Fabulous freeware – updated!

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Gosh the web changes fast. I’ve deleted some links that don’t exist any more. Also, I’ve recently acquired an Android tablet, so want to add some of my fav android apps. Not the ones we all know, but the more techie ones. At least, those that make tech simple for the rest of us.

So my fav new Windows app is volumouse. It makes it easy to adjust volume while streaming media or music. It works well with my version of Windows 7. There’s another volume app out there that worked well with Windows 10  but not very well with Windows 7. I’ll give it honorable mention: X-Mouse Button Control.

More updates below (in purple).

Media Players

• VideoLAN – VLC media player Ever wanted to capture a still image from a video? Most free media players can’t do it. After searching the web and reading all sorts of complicated do’s and don’ts, I stumbled upon this free program, which does it effortlessly. VLC also formats DVD playback in a variety of aspect ratios, which can be nice. And, it plays FLAC audio files. I found this waaaay before it became acceptable on the web. (pat on the back)

Video Search

• Freemake – Jukebox that searches and organizes YouTube videos.
• Blinkx Not really freeware because there’s nothing to download. But it’s free and a good alternative to YouTube and Google video searches.

Video Conversion

• Freemake – Awesome and fast
• Handbrake – Does some formats that Freemake can’t. But can be slow.
• Bink Video (RAD Video Tools) Converts digital video files into different formats. Especially useful if your digital camera writes Quicktime .MOV files. Bink/RAD will convert them into .AVI files, which Windows Movie Maker can import!

Image Editing/Digital Painting

• Paint.Net – A reader suggests this. I’ve tried it and it is good. See comments area for more info.
• Krita – Someone just recently tipped me off about this. I don’t see any text function. But it might be in there somewhere. Digital artists should give this a try. I can’t draw my way out of a wet paper bag. So this one isn’t too useful for me.
• Pixlr – This has three versions, each different. I like it way better than Instagram.
• PhotoFiltre One of my favorite free photo editors with plug-ins, highlighting and “fade last effect” feature, much like Photoshop version 4. PF doesn’t handle multiple layers like the GIMP but it’s light and tasteful. Don’t confuse this with PhotoFiltre Studio, which is not freeware.
• PhotoScape This is a fantastic program with some great filters, fun photo stuff and useful text effects. I use this to rotate/level photos as I find it’s faster, easier and does a better job than anything else I’ve tried.
• The GIMP GIMP stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program.” The GIMP just keeps getting better and better; features include text, drop shadow, bevels, layers, color replacement and lots of fine filters.
• Gimphelp.org Some cool filters for the Gimp. While Photoshop 8bf filters may still be the industry standard, I find that using freeware opens me up to different graphics and artistic approaches that I’d otherwise never try. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to install these filters. Just read the instructions and enjoy!
• Virtual Photographer This is a great program for enhancing photos, compatible with the GIMP and other commercial software.
• Picasa IMHO the strongest thing about this photo editor is the excellent color, lightness and contrast fixing. And it’s very user friendly. Photo rotation is a bit blurry. I use PhotoScape for that. Dead. Another example where good names don’t necessarily mean successful products.
• Photo Pos Pro Visually nice to look at, has some good effects and handles layers.
• Photobie I don’t use this one too much but it has some good filters and is under steady development. Like anything else, software preference is a pretty personal thing. Definitely worth a try.
• LightBox Solid performer. Free version touches up pics nicely with minimum of effort.
• UnFREEz Creates animated gifs almost effortlessly, preserves transparency, and does a much better job (in terms of image quality) than MS gif animator.
• Easy Thumbnails This easily creates good, sharp thumbnails.
• Vector Magic Not free but you can evaluate for free with saving disabled.
• Inkscape Good for making banners, working with fonts and converting bitmap to vector graphics.

