Speedfan

I downloaded this program called speedfan which lets you monitor can control your computer fans. When I installed it and ran it for the first time I left my computer on idle and for some reason my CPU temp was 50 degrees Celsius. Now that is very high considering it's doing nothing.

Next I decided to see what the tempter gets up to when running a game. I started FSX and let it run for awhile. This is what happened.

0min CPU 51C Core 20C

4min. CPU 76C   Core 40C

10min CPU 80C Core 44C

It just kept it's temperate the same for the next hour. Now I thought that it would of over heated and crashed because the maximum temperate it can handle is 55 - 65C but it didn't. So I restarted my computer and left it to idle and this time the CPU temp seemed much more accurate. Please note that I didn't give it time to cool down (Warm Boot).

CPU 37C Core 24C.

Now that seems much more accurate for a computer on idle. SpeedFan probably didn't configure right on first use.

Chat-ID stops trolls and spammers

There is some new software coming out soon and it will stop most trolls and spammers on sites that sign up to use it. The software is a download which must be downloaded on a computer in order for the user to access the chat or forums. If it becomes popular a simple add on for popular web browsers will be built.

The software is set to be free to use for users. Website owners must register and gain approval (To fight software abusers).

This is the current website (They will move later)
chat-id.weebly.com

10 Billion Apps have been downloaded

Wow, now that's a lot of apps. Here is the official download rate each hour before the 10 billionth download and the real number of downloads. This is not taken from the counter that you saw on the apple promotion page.


Time is based on where apple servers are located.



Friday 21st of January 2011


(Time/Downloads/Download Rate per hour)

5pm 9987919363, 1337327
6pm 9989254245, 1334882
7pm 9990643916, 1389671
8pm 9992020664, 1376748
9pm 9993308790, 1288126
10pm 9994438807, 1130017
11pm 9995451711, 1012904

Saturday 22nd of January 2011

12am 9996434829, 983118
1am 9997471822, 1036993
2am 9998596648, 1124826
3am 9999906427, 1309779 

Apples site really slowed down after this and this was when the 10 billionth app was downloaded.

Estimated Time of download. 3.03am apple server time.

How did you do, where you asleep?

Embed the Scratch experimental viewer on your website.

Many people know that scratch is moving to a flash based platform. MIT has created an experimental viewer but at the moment only those who sign up to use it can access it. I will tell you how you can embed the flash version on to your website.

First of all you might as well sign up to use the experimental viewer as this will make it much easier to embed in a web page. Navigate to the project you want to embed and view it in the experimental viewer. Right click on the edge of the viewer (not on the flash object) and look at the page source.

You should see something like this

<div class="frame" id="div">

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
  codebase="http://macromedia.com/cabs/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"
  id=Scratch WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%">
 <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="/static/experimental/Scratch.swf?owner=what-the&

projectname=1003864&userid=369503">
 <PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#000000">
 <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=medium>
 <PARAM NAME="allowScriptAccess" VALUE="always">
 <param NAME="wmode" VALUE="opaque">
 <EMBED src="/static/experimental/Scratch.swf?owner=what-the&projectname=

1003864&userid=369503"
  bgcolor="#000000"
  WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%"
  allowScriptAccess="always"
  wmode="opaque"
  TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash">
 </EMBED>
 </OBJECT>

<div class="popup"></div>

You should see something like this

<EMBED src="/static/experimental/Scratch.swf?owner=what-the&projectname=

1003864&userid=369503"

Copy the username, project number and userid into this code in red.

<div class="frame" id="div">
<EMBED 

src="http://scratch.mit.edu/static/experimental/Scratch.

swf?owner=username&projectname=projectnumber&userid=userid"
        bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
        WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%"
        allowScriptAccess="always"
        wmode="opaque"
        TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash">
    </EMBED>
</div>

If done correctly it should look like this.

Because of this websites source code the player has been resized.
Save it as .HTML in notepad. Play around with it add some text above and below. Give the frame a set size to control the size of the flash player.

Tow a wheelbarrow with next to nothing.

Well if you've seen my previous posts (Motorised bike and Spinning platform) you'll know that I can be very creative. And for no reason I decided try and tow a wheelbarrow with a bicycle with just random stuff lying around the house. This was the result.

 Image may have been edited.

What I used:

• A bicycle
• 3 wood things you put in the garden
• A wheelbarrow
• Some random green string like stuff.

How did it go?

