Corn Starch

Steve Spangler The Science Guy brings Ellen a tub of corn starch

[via Donna via Donda]

The Next Technology Boom

EVERYONE loves a booming market, and most booms happen on the back of technological change. The world’s venture capitalists, having fed on the computing boom of the 1980s, the internet boom of the 1990s and the biotech and nanotech boomlets of the early 2000s, are now looking around for the next one. They think they have found it: energy.

Many past booms have been energy-fed: coal-fired steam power, oil-fired internal-combustion engines, the rise of electricity, even the mass tourism of the jet era. But the past few decades have been quiet on that front. Coal has been cheap. Natural gas has been cheap. The 1970s aside, oil has been cheap. The one real novelty, nuclear power, went spectacularly off the rails. The pressure to innovate has been minimal.

In the space of a couple of years, all that has changed. Oil is no longer cheap; indeed, it has never been more expensive. Moreover, there is growing concern that the supply of oil may soon peak as consumption continues to grow, known supplies run out and new reserves become harder to find.

The idea of growing what you put in the tank of your car, rather than sucking it out of a hole in the ground, no longer looks like economic madness. Nor does the idea of throwing away the tank and plugging your car into an electric socket instead.

[via web_rules]

Save YouTube videos

First, you need a way to download and save the file to your hard drive. Second, because youtube videos are in "flash video" format, you typically need to convert the downloaded file into a common format, such as AVI or MP3.

There are several Web sites that allow folks to download YouTube videos. These include keepvid.com, savevideodownload.com, or savetube.com. These are all straightforward and simple to use, and best of all, free.

Converting the saved file is also fairly simple and there are a number of free programs available. We've used Pazera (www.pazera-software.com), Freez (www.smallvideosoft.com/flv-to-mp3), Prism (http://www.nbxsoft.com/flv-converter.php), all of which are free and straightforward to use. They all have optional settings for bitrate, framerat and size, but we've found that for most folks, the default settings provide the best combination of ease and quality.

China leads United States in emitting gas

China has clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas produced by human activity, a new study has found, its emissions increasing 8 percent in 2007. The Chinese increase accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions, the study found.

The United States still has a vast lead in carbon dioxide emissions per person. The average American is responsible for 19.4 tons. Average emissions per person in Russia are 11.8 tons; in the European Union, 8.6 tons; China, 5.1 tons; and India, 1.8 tons.

Global Cooling

In what might go down as one of the ultimate scientific flops of all time, a 1975 article in Newsweek documented a frightening phenomenon threatening the planet -- global cooling. That's not a typo. Even though it might be hard to believe today, some climatologists back then proposed covering the Arctic ice caps with soot to help them melt faster. And that was just 33 years ago.

mailing labels

This was harder to find than I thought. Lorna was looking for a program to enter customer addresses and print out mailing labels for a mailer.

This seemed simple enough. And in the old days, I might have whipped out a QuickBasic program to do that job.

But I decided to look for some freeware to do this. And couldn't find it. Especially because I was looking for only free programs.

I wound up using the Contacts list in Yahoo Mail. You can enter clients addresses and print out labels. However the labels printed a little off (too low on the label) and only three lines printed out. Well it was good enough for them.

Anyway, I was browsing through WinSite and came up with StatTrack Address Manager. It sounds promising but I didn't try it yet. Hmm. Maybe the search will go on. The demo is limited to five names.

Well I guess WinSite has a few more to look at.

stubborn viruses

Steven's daughter's (Bryanna) laptop got hit with multiple viruses. All stubborn.

First was a windows script host message saying

cannot find

c:\document and settings\owner\Local Settings\Temp\tt992.tmp.vbs

Later were attempts to get to WWW.WINIFIXER.COM which were blocked by SpySweeper. WWW.VIRUSBURST.COM too.

The background had a message that the system was infected. And a crawling bug screensaver kept popping up. Both are symptoms of FakeAlert-AG.

Some of this may have been due to running Malware Protector.

XP Defender also popped up. Like I said, multiple problems.

I did the standard stuff like installing AVG, Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, Spybot. CrapClean too for good measure. AVG seemed to catch some of it. And so did Windows Defender.