AntiVirus, Junk and Spyware Removal

• AntiVir A nice antivirus program from Germany with frequent free updates.
• AdAware A ‘too good to be true’ program for detecting and cleaning invasive ads and malware that can slow down your computer. With free updates and lots of options.
• Advanced SystemCare This was recommended by a visitor and it seems very powerful. But some may find it too aggressive and Gizmo’s Freeware says some have reported errors after using. I’ve tested this out and so far have had no probs with WinXP. It gets stuff CCleaner doesn’t, and vice versa.
• CCleaner Fantastic program for cleaning junk files from your hard drive with frequent updates. Also useful for fixing registry integrity and blocking unwanted Windows startup programs. Use with extreme caution and don’t even think about going past the default settings unless you know what you’re doing!
• Glary Utilities Recommended by a visitor; still testing…
• Malwarebytes This is handy if by chance the other stuff listed here can’t help you.
• Panda Cloud Antivirus Antivirus is available in cloud format, so say goodbye to those irritating virus definition updates.
• Revo Uninstaller Uninstalling programs with Windows uninstaller can be like having a traveling salesman or woman leave muddy footprints on your carpet. Meaning… all sorts of junk remains in your system. Revo seems to do a very good job at overcoming that. Scans deep to get the junk that normally is left behind.

FTP

• FileZilla FTP freeware. This is another “too good to be true” program with frequent updates. It just seems to be getting better and better.

Making Web Pages

• Free Gifs and Animations Lots of good stuff.
• KomPozer Apparently some techies didn’t like the fact that the buggy but very promising Nvu went into stasis. So they continued where Nvu left off. Great job! From my preliminary test it seems this might be the best totally free WYSIWYG editor around.
• Amaya A free WYSIWYG html editor. It’s a good, straightforward product that would probably fit the needs of basic to intermediate users. Also has some cool special characters.
• Evrsoft First Page is a free WYSIWYG editor (with a 5 sec. nag screen). It has advanced features but, as others have said, the last version I tested was a touch slow and, on my computer, a bit buggy. Still, I’ve used it with great results. (And it might have been updated since I wrote this particular entry in May 2008).

Making Music / Audio Production

• Kristal Audio Engine This is a great program for sound recording in a multi-track format. It’s like a software version of the old Fostex and Tascam cassette recorders. Handles up to 16 audio tracks with effects, copy/cut and paste, bouncing and room for expansion. Although Kristal has been criticized for tracks not being in sync, spending a bit of time at the friendly user forum solved the issue for me.
• Audacity – This is THE program for freeware sound recording. Check it out.
• Reaper Reaper isn’t free but is a 60 day demo. After that, a nagscreen reminds you that it’s not free. But it continues uncrippled because the developers believe that crippling their demo is not the best way to go. This is a great program for music producers if you are willing to look elsewhere for VST plugins (like KVR, Vst4Free or the very helpful Bedroom Producer’s Blog).
• FL Studio Somewhat like Reaper, FL Studio isn’t free but some features continue to work in the demo version. The cool guitar plugin Slayer, for instance, seems to work without limitation in the free demo version. Other plugins cut in and out.
• LMMS This seems really promising. It used to only work on Linux. But it’s now Windows-friendly. LMMS is mostly about midi, but you can import recorded audio files as samples. So vocalists might want to try Audacity first, or something like that. This program is fairly basic but has its own charm. I did a really quick, silly thing (posted here) while learning it. I never got much further than that!
• Asio4All So you’re new to audio production and your tracks are out of sync, or there’s way too much delay between hitting your MIDI keyboard and hearing a sound (called “latency”). Enter Asio4All. The genuine Asio driver is made, I believe, by Steinberg and is copyright material. But many people seem to use Asio4All, which I guess is some kind of approximation of the real thing. Perhaps it’s like generic drugs vs. name brands. It comes bundled with the FL Studio demo and is at CNET, so it’s got to be okay.
• Synthmaster Player I mention this by itself because it really stands out. It’s free, uncrippled, and great. You may not like my freaky music or limited ability. But I used this synth for the bubbly “Berlin Bass” in the tune On a Star.
• VST Resources There are a lot of really good sites out there telling about great free VST plugins. If you really want to find them all, try Google.  But the three sites I use most are KVR, Vst4Free, and Bedroom Producer’s Blog. BPB narrows down many plugins to his favorites. And I usually agree with his point of view. He’s also open to new suggestions. So it’s a “must visit” site.

