technology

Chris Knight's avatar

The Daily Mail in Great Britain is reporting that every police officer in London – from the average bobby pounding a beat on up to London Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Ian Blair – will soon be implanted with a microchip that will allow their movements to be tracked all over London, whether they’re on the street or in a pub or deep in the underground, or just at home.

The penalty for refusing to be “chipped”, says the story in the Daily Mail, is that a police officer will lose his or her job.

If I were one of those good London cops, I’d be seriously asking myself: “Is this job really worth my health?” I mean, if this works off of RFID technology, which I’m presuming it does, there’s already been reports of medical problems associated with these things with implanted chips in pets. Namely, stuff like cancer, painful ...

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A few weeks ago while visiting a church this crazy idea struck: put the Bible on an iPod! I’m not talking about MP3s of spoken passages from the scriptures. You can find those all over the place. What I wanted to know is: was there any software that puts the text of the Bible itself on an iPod, that can be taken with you and read anywhere?

It took awhile but last night I found podBible, a neat (and free!) application created by a fellow named Brendan Ross. Using the Notes feature of the iPod, podBible puts the entire New Testament of the English Standard Version along with Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament on the iPod with an easy-to-navigate interface. Here you see podBible running on my own 80-gig iPod classic, displaying 1st Corinthians chapter 1 starting with verse 26 (however that is not Corinthian leather on ...

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The New York Times has published an interesting piece about blog-related stress. The drive to constantly publish new material for lucrative gain has been enough to already cause serious medical problems and even death among some bloggers.

That just ain’t healthy, by any measure.

Many years ago (like when I was a teenager) I had a friend who told me something that’s become so prophetic, it’s absolutely frightening in its accuracy: the “information era”, he told me, would soon become something dominated more by information than by people. To the point that information would become like a god that people would be sacrificing every precious moment of their lives toward satiating. And I think I understood enough of what he was saying back then to be legitimately scared about it.

That’s why The Knight Shift isn’t my bread and butter, and I don’t particularly care for it to become ...

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Abby Prince of WebProNews has filed a fascinating story, albeit one with significant ramifications, about the fast-evaporating pool of available Internet Protocol (IP) numbers. Ever since the Internet’s inception the computers connected to it have been given addresses under the original IP4 scheme. But with the increase of devices that use the Internet combined with the number of developing countries that are beginning to build up their information infrastructure, there is a dwindling number of IP addresses still free for use. A new scheme, the IP6 protocol, has already been developed but it’s far from being fully implemented… meaning we could possibly and likely will see an IP numbers “crunch” in the near future.

Hit here for some excellent reporting about the issue....

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Give it up for Harmonix: they are definitely one software company that listens to its fan base. Yesterday they pushed a patch for their hit game Rock Band that addresses several issues that players have been having. And with the update comes one very cool innovation: Rock Band Store, an in-game way to purchase new songs without having to leave the game for Xbox Live Marketplace or the PlayStation Store.

I just installed the update and messed around with the game (the Xbox 360 version) and I am extremely pleased with what Harmonix has done with this update. The Rock Band Store even lets you preview songs that you might consider purchasing before doing so.

In addition to the Rock Band Store, the new patch fixes the random song lists bugs, tweaks the cap on fans in Band World Tour mode, improves some issues with the microphone (which was ...

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Late last night I succeeded in finally putting every episode of Lost on my new iPod. And I didn’t buy them through iTunes and load ’em on the iPod either: instead I chose to rip them straight from my DVD sets.

This took a lot of work. And when I was starting it off with Season 3, I wound up encoding most of those episodes, then found a much better way to do it and so I started the whole process all over again. But in the end, they were all done (and I might buy the Season 4 episodes over iTunes to add them to my iPod’s inventory starting next month when Lost returns).

So how’d I do it, on a computer running Windows Vista? The first thing I did was use HandBrake, which is a free program for most platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) that converts DVDs ...

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A few days before Christmas, Lisa and I were at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh and we wound up going into the Apple Store there. That was the first time that I ever beheld the video capability of the iPod. The first thing that I thought about was that this would be a neat way to carry around my video work to show to people. It was enough to make me forget about my initial reluctance to get an iPod (which has mostly been based on how they don’t have user-replaceable batteries).

So last week, on our way back from Georgia, we stopped at a Best Buy and I used a gift card that was a Christmas present from Mom, and got me an 80 gigabyte iPod classic. And I have to admit: this is a very addictive little gadget to have! I’m finally starting to understand why so many ...

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Last Tuesday, after I came back from Texas, I went to Greensboro to pick up my new computer at the store that I’d ordered it from. By the way if you’re in North Carolina and want quality computer products and outstanding service, I would definitely recommend Intrex. This is the second system that I’ve bought from them and I’ve never been anything less than overwhelmed at their confidence and dedication. They’ve got stores from Winston-Salem all the way to Greenville, with two in Greensboro and several in the Raleigh-Durham area.

Anyhoo, I got this new ‘puter as an investment in my new video production enterprise. That’s what I’ve spent a lot of this past week doing: installing software, tweaking hardware and otherwise fine-tuning it to be the instrument that I need to have.

So forgive me if I’m a babe in the woods when it comes to Windows Vista, ...

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