Dave's Techytips

Like a efficient biological virus, spam and online scams continue to evolve and take on new forms that elude even the discerning person. From: "Friends name" Subject: " Vacation Problems... " My Family and I are currently on vacation to Madrid (Spain),and we got mugged last night in an alley by a gang of thugs on my way back from shopping, everything i had on me including my cell phone, credit cards were all stolen,quite honestly it was beyond a dreadful experience for me but looking on the bright side  i was not seriously hurt or injured and i am still alive so that is whats important. I've reported to the cops here and canceled all my cards,it appeared I had acted quickly enough or they almost would have succeeded in cleaning out my bank account. I'm really having some difficulties clearing my hotel bills and also need to pick up a voucher ticket at the counter for us to catch a flight back home in a couple of hours. I was wondering if you could

Recently a friend asked me to take an online course with him.   Although I'm a big proponent of education, I didn't see the value in taking a couple extra classes.  But I begrudgingly enrolled because the classes that seemed interesting in AI & search engines.  I was very surprised at how well done the entire class was, how easy it was to follow each exercises and do homework functioned online.  It was very easy to fit it in my schedule too.  Sections are given out each week at your own pace, so I was able to go through them at various evenings during the week or on the weekend. The courses I took are provide by  Udacity  and taught by Stanford professors that work at Google (Sebastian Thrun & David Evans).  You can learn how to program a search engine, program in python, Javascript and HTML, the finer details of data encryption, or like I did, learn how to  program a robotic car .  The best part is that this is a completely free, 7-week online course; no upsells or

" I don't always browse the web, but when I do, I prefer Google Chrome "...  In case you haven't installed it yet, the Chrome browser is quite powerful.  Admittedly, I was not an early adopter of Chrome; but once I got on it, I was hooked. Having been online since before the days of BBS's and 56K modems, I've ridden the wave of browsers from the  revolutionary Mosaic browser , to the free academic Netscape browser, Microsoft's ubiquitous, yet " monopolistic " Internet Explorer, the open source Mozilla Firefox and now Google Chrome. Graph demonstrating that each new browser rapidly takes a major market share and slow decline. (graph predates Chrome's launch) Chrome is quite a different browser; in that it's actually a mini-operating system.  It's even package on a stand-alone, low cost laptop called a  Chromebook  which are even rented on Virgin America flights .  It's literally lightning fast in loading websites and has

If you've seen the film Men In Black, you might remember at the end of the movie that cool scene .  It starts with Will Smiths and zooms out over his car, above the streets, over Manhattan, Earth, past our Sun, solar system and beyond to reveal that the entire milky way galaxy is encapsulated in a marble.  Our whole universe is then in the hands of some octopus-like alien.  It's easy to see that we are not even a visible spec on the cosmic scale.  By way of comparison, we humans might be aliens to the sub-microscopic world of the molecules around us and in our body. So I wondered to myself is there's any comparison to the proportional size of the universe to that of the atomic world .  After browsing wolfram alpha , I found that there may be!  So here's an analogy... We have a massive sun and 8 planets in our solar system (poor  Pluto is a drawf planet ). Mass of Sun : 1.988×10 30  kg Mass of planets : 2.668×10 27  kg   Ratio of Sun / Planets = 745:1