It was a good plan and it did work but not very well. The wood was not secure properly and it came off, a lot. This made it very dangerous and I had to keep my speed low. I've never towed anything before and this was a good experience as I almost jackknifed it a few times.

I was going to use tent pegs as a pivot point but I couldn't get them to stay put. It would of worked if I had masking or duck tape to keep the things in place but I couldn't find any tape. If I can find the tape then I'll have another shot at this.

Isn't technology amazing

Technology amazes many. To others it's "Why didn't I think of that" and for the less fortunate it's just frustrating. When people see other people not using technology to it's full potential it can be very frustrating, especially when they want some information and the other person does it the slowest way possible to access it on the Internet. Kind of like the cartoon in this video.

Well the guy using the computer has to learn sooner or later. If he doesn't learn now what's he going to be like in 10 years time?

We have moved.

We have moved our blog to blogger from our old site at technologyintelligence.wordpress.com to techintelligence.blogspot.com.

Don't worry about our old posts they have been moved over to here as well. We will begin to shutdown the old blog over the coming days. Please tell everyone that the new blog is here.

Scratch and the Kinect

Wow. Stephen Howel a computer science lecturer in Ireland has developed a program which uses the open source drivers that enables the Kinect to be used on a computer to transfer the data from the drivers to Scratch. This has enabled an even larger opportunity for people who use Scratch and even those who use BYOB. The program OpenNI2Scratch can be downloaded on Howels site here.

This video was made by Howel and it introduces the new features which are now available to those who use Scratch. This is truly some great stuff. Now only if I had a Kinect.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/18562642

A project in Scratch which shows all the movable joints which are avaliable at the moment.

To the moon in 2020

NASA wants to head back to the moon in 2020 and possibly colonise it to see the effects of long-term space travel before it tries to send man to mars. Will they do it? Will something go wrong? Will a commercial company beat them to it? Your thoughts?

Happy New Year!

Happy new year to you. Yes you reading this right now.
Infomation will still be slow in the coming weeks. Talk about your new years resolution if you want to.

Nearly Christmas

Well it’s nearly Christmas so our blog is going to be slowing down for a few weeks. If any news comes up or other things come up we’ll let you know. Thanks and check back soon.

Nothing

Not much to post today. Well there’s this:

Any ideas on what to post about will be appreciated. Might have some more news later in the week otherwise.

Fan motor information update

I found out some more specifications on the motor. Because it is a fan motor it is single phase AC and appears to be an induction motor. This means that to use it as a generator I must have it on and make it spin faster than what it normaly does.
That gets rid of my plan to use it as a wind turbine to recharge batteries but I could still use it with a petrol motor to convert the mechanical energy output into electrical energy.
The only other think I can think of doing with it is to make a robot. But it will have a very long extension cord or $1000 of batteries with a DC to AC converter.
Any other ideas anyone?
Please see the previous posts for more information about my experiments.

Update of spinning platform

I moved the spinning platform on to a bike to see how fast it can go. So I connected up the Fan Motor to a Tent Peg and fed it through the hole of the platform to the other side. I had to do this because there was no way to reach the other side without doing it.
Items used.
Old Fan Motor
Metal Platform made in the previous post.
A tent peg
an old bike with a missing front wheel
Sticky Tape
Here based on calculations from the video are the results of full power. (50 watts)
RPM: 1800
Top speed: 3.4km/h with no weight (minus the metal wheel, minus energy loss, no gear box)
Energy rating: 17 watts per km with no weight.
This is quite interesting for me. I don’t know about you. Well the best thing I’m going to be able to power off this is probably a robot. The smaller wheels will reduce wheel weight and the light weight of the robot should allow it to reach a decent speed.
Here is a short video:

Spinning platform out of used parts

I made a spinning platform out of used parts. At the moment it is unstable and I need a proper base and a proper way to attach the platform. So far everything has been constructed with these parts.
An Old Fan
An Old Metal Door
A shoe Box
And a little stickytap
What I did was use the motor in the fan to spin a sheet of metal (Which is very poorly cut. Do not touch or you’ll bleed to death ). The controller which comes with the motor and I cut out the sheet of metal from a door. Total construction time was about 5 hours of which 4 hours 30 minutes was spent on the sheet of metal.
In the future I plan to use the blades as a small wind turbine to power a light or recharge a small battery. Also note this is the first time I’ve ever built something (Not out of plastic construction pieces). The total cost was nothing except for some cuts and aching arms as I cut the metal with gardening tools.