Music Listening / Audio Conversion

• Songza There are lots of services out there. This one is my favorite. I like it so much, I made several playlists for all to enjoy! (shameless plug) 😉  Dead… and the company didn’t arrange with Google Play to migrate my many playlists. Total bummer. I worked hard on those. Gone.
• iTunes You don’t have to purchase media with this software. iTunes comes with fantastic, free streaming radio and a 10-band equalizer and preamp with great presets. Travel the world through talk and music!
• Winamp Music and video player with a 10-band equalizer and preamp to make music come alive. I don’t know what’s going on with Winamp these days. But I used to like it.
• Live 365.com No download streaming radio portal. Impressive selection of genres.
• RadioTime Provides links to many streaming radio stations.
• AudioGrabber Handles WAV and MP3 formats. Audiophiles will probably know that WAV files sound better but are huge. MP3’s are “sonically acceptable” and take up less space for iPods, etc. There are several free grabbers out there but I find this one sounds bigger and fatter than the others I’ve tested. Some audiophiles may like that, others may not.
• Xrecode This is great for converting to FLAC (a “lossless” format that sounds just as good as WAV with about 45% smaller file size) and many other formats, including Mp3.
• Freemake – Nice user interface but flac to mp3 conversion test took 5 to 6 times longer than xrecode (which was listed here way before it caught on at CNET, etc).

Create RSS Feeds

• FeedSpring Web publishers can use this to generate their own RSS feeds.

Get News with RSS

• RSS Reader Get news stories from all over the web. This is a super program. But a while back I tested a beta version requiring net framework 2.0 and wasn’t impressed. About a third of my RSS feeds didn’t work. So I reverted to version 1.0.88.0 with net framework 1.1 and everything works great.
• Feedreader Google Reader is no more. I never liked it much anyhow. Doing RSS online is too slow for me. But here’s a program that I use sometimes. It has a good “lookup” feature for specialized articles.

Bandwidth Monitoring

• FreeMeter Since I’m a regular web cam user, I wanted to know which web cam software is most efficient. Enter FreeMeter.

Scanning, File Conversion, PDF

• Bullzip This easily converts Windows documents to pdf. Lots of options. Fantastic.
• Scan2PDF – scan documents to PDF format Scan anything and convert to .pdf (for Acrobat Reader). Also open image files from your hard drive and convert to .pdf. I found that it works best if in “options” you enable the scanner interface to be seen. That way you can adjust the resolution and get really good results.
• Open Office I tested out the word processor on this suite in 2008 and found it satisfactory, although the English thesaurus was weak, and downloading/installing more dictionaries was a hassle. It was also a bit slow to load and felt heavier on my machine than commercial products. Open Office easily converts to pdf, however, and supports a wide number of languages. And I believe there’s a more recent version.
• Primo PDF Primo converts Windows documents to pdf.

Multitasking

• Always on Top I use this with WinXP to keep an application window visible while working with other applications. Examples could be keeping MS Word or maybe a Google chat contact visible while surfing or blogging. This program is very light and works great.

Web Browsing (new!)

• I can’t believe I haven’t listed this one. I’m actually using it right now. It’s a very lightweight browser called K-Meleon. You can customize it and bring old computers back to life (because it is so light on resources). Just don’t shop with it or put any sensitive data thru it. It’s probably not nearly as secure as the big browsers.

iOS Related

• Syncios Transfers media files (including video) directly from PC to iPad and other iOS devices—without having to jailbreak. I couldn’t get it to work on Windows 7 64 at first. But after following the help steps and my own good sense, it works fine. The joy of this is that you can transfer media to your iOS device without having to waste bandwidth (and time) thru iTunes (which was a hassle to instal on Windows 7 64) or dropbox.

Android Apps (new!)

• I just discovered something really cool. You can use an old laptop keyboard as a dummy for your android phone or tablet. I’ve tested out two apps so far. They both work well. Depending on your needs, you may prefer one over the other. Right now my current favorite is WiFi Keyboard. You can navigate thru text with control > arrow.
• My runner up here is Remote Keyboard. It has no lag whatsoever but I couldn’t get my control button to work.

So that’s a list for now. What apps do you like? Any hidden gems that you’d like to share? Drop us a line in the comments area. 🙂

By clicking on any of the links mentioned in this blog post and its comments, you agree that Earthpages.org | Earthpages.ca is not liable for any damages that may be incurred from visiting these links or downloading the software they point to.

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Children can attack Ravana to save Sita at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum

Embed from Getty Images

Rama’s Marriage, 1913. A scene from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Rama marries Sita, daughter of King Janaka, after proving able to wield the great bow presented to the king by the god Shiva

Special to Earthpages.org

At Taiwan’s National Palace Museum Southern Branch in Taibao, children can join the Ramayana battle and attack Ravana to save Sita with an interactive game device for educational purposes.

