Sibi Marcos asked about removing a laptop's battery to increase it's life.
Here's one of those sad facts of life that you just can't avoid: Like cars, clothing, and people, batteries wear out. You can't stop this process, but with proper care you can slow it down.
What wears down a battery? Charging and discharging. Obviously, you can't avoid either of those acts entirely (although if you could, you wouldn't have to worry about wearing out your battery). The trick, of course, is to do as little charging and discharging as possible. And one way to avoid charging and discharging is to remove the battery when you don't need it.
Meet Mary Lee, a great white shark that's the same weight and nearly the same length as a Buick. And, by the way, you may have been swimming within a few feet of her this past year and not known it.
Since last September, when she received an array of radio, acoustic, and satellite tags, Mary Lee has travelled from Massachusetts to Florida, often hugging the coastline so closely that scientists tracking her called beach authorities in Florida to warn them about her. The 16-foot, 3456-pound shark also headed into open ocean, taking a February vacation off the beaches of Bermuda.
"She was undoubtedly not the only one there. Sharks have probably been doing it for millions of years," said Nick Whitney, a marine biologist with the Mote Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, Florida. "We're learning things that ten years ago we would have never dreamed we could have learned about these species."
OCEARCHMary Lee, a 16-foot 3456-pound great white shark, traversed the East Coast over the past year, at times hugging the shoreline so close as to prompt a warning call from researchers.
Whitney, who spoke from a research vessel off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is part of a team that runs OCEARCH, a nonprofit global shark-tracking project that uses four different tagging technologies to create a three-dimensional image of a shark's activities. OCEARCH is hoping to develop successful conservation and management strategies by studying shark habits in more granular detail.
While traditional research has focused on small-scale movements, the data being gathered by OCEARCH offers surprising new information about where sharks go and what they do. That's where the tracking technology is crucial.
A dorsal fin tag attached by OCEARCH uses a satellite to track a shark's position each time it breaks the surface. Other tags include an RFID implant whose ping is picked up whenever the shark passes a special, underwater buoy; an accelerometer, similar to the technology used in an iPhone or Nintendo Wii, that detects up or down movement; and a Pop-off Satellite Archive Tag (PSAT), which acts as a general archive, recording average water depth, temperature and light levels.
"On average, we're collecting 100 data points every second—8.5 million data points per day. It's just phenomenal," Whitney said. "Second by second, we can pick up every tail beat and change in posture."
One of the surprises the tracking data revealed is that white sharks don't always stick to cold water, as previously thought. Some even venture into the Gulf of Mexico during the summer.
Open-source research
In addition to in-depth data, what sets OCEARCH apart from past shark-tracking projects is that anyone—from a child in grade school to a television arm-chair warrior—can see the tracking data at the same time as researchers on the OCEARCH web site.
Each shark's location is represented by an icon on a Google Maps-based TruEarth Viewer. By clicking on the icon, a user can get detailed information such as the species, gender, size, weight, length, as well as where and when the shark was tagged. A user also gets images of the shark as it was being tagged.
By drilling down further, and clicking on the "Where Have I Been" icon, a user can also see a track of where the shark has been since being tagged, in some cases see a detailed trail over the course of a year or more.
OCEARCH expedition leader Chris Fischer calls the methodology "open source" research, since all scientists see the data at the same time; nothing's proprietary. Within a week, OCEARCH also plans to launch a "digital hub" shark tracker platform with a real-time social media interface that allows researchers to post FAQs and videos to the most popular social networks: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter, according to OCEARCH spokesman Chris Berger.
OCEARCH will also be launching a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education-based curriculum for K-12 students. "We currently have 30 lesson plans for sixth through eighth graders, and will have more for K-12—eventually, even pre-K," Berger said.
Currently, OCEARCH is tracking 47 sharks, some of them bull and mako but mostly great whites off the U.S. East Coast and in the waters off South Africa.
Many of the sharks are given endearing names, such as Princess Fi, Genie, Opera, and Sabrina. Others have handles more befitting ships, such as Poseidon, Redemption, Perseverance, and Courage.
Mary Lee, who was tagged off of Cape Cod, is named after Fischer's mother. "My parents have done so much. I was waiting and waiting for a special shark to name after her and this is truly the most historic and legendary fish I have ever been a part of and it set the tone for Cape Cod," Fischer wrote in an online description of Mary Lee.
Co-Captain Jody Whitworth and master of the Martha's Vinyard OCEARCH team Brett McBride prepare to stabilize a great white shark named Amy. Before taking measurements, blood and securing real-time technology tags, a device is inserted into the shark's mouth to irrigate its gills. (Image: OCEARCH).
How to catch a great white shark
To tag the sharks, the OCEARCH team first goes fishing with a hand-held line tipped with special barbless hook, engineered so it won't injure the animal. The team then brings the shark alongside their 126-foot boat, which has an underwater hydraulic lift that can hoist up to 75,000 pounds. That capacity is needed since the team is not only lifting what could be a one- to two-ton shark but also the water around it.