Free Domain Names and Custom extensions?

I was thinking about domain names when it hit me. I know how to get free domain names and custom extensions. For a while now we have been developing a test website which enables people to register a free domain name or buy a custom extension one and what’s even better is there are no limits to the custom extension. It has been working great. To gain access to the domain names you will have to download a special browser (We hope to develop an add-on for the popular current browsers in the future). You will be able to obtain the domain names though your normal browser but need to use the certified browser to access any sites that use the domain names. To continue development we need funds to purchase a regular domain name so that you can find the web site as well a Web server.
To see if we should continue development we need your input.
What are your thoughts on this? And any other questions you may have.

10 programs that let you make games easy

Below is a list of 10 programs that will enable you to create games easier. The programs range from 2D to 3D based games and enable games to be made on a variety of platforms including PC, Linux, Mac, Iphone, Wii, Xbox360 and many more.

1. Scratch. This program is made by MIT and has a simple drag and drop interface which enables anyone to make games and animations. The program was initially aimed at young children from ages 6 and up but teenagers and adults use this program just as much too. This is a great program to use if you have never programmed anything before.

2. Alice made by Carnegie Mellon University is another program which can be used to make games. Simular to Scratch but is a little more complex but enables 3D games to be built with relative ease.

3. StarLogo TNG is also a 3D game making program with an interface which resembles that of Scratch. This program is also made by MIT.

4. Adobe Flash is a very common platform for making games on it is relatively easy and there are many tutorials which will help you create some amazing games. Though it doesn’t come with a drag and drop interface it still is a very good and very easy program to use.

5. YoYoGames’ GameMaker is a program which lets you create games quite easily the games you can make are sort of like flash games.

Now we get into harder more advanced game making but this opens up a wider range of platforms to program on.

6. C# by Microsoft is a common program used to make games for PC. There is an add on which will allow you to make games for the xbox360 and play games others have made with the program as well for $100 a year.

7. VB.Net by Microsoft many people underestimate this programs capabilities because only a few developers use it there isn’t as much information on the internet on making games with this program.

8. C++, Another very common program that is used to make games. The difficulty of making games is similar to that of C# and there is plenty of information on the internet which will help get you started in making games.

9. Unity is another great program which can be used to make games on many platforms including the Wii and Iphone. The Wii and Iphone costs to get the developer.

10. Lastly. Even though there are heaps of others out there, is Python which will enable you to create some fantastic games as well.

There are so many other programs which could be listed here that would enable you to make games very easily. This is only a list to get you started. Some people might find certain languages easier than others and some might like to make games on different platforms.
Know of a program you use to make games? Post it below in a comment.

Play Mario on your calculator

Calculators have come a long way. For a while now graphic calculators have been programmable. I got a hold of one of these calculators and was amazed to find that I could download games on to it, including a Mario game. The calculator I obtained was an 8cm touch screen programmable graphics Casio Class Pad 330 calculator. It even has a function to change the off screen image.
I found the games at http://www.classpad.org/ there are many programs to download from the site for your computer and directly on to the calculator. A Software development kit is available to those who want to make their own programs. The games range from 5-in-a-row, Battleship, Chess and Checkers right up to 3D mazes, Ping Pong and Mario. Some others to mention are the card games and Tetris.
The Class Pads are also able to link up with each other and exchange data. You are also able to transfer text files on to the calculator so you can store your notes for those important exams. That is to say that you don’t get carried away playing a game and failing the exam. When compared to the average computer they are still far from powerful with less than 0.5mb of RAM.
Because of how much stuff it can do finding the right place to perform a calculation may take time and a scientific calculator would come in handy in the fiddley process of finding the right place. Overall this is a very good calculator and this calculator is over 2 years old and more powerful models are available.
If you’re interesting in getting a graphics calculator they are really great to have. This model costs around $150 new but there are many other brands out their which also have the ability to perform and operate like this calculator does.

MasterCard and Visa DDOS attacks isn’t hacking.

The recent news reports on MasterCard and Visa distributed denial of service attacks done by “anonymous” as revenge attacks has called the attackers “hackers”. These attacks are no way near hacking. Hacking is unauthorised access to computer resources and is mainly used to destroy or sell data. These people did not hack these sites and should not be called hackers. I’m not defending these “hackers” but they should be labelled as to what they really did. The media has just over reacted to try and sell their content to the highest bidder.