Lord Hanuman is the game host and it also includes constructing the bridge over the ocean. This is done, after children finish watching animation film on “Ramayana” in its Asian Theater, for the purposes of reviewing the plot and remembering it and children are prompted to recall the storyline. This film “aims to convey to children the many virtues of Rama, Laksmana, Hanuman, and Sita”, Museum announcement says.

Lord Hanuman is also the mascot of Children’s Creative Center of the Museum, (dedicated to 5-12 year-old children and established “to encourage children to explore the diversity of Asian cultures”), “in order to appeal to family audience”.

Commending Taiwan’s National Palace Museum for educating visiting children about Ramayana and for exhibiting Hindu artifacts, Rajan Zed said that art had a long and rich tradition in Hinduism and ancient Sanskrit literature talked about religious paintings of deities on wood or cloth.

Rajan Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, urged major art museums of the world, including Musee du Louvre and Musee d’Orsay of Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Los Angeles Getty Center, Uffizi Gallery of Florence (Italy), Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern of London, Prado Museum of Madrid, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, etc., to frequently organize Hindu art focused exhibitions, thus sharing the rich Hindu art heritage with the rest of the world.

Jeng-Yi Lin is the Director of awards-winning Taiwan’s National Palace Museum founded in 1925, which houses ancient Chinese artifacts and includes a collection of about 700,000 objects.

Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about 1.1 billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal.

Related articles

 What to do before you go to India (telegraph.co.uk)

 ‘Hanuman Da Damdaar’ has Salman Khan, animation, songs and a big-budget feel(thereel.scroll.in)

Melding mind and machine: How close are we?

A noninvasive brain-computer interface based on EEG recordings from the scalp.
Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), Photo by Mark Stone, CC BY-ND

James Wu, University of Washington and Rajesh P. N. Rao, University of Washington

Just as ancient Greeks fantasized about soaring flight, today’s imaginations dream of melding minds and machines as a remedy to the pesky problem of human mortality. Can the mind connect directly with artificial intelligence, robots and other minds through brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies to transcend our human limitations?

Over the last 50 years, researchers at university labs and companies around the world have made impressive progress toward achieving such a vision. Recently, successful entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk (Neuralink) and Bryan Johnson (Kernel) have announced new startups that seek to enhance human capabilities through brain-computer interfacing.

How close are we really to successfully connecting our brains to our technologies? And what might the implications be when our minds are plugged in?

How do brain-computer interfaces work and what can they do?

Origins: Rehabilitation and restoration

Eb Fetz, a researcher here at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), is one of the earliest pioneers to connect machines to minds. In 1969, before there were even personal computers, he showed that monkeys can amplify their brain signals to control a needle that moved on a dial.

Much of the recent work on BCIs aims to improve the quality of life of people who are paralyzed or have severe motor disabilities. You may have seen some recent accomplishments in the news: University of Pittsburgh researchers use signals recorded inside the brain to control a robotic arm. Stanford researchers can extract the movement intentions of paralyzed patients from their brain signals, allowing them to use a tablet wirelessly.

Similarly, some limited virtual sensations can be sent back to the brain, by delivering electrical current inside the brain or to the brain surface.

What about our main senses of sight and sound? Very early versions of bionic eyes for people with severe vision impairment have been deployed commercially, and improved versions are undergoing human trials right now. Cochlear implants, on the other hand, have become one of the most successful and most prevalent bionic implants – over 300,000 users around the world use the implants to hear.

A bidirectional brain-computer interface (BBCI) can both record signals from the brain and send information back to the brain through stimulation.
Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), CC BY-ND

The most sophisticated BCIs are “bi-directional” BCIs (BBCIs), which can both record from and stimulate the nervous system. At our center, we’re exploring BBCIs as a radical new rehabilitation tool for stroke and spinal cord injury. We’ve shown that a BBCI can be used to strengthen connections between two brain regions or between the brain and the spinal cord, and reroute information around an area of injury to reanimate a paralyzed limb.

With all these successes to date, you might think a brain-computer interface is poised to be the next must-have consumer gadget.

Still early days

An electrocorticography grid, used for detecting electrical changes on the surface of the brain, is being tested for electrical characteristics.
Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, CC BY-ND

But a careful look at some of the current BCI demonstrations reveals we still have a way to go: When BCIs produce movements, they are much slower, less precise and less complex than what able-bodied people do easily every day with their limbs. Bionic eyes offer very low-resolution vision; cochlear implants can electronically carry limited speech information, but distort the experience of music. And to make all these technologies work, electrodes have to be surgically implanted – a prospect most people today wouldn’t consider.

