I have been racking my brains for some time now trying to figure out a better way for people to interact with the information overload that is constantly coming at them. One of the ways that I have discovered is through augmented reality. And now, there are even tools that are available for free that can help with this.

Microsoft has released some technology that, when combined with heads up displays and GPS tracking could provide a very useful and informative way of seeing the world. When you combine the mapping capabilities of Virtual Earth with trueSpace, a 3D development environment, you can modify the way you see the virtual world.

Now, take this modified virtual world and add a heads up display in the form of glasses which interacts with very precise GPS systems, you have a very good start at something amazing!

Here is a demo that has been put together to show what a trueSpace building looks like in Virtual Earth:

The implications of something like this are astronomical! Some potential uses include:

• Tourist attractions to historical areas showing where building once existed
• Military real-time monitoring of a remote mission
• Real estate agents showing future expansion and growth of a neighborhood
• Architectural businesses performing a virtual walk-through of future building

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/12/reality-20-like-the-real-world-only-better/trackback/

Sometimes, it can be difficult to visualize what is happening inside a computer and we need a bit of help from the real world in order to get the concepts clearly. Here is an absolutely brilliant way of visualizing how OR, AND and XOR gates work using dominoes.

I can’t imagine how long it took this guy to do this but I have to admit that I am impressed!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/07/31/or-and-and-xor-logic-gateswith-dominoes/trackback/

A very useful trick from What’s My Pass? if you can’t access your Vista box:

Using BackTrack Live CD which can be found ::here::

For those of you who forgot your spiffy new Vista Logon password. Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account. BTW, this has been around since XP but still useful.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)
ls (get the list of mounted drives)
cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)
cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)
cd System32/ (change to the system directory)
mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)
cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)
reboot

once rebooted, at vista logon screen, Press Windows key + U
To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)
Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.
c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add
c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add
Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/07/22/reset-your-vista-password/trackback/

Since I have done a lot of writing in the past about USB devices, I often get questions about the actual USB hardware. One of the biggest questions that I get is about the USB pinout specifications. Just what are each of those pins and what do they do.

Well, the USB pinout varies, depending upon which type of USB plug and receptical you have.

Series A USB Pinout

This is usually what you see most USB devices such as mice and keyboards using. These are four pin devices, two pins for power (1,4) and two pins for data (2,3). The power pins transfer 5V DC.

Series B USB Pinout

These are more popular on USB hard drives, CD/DVD drives and scanners. Just like Series A, these are four pin devices, two pins for power (1,4) and two pins for data (2,3). The power pins transfer 5V DC.

Mini-USB Series A USB Pinout

The Mini-USB series went to a five pin design, even though one pin is either not used or is redundant. You will usually see these on cameras or other such devices. Pins 1 and 5 are for power and pins 2 and 3 provide data access. Pin 4 is connected to pin 5 for redundancy.

Mini-USB Series B USB Pinout

Just like Mini-USB Series A, Series B used five pins, two for power (1,5) and two for data (2,3). Pin 4 is not connected and serves no purpose.

Summary Tables

Standard USB Pinout & Cable Color Code

Mini-USB Type-A Pinout & Cable Color Code

Mini-USB Type-B Pinout & Cable Color Code

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/07/21/usb-pinout/trackback/

A few weeks ago, I ran across a couple of articles about a university in Holland that was having difficulty getting all of their Microsoft patches out to all of their systems. What did they decide to do?

Buy more servers? Nope!

Increase bandwidth? Nope!

Use a program that has been essentially outlawed in North American universities? Yep!

The university decided, on the advice of their IT consultant, that they would use bittorrent to deploy the patches.

This really got me thinking about how I would go about creating my own U.Holl server (as I like to call it). These are some of the thoughts that I have come up with.

The Server

Just to add a really strong sense of irony, I would probably build the U.Holl server on Linux, most likely Ubuntu with a typical LAMP installation. Then, for ease of management, I would install a tracker such as phpMyBittorrent or something similar.

In the tracker software, I would create several different categories based on the target systems that I would use. For example, there would be Windows XP, Windows Vista, Office 2007, etc. categories. Each category would have its own RSS feed.

The Clients

Each workstation or server that was to receive updates using bittorrent would have a copy of uTorrent running in the background. This would be critical. You would also need to tweak uTorrent so that it automatically ran an installation script r program each time it finished downloading a new patch. This script would also schedule a reboot at 3:00 AM (or whatever time you wanted) since it seems almost every hotfix from Microsoft needs to reboot the system.

A potential install script might look like this:

The trick to automatically downloading files is to subscribe each uTorrent client to the proper RSS feeds given out by the server. This way, each system only gets the patches it needs.

Potential

I think that this type of a delivery system has great potential. You could even use it across slow bandwidth links or to deploy other software, not just patches.

This is a project that I am hoping to spend some time on over the next while but I am looking for your input/suggestions now so that I can hopefully avoid some pitfalls later. Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/06/12/diy-bittorrent-patch-server/trackback/