Yes what the “hackers” have done is illegal, there’s no doubt about that. They have cost these companies money as a result of taking down their sites. Most of these “hackers” appear to be people who just want to join in and have some fun in all the chaos which has been primarily triggered by the media and they seem show very little interest in the topic itself. These attacks have only been of low level. Companies that have dealt with WikiLeaks better arm themselves for the worst because once these people actually start hacking these companies could stand to lose millions.

World War 3: Battle over the Net

You’ll be seeing blue more often

Apparently a certain blue shade of light is meant to make teenagers more alert. As crazy as it sounds I think that it might actually work. I’ve been looking at the shade of blue for awhile and have found myself to be more alert as I am typing this.

We better get use to the colour as it’s going to be hanging around for quite some time. It has been developed by Philips electronics and has been tested in several schools so far with amazing results. The shade of blue light triggers the body to become more alert as the retina in the eye’s respond strongly to blue light. This response is a natural habit formed by the blue sky. Speaking of which they might as well just install sky lights and ask the students to look at the sky for awhile.
According to psychologist Effie Konstatinou at City University, London, “Lighting has not been seriously considered as a factor in performance until now”. “We know that there’s a direct link between lighting, well-being and performance”.
The light also has four settings normal, focus, calm and energy which each contain different variations of the blue light. Intense blue to make teenagers focus and up energy levels. And a slightly red colour to make teenagers calm. This blue light is set to change how schools look and students behave.

Convenience at a cost

Oh the wonders of modern technology 3D TV’s, phones, computers and all the rest. Recently a new way to pay for goods has been released. Very similar to the swipe and pay ticket systems featured on modern public transport the device enables customers to quickly pay for goods and services without pressing a button or fiddling with cash. MasterCard’s paypass card has just come out and it looks like some great technology. You have probably seen MasterCard’s ads for the card featuring the slogan “Tap & Go”. The card makes it easy to quickly pay for goods under one hundred dollars with just a swipe of the card.

At first this card seems great, who wouldn’t like to save 30 seconds of their life? But the catch is that without a password (Pin number) on the card anyone can take your money and this is just what is happening. Fraudsters have been increasing stealing details from the cards without even touching them taking all the funds right out of peoples account and they don’t even notice until it’s too late.
Devised with a cleaver scheme fraudsters have purchase machines which can read the card information. With some tweaking they are able to take your cash without them even touching it. The card readers have had their reading card abilities amplified and can read cards from a distance of over 20 centimetres. Fraudsters have then put the readers in bags connected to laptops which go around recording details of every card it can find. And it’s very easy to come within 20cm of the card. Imagine if you are walking along the street with the card in your purse or wallet and someone brushes past you. You then discover a few days later that all your money is gone, it’s that simple. A fraudster could do this to hundreds of people each day and that adds up to a lot of money.
Even though this technology is great it’s just too risky to use it and people can and will rip you off when they can.

Network types

There are a few types of networks which exist in today’s society. An increasingly common network is the PAN network. PAN or personal access network is a small network in which devices usually phones communicate with each other. This is the “Bluetooth” on your phone, computer and even your PS3 controllers. It is a small simple way of devices communicating with each other over a very small distance.
The most common network type you will come across is the local area network (LAN).This is a network of computers connected by cables or Wi-Fi. They are able to send large amounts of data and because it is usually an office or a house it is quite quick because traffic tends to be lower than bigger networks.

The next size up is called a MAN. A metro area network is network of LAN’s connected together over a city. A MAN also contains Backbone servers which act as a gateway to other cities.
Getting fairly large we come to a wide area network (WAN). These contain many MAN’s connected together over a continent and enable the transfer of data over the continent.

Finally we come across a network where the internet is located. A global area network (GAN), is a massive network spread over the entire Earth which connects many WAN’s together and enables people to access information from all over the world quite easily.
On GAN’s there are two types of networks the internet and extranets. The internet is global network consisting of cables and severs allowing free access to data anywhere in the world. An extranet is like the internet but require a password and username (generally can also be email among other things) to access the stored information.
One thing not mentioned here yet are intranets. They are local area networks which are not connected to any outside sources and one must be in the local area network to access the information.