Not all BCIs, however, are invasive. Noninvasive BCIs that don’t require surgery do exist; they are typically based on electrical (EEG) recordings from the scalp and have been used to demonstrate control of cursors, wheelchairs, robotic arms, drones, humanoid robots and even brain-to-brain communication.

The first demonstration of a noninvasive brain-controlled humanoid robot “avatar” named Morpheus in the Neural Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington in 2006. This noninvasive BCI infers what object the robot should pick and where to bring it based on the brain’s reflexive response when an image of the desired object or location is flashed.

But all these demos have been in the laboratory – where the rooms are quiet, the test subjects aren’t distracted, the technical setup is long and methodical, and experiments last only long enough to show that a concept is possible. It’s proved very difficult to make these systems fast and robust enough to be of practical use in the real world.

Even with implanted electrodes, another problem with trying to read minds arises from how our brains are structured. We know that each neuron and their thousands of connected neighbors form an unimaginably large and ever-changing network. What might this mean for neuroengineers?

Imagine you’re trying to understand a conversation between a big group of friends about a complicated subject, but you’re allowed to listen to only a single person. You might be able to figure out the very rough topic of what the conversation is about, but definitely not all the details and nuances of the entire discussion. Because even our best implants only allow us to listen to a few small patches of the brain at a time, we can do some impressive things, but we’re nowhere near understanding the full conversation.

There is also what we think of as a language barrier. Neurons communicate with each other through a complex interaction of electrical signals and chemical reactions. This native electro-chemical language can be interpreted with electrical circuits, but it’s not easy. Similarly, when we speak back to the brain using electrical stimulation, it is with a heavy electrical “accent.” This makes it difficult for neurons to understand what the stimulation is trying to convey in the midst of all the other ongoing neural activity.

Finally, there is the problem of damage. Brain tissue is soft and flexible, while most of our electrically conductive materials – the wires that connect to brain tissue – tend to be very rigid. This means that implanted electronics often cause scarring and immune reactions that mean the implants lose effectiveness over time. Flexible biocompatible fibers and arrays may eventually help in this regard.

Co-adapting, cohabiting

Despite all these challenges, we’re optimistic about our bionic future. BCIs don’t have to be perfect. The brain is amazingly adaptive and capable of learning to use BCIs in a manner similar to how we learn new skills like driving a car or using a touchscreen interface. Similarly, the brain can learn to interpret new types of sensory information even when it’s delivered noninvasively using, for example, magnetic pulses.

Learning to interpret and use artificial sensory information delivered via noninvasive brain stimulation.

Ultimately, we believe a “co-adaptive” bidirectional BCI, where the electronics learns with the brain and talks back to the brain constantly during the process of learning, may prove to be a necessary step to build the neural bridge. Building such co-adaptive bidirectional BCIs is the goal of our center.

We are similarly excited about recent successes in targeted treatment of diseases like diabetes using “electroceuticals” – experimental small implants that treat a disease without drugs by communicating commands directly to internal organs.

And researchers have discovered new ways of overcoming the electrical-to-biochemical language barrier. Injectible “neural lace,” for example, may prove to be a promising way to gradually allow neurons to grow alongside implanted electrodes rather than rejecting them. Flexible nanowire-based probes, flexible neuron scaffolds and glassy carbon interfaces may also allow biological and technological computers to happily coexist in our bodies in the future.

From assistive to augmentative

Elon Musk’s new startup Neuralink has the stated ultimate goal of enhancing humans with BCIs to give our brains a leg up in the ongoing arms race between human and artificial intelligence. He hopes that with the ability to connect to our technologies, the human brain could enhance its own capabilities – possibly allowing us to avoid a potential dystopian future where AI has far surpassed natural human capabilities. Such a vision certainly may seem far-off or fanciful, but we shouldn’t dismiss an idea on strangeness alone. After all, self-driving cars were relegated to the realm of science fiction even a decade and a half ago – and now share our roads.

