Drying out a phone after acute water exposure

By rickColosimo / March 31, 2013 / Comments Off on Drying out a phone after acute water exposure

I was recently in a Starbucks, fand my phone was perched [a little] too precariously. It fell. Into water. I was right there, of course, and snatched it out in less than a second. (Of course, this is purely hypothetical.) My luck was not all bad. There was an enormous high-speed dryer there (Dylan calls…

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Don’t bother us with questions: just buy

By rickColosimo / February 28, 2013 / Comments Off on Don’t bother us with questions: just buy

Everything you do as a business speaks to your customers. I got an email from Quicken the other day saying that they were shutting off certain services, including downloading info from banks. (How and why that should affect my desktop software, which I thought connected directly, is another version of the message in this post…

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Why DNA privacy should not be on your radar today

By rickColosimo / January 22, 2013 / Comments Off on Why DNA privacy should not be on your radar today

The NYT headline, “Web Hunt for DNA Sequences Leaves Privacy Compromised,” blows this out of proportion.   Wired’s article “Scientists Discover How to Identify People From ‘Anonymous’ Genomes” is only slightly more helpful. The key issue here is not that the DNA sequence of the participants itself was itself a magic fingerprint, but that when that information…

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Saving comment state improves usability

By rickColosimo / January 15, 2013 / Comments Off on Saving comment state improves usability

If you want people to comment, say on a lifehacker post about going paperless, and you require sign-ins for commenting, don’t trash their comments when they forget a password.   Among the least interesting passwords I remember is my lifehacker account for commenting. I don’t use it every day and it’s of zero value to a hacker…

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