Kinect Going Into Skynet

By DustinPosted on

Now this is really interesting. These students have made a quadrotor flying machine using a Kinect. Very Hunter-Killer Terminator like. These Kinect hacks are getting cooler every day!

The attached Microsoft Kinect [2] delivers a point cloud to the onboard computer via the ROS [3] kinect driver, which uses the OpenKinect/Freenect [4] project’s driver for hardware access. A sample consensus algorithm [5] fits a planar model to the points on the floor, and this planar model is fed into the controller as the sensed altitude. All processing is done on the on-board 1.6 GHz Intel Atom based computer, running Linux (Ubuntu 10.04).

A VICON [6] motion capture system is used to provide the other necessary degrees of freedom (lateral and yaw) and acts as a safety backup to the Kinect altitude–in case of a dropout in the altitude reading from the Kinect data, the VICON based reading is used instead. In this video however, the safety backup was not needed.

Fix For UAC Problem In Windows 7

By DustinPosted on

Some people may be experiencing this problem, and Microsoft has a Fix It solution for it, as well as a manual fix if you want to go that route. If you are suffering from the problem, jump on over to Microsoft and get it fixed!

In the Windows 7 “System and Security” control panel category, the Action Center lets you change User Account Control (UAC) settings. In the User Account Control Settings dialog box, you move the slide bar control for notifications, and then you click the OK button. In this scenario, the dialog box does not close, and no change is made. When the mouse pointer is positioned on the OK button, and you press ENTER, the dialog box still does not close, and no change is made.

Windows 8 and “The Cloud”

By DustinPosted on

According to Softpedia, Windows 8 will need to move past the “To The Cloud!” agenda they are using with Windows 7. Sure, Windows Essentials is considered “Cloud” software. So is their Microsoft Office Online (Office 365), among others. What Microsoft isn’t teaching people is that “The Cloud” is actually just the Internet. The software that utilizes the connection to the Internet, for storage or as a place to access software (Software as a Service), is considered “Cloud Computing”. While I feel that the whole “Cloud” moniker is overused and misunderstood by many, and is definitely a huge buzz word that the marketing directors use to entice people to switch over to their remotely hosted servers or applications.

Also for the time being, Windows 7’s connection to the Cloud is largely limited to the rich clients packaged into the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite.

At least this is the conclusion of the new “To the Cloud” marketing campaign put together for the successor of Windows Vista.

No less than four video advertisements have already been released, all of which embedded at the bottom of this article for your viewing pleasure.

Futuremark 3DMark 2011 Released

By DustinPosted on

Futuremark has finally taken the wraps completely off the new 3DMark 2011. You can download it at their site. Although it is mostly a synthetic benchmark and isn’t real world gaming (which is why we spend so much on a gaming PC!), it is still great for coming up with single numbers to judge your overclocking results and compare to other systems.A DirectX 11 video card and Vista/7 is required.

Your PC’s performance is determined by the interactions between different hardware components, the operating system and the type and amount of software running. A benchmark provides a set of performance tests that can be repeated with a high degree of accuracy on a wide range of computer hardware.

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark for measuring the graphics performance of gaming PCs.

Week 1 Christmas Giveaway!

By DustinPosted on

It’s Christmas Giveaway time! This week, we will have 2 lucky winners, each getting a license for TuneUp Utilities 2011, which is good for 3 installs each. This is a great utility to tune your PC and keep it running as fast as possible.

Entering is easy. Like our page on Facebook (the link is to the right) , and leave a comment to this post (No Registration is Required!). Simple, right?

Winners will be chosen Friday, December 10th 2010 at 7:00PM PST. Good luck to all! Make sure to come back next week to see what else we have in store!

EDIT: The Winners have been chosen using Random.Org. Congratulations to Brittany E & AllTheWiser! You each won a license for TuneUp Utilities 2011! Check your Facebook inbox for the key and to download your software! Enjoy! Thank you to all that entered.

We will be posting another contest on Monday morning for Week 2!

Black Tango Down For Windows – 99 Cents

By DustinPosted on

Today is Day 4 of the Games For Windows Daily Deal. For 99 pennies today, you can grab the newer game Black Tango Down. I’m DLing it right now, and from the videos I’ve seen, it looks to be a nice game!

Participate in the “NetWar”: a hyper-realistic battlefield letting you fight tomorrow’s conflicts with or against your friends in the gritty Blacklight universe. Experience the bleeding edge of advanced warfare today for only 99 cents!

Internet Explorer “Protected Mode” Can Be Bypassed

By DustinPosted on

The Protected Mode in the later versions of Internet Explorer has been proven to be not so “Protected” as previously thought. While it is a security hole, it can also be avoided as much as possible by limiting the trusted Intranet Zone.

Researchers from Verizon Business have now described a way of bypassing Protected Mode in IE 7 and 8 in order to gain access to user accounts. The technique requires a vulnerability that allows the execution of malicious code in the browser or in a browser extension. Although the malware will initially only run in the browser’s Low Integrity Mode, it can start a web server on the computer that will respond to requests on any port of the loopback interface. By calling the IELaunchURL() function, an attacker can instruct IE to load a URL from this web server, for instance “http://localhost/exploit.html”. Localhost is generally part of IE’s Local Intranet Zone and, by default, Protected Mode is disabled for content from this zone.

Microsoft Begins Pushing Cut/Paste Update

By DustinPosted on

Developers have started to get the new update from Microsoft for the Windows Phone 7 which includes the Cut & Paste functionality. This was promised from the beginning, and it is starting to get into the cycle of updates. How long did it take the iPod Touch/iPhone? I know that was a lot of the animosity from the Apple crowd about the Windows Phone 7. It’s turning out to be a real nice platform.

“A user can tap a word in mail, IE, Word, etc and that word is then highlighted with arrows on both sides. One can then drag to the left or right to include more words. An icon appears above the highlighted word(s) (looks very similar to the copy icon in Office 2010) to copy. Open a new document, once the cursor is set/blinking and the soft keyboard appears, a paste icon (again, looks the same as the paste icon in Office 2010) is shown just above the top row of letters. In “Messaging”, a user can long press a specific IM which open up the hidden menu that now includes copy. Paste where you wish…”

MS Office 2010 Celebrates 6 Months

By DustinPosted on

6 Months ago, Microsoft unleashed Office 2010 onto the public. It looks like it has been a great success so far, with excellent growth and market penetration. There are many reasons to upgrade to the newest version of Office, but for many, Office 2007 is still “good enough”. Those that need basic features for school or home could get by with Office 2007. Anything more than that, and you will find a lot of potential with Office 2010.

First, customers are buying Office 2010 at a record pace. Office has seen double-digit growth in its first full quarter on the market, a 50 percent increase in business non-annuity sales, and a 5 percent increase in multi-year licenses in Q1. Needless to say, we’re delighted by the rate of adoption and interest from consumer and business customers. While the numbers are amazing, what pleases us even more are the many ways customers have become more efficient and productive as a result of implementing Office 2010.