Wolfram Alpha

A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.

[found when browsing google news]

telephone manual

I wanted to program my cellphone number into our GE cordless phone, but couldn't find the manual.

But I was finally able to track down the manual online

*** [update 11/20/09]

(model 27923GE2 bought from Walgreen)

Press Memory. Press number (0-9). Press Memory again. Key in phone number. Press Memory again. Phone should beep.

To dial the save number, press Memory, then the number (0-9).

BYD is a buy

Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of investing: When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will. And perhaps most famously, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

So when Buffett's friend and longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB), Charlie Munger, suggested early last year that they invest in BYD, an obscure Chinese battery, mobile phone, and electric car company, one might have predicted Buffett would cite rule No. 3 above. He is, after all, a man who shunned the booming U.S. tech industry during the 1990s.

But Buffett, who is 78, was intrigued by Munger's description of the entrepreneur behind BYD, a man named Wang Chuan-Fu, whom he had met through a mutual friend. "This guy," Munger tells Fortune, "is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch - something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it."

-- via chucks_angels

transferring from Outlook to Vista Windows Mail

My next task was to transfer email and address book from Microsoft Outlook (running on XP) to Windows Mail running on Vista.

Sounded easy enough. Mike had backed up to a .pst file but strangely there was no option for importing Outlook. It turns out the option only exists if Outlook is installed on Vista (so what's the sense?)

Next I read that you should export to Outlook Express then import into Windows Mail. But I could see no option in Outlook to export to Outlook Express. The trick was to go to Outlook Express and import the Outlook messages into there. That worked. Then I think (I don't remember exactly -- after all it was yesterday!) I found where the Outlook Express messages were and copied them to the flash drive. Then I went to Windows Mail and imported [see ali_jane] them.

Then it was time for the address book. I couldn't figure out how to import from Outlook, so I wound up (from another tip on the internet - I can't find the link now) [see Michael B on previous link] to export the address book as a CSV file. I copied that file to the flash drive and imported from Windows Mail.

Note: I believe all this was with Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express 6.

Vista to wireless router

CliffH called me about his sister's company. They changed to a new computer running Vista (with Media Center it turns out) and had trouble connecting to their wireless router (which the old computer had been connected to).

When they called for support, they were told to lower security on the router. And it turned out they could only connect with the security turned off.

My turn to try. The router was a D-Link DI-624 and I found the documentation at Scribd. First of all I had to reset the router because the admin password was changed.

I set WEP back on, but when I tried to connect from the Vista computer, I got the message "the settings saved on this computer do not match the requirements of the network".

So I had to change the configuration on Vista, but it still didn't work.

Then I read that Vista doesn't like WEP, so I changed it to WPA-PSK. On the Vista side, I changed it to WPA-Personal, encryption TKIP. And to my surprise, it connected!

recycling computers for fun and profit

Scott Belford is on a mission.

The lanky Savannah, Ga., native recently donated a revamped PC to Lama Wangchuk, who uses it to surf the Web, communicate with his family in India, and operate a Tibetan Buddhist nonprofit organization out of his tiny Kaimuki apartment.

The lama is not the lone beneficiary of Belford's largesse. Belford's organization, the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation, refurbishes and gives away hundreds of computers a year to schools and homeless shelters, as well as the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation.

Software designer Curtis J. Kropar, founder of Hawaiian Hope, also specializes in recycled technology, in particular by building computer labs in homeless shelters on Oahu. Kropar says he encourages the homeless to keep the computers once they move out of the shelter.

Another long time IT philanthropist is Ken Goldstein, founder of Hawaii Computers for Kids, who recycles computer gear and distributes it to grade schools and high schools statewide.

Also, Kevin Hughes, of software startup Sprout, has long contributed used hardware to nonprofits, and encourages others to do the same.

He says he's found it easy to coordinate his tech philanthropy through Tech Hui, a nonprofit composed of IT and life sciences entrepreneurs.

Project Puma

GM and Segway jumped the gun on the beginning of the 2009 New York International Auto Show to announce the Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) prototype. The joint venture is a two-person vehicle that can travel up to 35 MPH and can travel from 25 to 35 miles on a single charge.

sell your old gadgets

Instead of just throwing away or recycling your old gadget, make money off it. There are websites out there that will buy your old stuff and put money in your pocket (with free shipping) - buymytronics.com and gazelle.com, to name a couple. To give you an idea, my still-functioning first generation iPod nano (4GB) came back around $15. You won’t receive a huge bundle, but every little bit helps!

creating a pdf

Here's a cool way to create a pdf that I just discovered.

Create [or upload] your document in Google Docs. Then go to print it. Google Docs converts it to a pdf ready for printing.

[4/25/09 frwr_news] On the other hand, if you want to convert a pdf to text file, you might try Simpo PDF to Text.

Here's another one: PDF2Text Pilot

[5/3/09 from frwr_news 10/30/08] PDFUNdo.net
PDFUNdo.net is a free online PDF to Word converter. It's real simple to use and doesn't require your email address or registration. You just upload your PDF document and when the conversion is complete, download your Word document. Password protected PDFs not supported [9/4/09 - installation errored]

[9/3/09 frwr-news] PDF Text Reader v1.1 - 3193 KB
Open Almost Any PDF Extract the Text 100% FREE
Features:
- Convert PDF files to text.
- PDF to TXT
- 100% FREE
- Easy to use
- Uses same conversion process as PDFconverter
- Preserves PDF layout in text
- Reads and displays info tags from PDF files
- Built in text viewer
- Works independent of Acrobat and all Adobe products
- Complete and comprehensive help files
- Distributed only by CTdeveloping
- No limitations or time expiration, this software is free as long as you have it installed
[9/4/09 - couldn't open protected file - i.e. file that doesn't let you copy and paste]

[frwr-news 4/3/10] Ease Pdf to Text Extractor is a free software designed to extract text from Adobe PDF files. It does NOT need Adobe Acrobat software.It processes at very high speed and you can convert multiple PDF files to text files at one time.

It started in 1990

in 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What's New" page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.

Fast forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google's services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.

-- Sergey Brin, 2008 Founders Letter