Once the shark is above the water line, from three to eight scientists get to work on it like a NASCAR pit crew, first placing a wet towel across its eyes to calm it and an irrigator in its mouth so it can breath. The crew then rolls the shark on its side to surgically implant the first tracking tag in its belly.
That device, known as an acoustic tag, is about the size of a Sharpie pen. It can remain in the shark for as long as ten years and can be "heard" whenever the animal swims to within a quarter to a half mile of underwater buoys that can pick up a radio frequency specific to marine tagging operations. Throughout the world, marine biologists have anchored such buoys, which can record an acoustic tag's unique ID as well as the day and time.
OCEARCHThe OCEARCH team tags a great white shark off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Once the acoustic tag is in place, the OCEARCH crew rolls the shark back onto its belly and attaches a Smart Position Or Temperature Transmitting (SPOT) device. The SPOT tag is placed high on the shark's dorsal fin because its radio ping can only be received when the shark breaks the surface of the water and a satellite is in position to receive the signal. The longer the fin is out of the water, the more accurate the data. There are six ARGOS global positioning satellites orbiting the earth that can pick up a SPOT tag's ping at any time.
"The ARGOS satellite is only around about every two hours. Then the fin has to stay out of water for minute or two to get a good fix," Whitney said. "It's ridiculous that this works. It's pretty amazing when you look at the map and understand how many fixes we get on these sharks."
The third tag is an accelerometer package, which tracks fine-scale data on the shark's body movement and behavior along with water depth and temperature information. That tag, which is designed to release from the shark after just two days, records more than eight million data points each day, with the information stored to memory. The tag is embedded in a float package that contains a satellite transmitter and a VHF radio tag, which transmits a ping that can be heard over a ten-mile range with a VHF receiver and antenna.
"In this case, the VHF tag allows us to find the needle in the haystack, once the satellite tag tells us where the haystack is," Whitney said.
Although OCEARCH has been using two-day accelerometer tags, the team off Cape Cod is now going for the longest accelerometer track of a shark ever: two weeks of second-by-second behavioral information.
Finally, OCEARCH researchers attach a PSAT archival satellite tag, which records depth, temperature, and light levels (used for geolocation) and stores the data to memory. The tag is programmed to release from the fin anywhere from six months to a year after being attached. It then floats to the surface and processes and summarizes the data for transmission back to researchers via satellite.
"It'd be great if there was one tag to get all the information, but there's not," Berger said.
The researchers have gotten the tagging procedure down to, well, a science. They've perfected the process by performing it on more than 100 sharks—67 of them great whites.
To date, the largest great white the team has captured and tagged is an 18-foot, 5000-pound animal named Apache. Apache currently holds the world record as the largest fish ever caught and released by anyone, Berger said.
For their massive size and ferocious reputation, white sharks actually represent a small minority of shark attacks throughout the world, including the shark attack capital, Florida.
"Florida has more shark incidents than any place in the world, but virtually all of those bites form small sharks—black tips and spinner sharks. In fact, I'm not sure of any confirmed white shark attacks there," Whitney said.
Two developers have cracked Dropbox's security, even intercepting SSL data from its servers and bypassing the cloud storage provider's two-factor authentication, according to a paper they published at USENIX 2013.
"These techniques are generic enough and we believe would aid in future software development, testing, and security research," the paper says in its abstract.
Dropbox, which claims more than 100 million users upload more than a billion files daily, said the research didn't actually represent a vulnerability in its servers.
"We appreciate the contributions of these researchers and everyone who helps keep Dropbox safe," a spokesperson said in an email reply to Computerworld. "In the case outlined here, the user's computer would first need to have been compromised in such a way that it would leave the entire computer, not just the user's Dropbox, open to attacks across the board."
The HTC G2 is the successor to 2008's much ballyhooed HTC G1 (aka the "Google Phone"), the very first Android smartphone released in the United States. It's also the first T-Mobile phone built to take advantage of the carrier's new, faster HSPA+ 3.5G network; it can handle theoretical throughput...
I’ve found my iPhone 5 battery typically lasts at least 2-3 days between charges on my slow days, but when I’m traveling or using my phone a lot, the battery can drain pretty quickly. The last thing you need is to find yourself with a dead phone while traveling, so a backup battery is a […]
You’ll be able to carry your toolbox on your back with the new Tech Pac backpack from Veto Pro Pac. This is a very rugged bag that has been designed to last with a weatherproof body, base and pockets. Speaking of pockets, the Tech Pac has them… a lot of them. It features 47 interior […]
If you've waited until now to buy a new HDTV, I can guarantee one thing: You'll spend less for a given screen size than somebody who made that purchase last year. (Ahem.)
A few weeks ago we reported that Nate Richardson, the CEO and co-founder of Waywire, would be leaving the company as it makes a strategic shift from content creation to content curation. Well now we know where he's landed: Richardson has joined our parent company AOL as the President of AOL Live, TechCrunch has learned.
Zen Coding made quite a splash when we first covered it almost a year ago. For those who aren't familiar, Zen is a fantastic form of shorthand for quickly hand-coding HTML. And today, a new version is out!
