely.
Amazon press conference going ahead on September 6
Amazon has sent out invites for a press conference it is holding on September 6th. The event is being held in Santa Monica and at the moment, that’s all that is being announced by the company.
Speculation at the moment is revolving around the launch of a new Kindle Fire 2 or perhaps even a smartphone. Alternative options could be a new generation Kindle announced (of the reader variety), perhaps one with colour eInk, or perhaps back-lit.
Apple releases Mountain Lion update to fix a few bugs
Apple has released the first update for OS X Mountain Lion today. The new update takes Mountain Lion users from OS X 10.8 to 10.8.1. With that update, which requires an update I’ll point out, fixes a few issues such as iMessage, Thunderbolt issues as well as battery life issues on MacBooks.
500 TB of data per day processed by Facebook
Facebook is a busy website with millions of people constantly logging in. Every so often the company shares a bit of information about what kinds of numbers they are dealing with. The latest come in reveal that the site is absolutely huge such as 2.7 billion likes made daily along with 300 million photos uploaded daily.
Google Play Gift Cards launch
Over the last week some pictures of Google Play Gift Cards were uploaded with a hint that they will be launching soon. Google has now made the Gift Cards available to purchase.
Amazon Glacier cloud storage announced
Amazon Web Services now offers a new product called Amazon Glacier. Glacier is a cloud storage solution that lets you store lots of files in the cloud at a cheap price. The draw back is that it is designed to be slower to access meaning that a file you request could take several hours to arrive.
Due to the slow process of getting data, the main types of files you would want to store are those that you do not need immediate access to. Think of old pictures, documents, database backups etc…
Facebook photo deletion now working
For a long time now, Facebook has allowed you to delete photos that you upload. Since that “feature” was added the main problem has been that when you delete your pictures, they don’t actually get deleted. Instead, any reference is removed from your Facebook account, but the pictures could technically still by found by URL if known.
Outlook.com gains 10 million users in two weeks
A few weeks ago Microsoft [MSFT] launched Outlook.com which was designed to be a Hotmail.com replacement. Within the first two weeks of launch Microsoft has now received over 10 million new accounts on the service with the latest figures showing a peak of 1 million of those within a 24 hour period.