Crazy Little Fingers

Crazy Little Fingers is a great piece of software to keep those unwanted little fingers from messing up a document or presentation etc that you may be working on. What it is basically is a piece of software that locks your computer and runs like a kind of screen saver. If you happen to have young children around that are always trying to get at your computer. What will happen is that instead of them typing unwanted characters on your piece of work, while you are away from the computer. It will show a goat from example if they press the letter "G", and still leave the keyboard locked. Until you unlock it by pressing ctrl + alt + delete.

If you are downloading the software it offers two versions. One which is 64MB in size and comes with a complete library for all the keys on the key board, or the second version which is almost 400Kb in size (hell of a lot smaller), but the catch is that you have to put in all of the pictures for the different keys on the keyboard.

Overall Wantoks it is good little piece of software which will protect your work from the kids and keep them entertained at the same time.

BSP Capital blog

For the Wantoks out there that are interested in Shares etc. Have a look at the BSP Captial Blog for local Papua New Guinea stock market information. I think it is a great to see a big organisation like BSP Captial entering the blog world and posting updates on markets and other types of stock market information. Well done to Juda and the boys at BSP Captial for taking the extra step to get stock market information out to the Wantoks on the street.

Friday 13/02/2009 Important Day for IT in PNG

Last Friday (13/02/09) marked an important day for IT in Papua New Guinea. The reason been is that three important IT related matters were launched on this day.

The first item was the launch of Digicel's web browsing on the Digicel mobile network. It is a great step for Internet access for Papua New Guinean's. The reason why I say this is because it now makes accessing the web something that any Digicel customer with a web capable mobile phone can do. Which before access to the Internet in Papua New Guinea was mainly done via computers. The Digital world has now had it doors flung wide open to Papua New Guinean's. Thank you Digicel.

The next item was that Telikom released its ADSL charges which were approved be the ICCC on Thursday morning (12/02/09). That was advertised to the general public on Friday. What does this mean for my Wantoks. Well now there is a new major ISP player in town, I am hoping that it will bring down the charges for access to the Internet. (I will try and find time this week to do a ISP comparison).

The last but not least event that took place last Friday was the official launching of the UNDP and BPNG - Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP). Which is planning to give funding to projects technology projects to help reach low income households with financial services. By the sounds of things from what I can gather this project will help fund mobile banking projects, etc.

Pirate Bay releases map of Pirates

Pirate Bay the King of BitTorrent piracy websites has recently released a Google powered map that charts the locations of Pirates around the world. Which is based on the origin of the tracker that a person uses when downloading items from Pirate Bay states Torrent Freak.

At the time of writing this post I wanted to see how many Papua New Guinean users were downloading items from Pirate Bay. I was amazed to find out that their was 14 users per minute at 9:50pm tonight (9th Feb 2009) downloading items from Pirate Bay, or 0.001% of Pirate Bay users at this time were from Papua New Guinea. I pebble in the ocean. When you compare the figures of people who live in Papua New Guinea with other countries.

The interesting thing to notes was that the country where the most users came from was China which you would expect it to be. With 33% of Pirate Bay users coming from China, around 7 million users. The interesting part about it is that Pirate Bay is banned in China. So I guess where there is a will there is a way.

The statistics is now based on unique users connected per minute! Keep in mind that a torrent client usually only connects to the tracker once every 15-20 minutes. Total unique users per minute : 1343613 (at the time of writing this post)

The lines between virtual and reality are begining to cross

According to Wired, Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns surfaces into interactive display screens. The person who wears this device can control virtual gadgets and internet data at will. According to Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab's the research is aimed at creating a new digital sixth sens for humans.

The prototype of this device was constructed from a ordinary web cam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror. That are all connected to a mobile phone that is connected to the Internet. The original cost of this set up was around $US350. This allows the user of the device to project data from the phone on to a surface.

Thus making the boundaries between virtual reality and reality beginning to cross. Simple gestures done by a persons fingers and thumbs can be used to create a picture frame that tells a camera camera to snap a photo, which is saved to a mobile phone. That the person can
project on to a wall as just one of the functions that this new device.

Hummer drivers get booked more often

I was over at Wired this morning and saw an article about how Hammer drivers get five times as many traffic tickets in the United States then the average driver. It got me thinking about Emmanuel's story over at Masalai "Seriously Get Noticed" which is Boroko Motors slogan in adverts to sell the Hammer H3's in Papua New Guinea. I guess the Boroko Motors slogan must really be true if the Hammer drivers in the U.S are getting booked five times more then the average driver. Which means that they are really getting noticed more. Or is it that because they are driving a car that is designed to be bank vault on wheels which is making their driving more erratic then the average Tom, Dick, and Harry.

According to the study that reported these findings the reason why the Hammer driver may get booked more is "The sense of power that Hummer drivers derive from their vehicle may be directly correlated with the number of violations they incur, or perhaps Hummer drivers, by virtue of their driving position, are less likely to notice road hazards, signs, pedestrians and other drivers," Raj Bhat, president of Quality Planning, said in a statement.