The screen saver and background tabs were missing, but I was able to reset them at KellysKorner.

That seemed to help a lot, though I was still getting the occasional popups.

I also tried if I could do a system restore. But all the old restore points were gone.

Anyway, that seemed good enough for me, so I tried to do a system update of XP Service Pack 3. Unfortunately, hours later, the system stopped responding so I tried to cancel and the system stalled again.

So I rebooted, the upgrade got uninstalled. And the viruses were back including the crawling bugs. Well at least the background message was gone.

AVG turned up Generic.OYG/ which I move to vault.

Windows Defender detected TrojanJS/Agent.FA

KellysKorner would bring back the tabs, but they would get lost again on reboot.

AVG would find TrojanhorseAgent.WLG, Trojanhorse Fake/Alert.O. Not to mention FakeAlert.O and Agent.WLQ.

And I couldn't get rid of them.

So I turned to safe mode and ran AVG in command line mode (the only mode it runs in in safe mode).

It found a problem in the registry starting up trojanhouse agent.WLG,
Fake_antispyware.OI, and Trojan house FakeAlert.O

I deleted the registry key and infected files from the command prompt
That seemed to clear up a lot of the problems.

Power back on. No Windows Script Host message (may have been running from the registry key). Good sign.

But AVG found Trojan horse Agent.WLQ which was in System Volume Information\_restore. I manually deleted the file.

Trend Micro showed microsoft vulnerabilities, but no spyware. Tried Office update, but the installed Office could not be verified as genuine.

Spysweeper found apmebf cookie, and rogue security products in quarantine. Deleted the quarantine.

Windows Defender found Trojan: JS/Agent.FA which is also known as
Trojan-Downloader.JS.Istbar.ax (Kapersky)
VBS/Istbar (Ahnlab)
JS/ForcePopup (Authentium)
Trojan.Clicker.CM (BitDefender)

This was very annoying and wouldn't go away

I installed BitDefender which sure enough caught multiple occurrences of Trojan.Clicker.CM. But they kept coming back even after manually deleting them.

Exasperated, tried turning back the system date to see if I could do a system restore. No dice, all the old restore points were still missing.

Ran bitdefender full scan again. Ran AdAware which found tracking cookie.

Ran Spybot which found tracking cookie. Then tried to immunize which got stuck. So I shut down the background virusprotection (TrendMicro, AVG, SpySweeper, etc.) and the immunization went through.

Ran BitDefender again, but the Trojan.Clicker.CM was back.

At this point, I think I tried Windows Update again and this time there were some specific updates to apply instead of the whole Service Pack 3 (don't ask me why). And this time the updates were successful.

Windows Defender found nothing. Bit Defender found nothing. Reboot and Bit Defender found only files in trendmicro quarantine.

I don't know if it was perfectly clean, but that was good enough for me. Uninstall Bit Defender. And get it out of here.

The other option, of course, would be to reinstall the O/S from scratch. But I didn't have the system CD. And I don't know if they had all the programs. Office might have been borrowed.

So in summary, what helped fixed it were AVG, KellysKorner, AVG in safe mode and manually deleting in command mode, and Windows Update. Immunizing with spybot might have helped too but I'm not sure.

Web sites show you how it’s done

Instructional videos can make you a better magician, pastry chef or yoga practitioner. There probably isn't a hobby or interest out there that doesn't have a corresponding video sitting on a server somewhere.

There are Web sites that cater to this "how to" market and in this column I want to introduce readers to ExpertVillage.com, WonderHowTo.com, Howcast.com and eHow.com.

Each site obtains its content differently. Expert Village recruits certified expert to create videos for its library. Howcast.com also has user-provided content; WonderHowTo.com collects videos from existing sources such as YouTube; and eHow.com consists mostly of self-help articles but also has a small collection of videos and photos.

All the sites are free and supported by advertising.

monkey think, monkey do

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The Digital TV transition

Ready or not, here comes digital television

The upcoming DTV transition has made one thing clear -- the issue is confusing.

* * *

For more information:

www.DTV.gov

www.dtv2009.gov

DTVTransition.org

DTV Answers

Digital TV Facts

Digital TV 101

OK, I guess that's enough..