Back up your data

There is never a bad time to back up your data except trying to after you’ve lost it all. Backing up your data is very important if the information that the hard drive contains in important. There’s nothing worse than getting a virus or your hard drive corrupting when you go to use it realising that there is little hope of retrieving your data. One of our members at Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Space & Science (TAISAS) lost his hard drive data when the computer refused to start up. Because of his intellect with computers he was able to retrieve some of the data on the corrupted drive. Just to make this post a little more useful this is what he did.
The computer would boot but then would crash when the OS (Windows XP) tried to start up. This was due to part of the hard drive being corrupted. To retrieve the data he inserted a “very bad” copy of Linux on a CD to boot from. From there he navigated to his saved files and copied them on to a thumb drive. Once complete, he reformatted the drive and reset the BIOS to start over. This took him a few weeks. Working on the computer, while doing other work and diagnosing other problems he encountered, saved him hundreds of dollars from hiring an actual computer technician who would have likely been able to recover nothing.

Now on to backing up your data, why do it? Not only will it save you time and money it will also enable recovery of accidentally deleted data and corrupted data. When making a back up you should back up all data that you have created. Generally you don’t need to make back up’s of programs but you can if that program is hard to find, very important or would cause you loads of trouble from the producer.
When you back up data it is important to back it up to a different location to where it is originally held. Backups that are done over the internet ensure that if something where to happen to the building in which the original data was held, like burning down the other data will be save. The problem with this is that sending data over the internet can be dangerous so encrypting the data while it is being sent and decrypting it once it arrives at its destination is the way to go.
There are two main backup methods you would use backing up all the data or just the data that has changed since last time. Backing up all the data could just be a waste of bandwidth for many so most choose to back up the data that has changed. One other thing to consider is how often you should make a backup. Once a week, daily, every time it changes? Really it is up to you and it depends on how much data can you afford to lose. If you can’t afford to lose any you should back up your data every time it changes. The type of drive you should back up to is also important but where not going to get into that. If you need the latest and fastest drive it’s quite simple to do a little research as it goes along way and it can save you a bunch.

Electric Car

Well here’s our first meaning full post. To start us off we will get into the swing of things with the electric car.
The electric car invented years ago. There are photo’s of people recharging their cars from home but why is it only now that they are coming back? Firstly we must know why they went away. As technology advanced people wanted to go further and faster two. Batteries at the time weren’t very good and electric cars didn’t go very far. When the petrol car was introduced people were amazed and they liked it a lot. Soon many people had these cars and it opened up the world through a much better and quicker means of transportation. It is only now that we are beginning to realise the effect of the burning of fossil fuels is having on our world. City’s are covered in smog and acid rain falls from the Sky’s. We are beginning to see loss of life of Earths animals as we look all over the place to find our precious fossil fuels. Gas prices are now extremely high as company’s try to pull in as much money as they can through our heavy reliance of the black gold.
People for some time now have been looking for alternatives for cheaper and cleaner ways of transportation. Many are now turning to electric cars as they produce no pollutants (Not including the burning of fossil fuels to produce the electricity). But there still lies a problem the batteries are mostly toxic and require replacing quite and are quite expensive as well as the cost of electricity. But for now the electric car remains cheaper than the gas alternative. As mentioned before it is still no better for the environment because of how the electricity is made. This has put people off as their is no point in switching as it is expensive, the car can’t travel as far as a gas car can and the pollution made by the burning of fossil fuels for electricity.
Now for the reason why the electric car is suddenly coming back. Batteries have become much more efficient. Especially with the introduction of lithium ion batteries. Though still quite expensive and the fact that every day house holds can afford to purchase solar panels. This along some government schemes has seen a massive interest in electric cars. It is predicted that in 10 years time that one in five cars will be electric.
Car manufactures have seen this interest in electric cars and many are now introducing the first versions of electric production cars.
 
It won’t be long before the electric car is hitting your driveway.
Don’t like what’s available? There are many companies out there that will take your car and convert it to electric. Some people even go as far as doing it themselves. Which turns out to be a simple and easy process and would save you a few thousand dollars not spent on getting someone to do it for you. Though make sure you have the time and the patients to wait. As it could take you years in some cases.
Look out for events in your area which will be coming soon show casing the latest electric cars on the market and remember don’t forget the solar panels if you want to go truly green.

Welcome to our blog

Hello. This is the first post from our organisation. We are a group that focuses on technology, artificial intelligence, space and science our findings and events will be posted on this blog. So stay tuned we have some big plans a head for a readers as they, along with you journey with us to discover many things.