A BCI can vary along multiple dimensions: whether it interfaces with the peripheral nervous system (a nerve) or the central nervous system (the brain), whether it is invasive or noninvasive and whether it helps restore lost function or enhances capabilities.
James Wu; adapted from Sakurambo, CC BY-SA

In a closer future, as brain-computer interfaces move beyond restoring function in disabled people to augmenting able-bodied individuals beyond their human capacity, we need to be acutely aware of a host of issues related to consent, privacy, identity, agency and inequality. At our center, a team of philosophers, clinicians and engineers is working actively to address these ethical, moral and social justice issues and offer neuroethical guidelines before the field progresses too far ahead.

Connecting our brains directly to technology may ultimately be a natural progression of how humans have augmented themselves with technology over the ages, from using wheels to overcome our bipedal limitations to making notations on clay tablets and paper to augment our memories. Much like the computers, smartphones and virtual reality headsets of today, augmentative BCIs, when they finally arrive on the consumer market, will be exhilarating, frustrating, risky and, at the same time, full of promise.

James Wu, Ph.D. Student in Bioengineering, Researcher at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, University of Washington and Rajesh P. N. Rao, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering , University of Washington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Today’s Top Tweet – Corruption… Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves

There's more to measuring corruption than Transparency International's annual index, just released https://t.co/NMREYmWbii #corruption

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) January 27, 2017

Today’s top tweet actually comes from yesterday. I’ve been busy learning Linux (read here) so the news – or at least my commenting on it – has taken a temporary back seat.

But I’ve more or less figured out enough Linux to do the news with it. So here I go…

About today’s tweet…

When I won a scholarship to study in India I was a naive North American. I had a few misconceptions:

One… I thought Canada and the US were basically the same. Two… I thought large scale corruption only took place in seedy, faraway countries.

Image – wikimedia.org

So when in India, I was offended by its obvious, in-your-face corruption.

This was the mid-to-late 1980s and you couldn’t miss it. I’m not sure about today. The last time I visited India was around 1991.

To make a long story short… on returning to Canada and the Canadian academic system, I was happy. I even felt – at the beginning – that I had found a new ‘family.’ A group of honorable people dedicated to learning and knowledge in areas I was becoming increasingly interested in — in my case, Psychology and Religion.

World Map Index of perception of corruption 2010 (Image: Wikipedia)

A few years later, however, my new ‘family’ proved to be just as weird and dysfunctional as any biological family can be. And I realized that corruption is not just an Asian thing. These days I believe it’s everywhere. We just hide it better in the West.

So I usually laugh at global measures of corruption… corruption “indexes” and so on.

Can a broken yardstick accurately measure another broken yardstick?

No. Obviously not. Measures of corruption, themselves, are inherently biased. Possibly even corrupt, themselves. That’s why I welcome today’s top tweet. We need to realize this.

Corruption isn’t just a topic for disgruntled outsiders shafted by the system. It’s something that hurts us all. And the longer we turn a blind eye to corruption, the longer it will do its damage to real people, here and abroad.

Related articles

• The Best Linux Distros to Watch Out for in 2017

Today’s Top Tweet – Another juicy one from the parapsychology corner

The Russian Spy Who Convinced America to Take ESP Seriously @atlasobscura https://t.co/zE9QJU7Oqt

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) January 13, 2017

Today’s top tweet happens to be my only tweet today. Truth be told, I’m deeply engrossed in trying to figure out xubuntu, which is a Linux operating system. I have installed it parallel to Windows XP on an old laptop (which I’m using now). So right now my mind is on tech stuff, not the news.

Having said that, I will always be interested in the possibility of hostile spies and parapsychology.

See ya’ll in a day or so once I get xubuntu working with my wifi. If that is… 🙂

Today’s Top Tweet – I’m no dark web wizard but…

Kellyanne Conway calls CIA report on Russian election meddling 'laughable and ridiculous' https://t.co/05b3173tYo

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) December 11, 2016

I’m no dark web wizard but if the CIA’s claims are definitively true, why don’t they just post their data on the web for all to see? Surely there are enough independent and capable tech wiz’s to assess whatever traces, links etc. they have unearthed.

By way of analogy, if a surveillance camera captures footage of a criminal, the police usually have no hesitation releasing this info to the media. So what’s going on with the Russia allegations?

Hackers Infiltrate 45 Million Passwords for over 1000 Sites

Hackers Infiltrate 45 Million Passwords From Over 1,000 Enthusiast Sites https://t.co/qSUKFyJKfz via @HotHardware

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) June 17, 2016