Here are some of the goodies version 0.7 brings to the party:
Text nodes: Writing something like a[href=/]{Click here} now works, and puts "Click here" within the link.
New actions added: Increment/decrement number under cursor, evaluate math expressions, and more.
Wrap with Abbreviation was upgraded.
There are several other improvements but they're all rather technical. If you use Zen Coding (or are intrigued by the concept) go ahead and read the release notes for this new version.
Zen Coding has official implementations for a ton of editors, including TextMate, Apatana, Coda, E2, Komodo, Notepad++, PSPad, and more. It also has unofficial builds for Vim, UltraEdit, Visual Studio and more.
If you want to play with Zen Coding without installing it, you can use the online demo to see some of its magic in action.
We've already received a slew of exciting entries in the #ExpandThrowback contest we launched around a week ago. Turns out we're not the only ones who hoard old technology to embrace memories of a life before local TV could be streamed over a WiFi connection. For those not up to speed, here's the deal: Our Expand NY event is coming this November 9th and 10th, and we're on the lookout for the coolest vintage tech. Help us find it, and you could end up with a trip to Expand NY on us, or a gift card to help finally update that old technology.
Read on to find out how to win a trip to Expand NY...
Digg was ready with a Reader-enabled iOS app in time for a rush of Google Reader exiles, but it left Android users looking for alternativenewsreaders. That void is now filled with the launch of the company's Android app. The Android build closely matches its iOS counterpart, with support for Digg's own news, RSS feed subscriptions and sharing to both read-it-later apps as well as social networks. Just be aware of a few rough patches -- this release is missing background updates, some display options and an unread-only filter. If you can live without those features in the short term, though, you can grab the Digg app through Google Play.
With a wave of new smartphones and tablet computers threatening to overwhelm wireless networks, the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to take another aggressive step to ease the growing capacity crunch.
We first got a whiff of Sony's NSZ-GU1 earlier this month from an FCC filing, and now the folks at GTVHacker point out those documents have been updated with more info and pictures. The first new Google TV hardware seen since the $35 Chromecast dongle launched, this device appears to be a blend of the two. A key difference revealed from the pictures however, is an odd stepped design, with the MHL/HDMI port protruding from the bottom of the box. The brief user manual included in the filing may explain this however, as it can draw power via that MHL output and the USB connection to a BRAVIA TV. A tiny diagram in the truncated user manual shows it plugged into the side of a TV like the Chromecast or Roku Streaming Stick. If you're wondering about the PS4 -- yes, we looked, but there's no indication it's meant to work directly with the upcoming console.
Like previous Google TV devices, it brings HDMI passthrough to the table along with an IR blaster, remote diagrams (in a separate filing) look similar to the one included with the NSZ-GS7 and GS8. Inside is a low power Marvell DE3108 SoC, 8GB of flash memory and 1GB RAM, however the specs indicate it's limited to 720p video output. As GTVHacker put it, the entire thing is similar to the Chromecast but with Google TV features. What remains to be seen is when it arrives, how much it costs, and what software tweaks Google and Sony can cook up to make this generation of Android-powered smart TVs more appealing.%Gallery-slideshow76478%
Back in 2011 Doo closed a $6.8 million round for its big play to attack the world of collaboration and documents. Basically they want to kill off paperwork and make everything digital. To that end they have released an Android app earlier this year and today they have launched their iPhone version, you can download it here.
Today, Facebook is proposing a series of changes to its terms if service. There's a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but the most interesting piece is that Facebook wants to start using your profile photo as the basis for suggesting that you be tagged in your friends' photos.
The buyers that Toshiba targets with its luxury Kirabook wouldn’t touch a Satellite L55Dt-A5253 if Neiman Marcus was giving them away. That’s too bad, because this laptop actually offers a much better price-to-performance ratio.
Toshiba selected AMD’s 2.0GHz A6-5200 APU to power this $650 notebook. That chip features an integrated AMD Radeon HD 8400 graphics processor, which helped Toshiba secure a second-place finish in the games portion of our benchmark suite. But the machine’s 6GB of DDR3 memory runs at only 1333MHz, which held its performance back in comparison to some of the laptops equipped with Intel CPUs and faster DDR3/1600 memory.
ToshibaToshiba's Satellite L55Dt-A5253 uses AMD’s A6-5200 processor, which has an integrated Radeon HD 8400 graphics processor.
Like most notebooks in its price range, the Satellite is composed primarily of plastic, but Toshiba’s attractive material does a nice job of resisting smudges and fingerprints. The computer’s lid and chassis also feel more rigid than most, though it does weigh a full pound more than the Acer Aspire E1—a significant consideration if you’ll be carrying your laptop on your shoulder for extended periods every day.
The Satellite L55Dt features a 15.6-inch, LED-backlit touchscreen display with a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The display is attractive enough, if you position it just so. Text appears most legibly when the screen is tilted back; but bring it even slightly forward—as you might have to do when using the computer on your airline tray table, if the passenger in front of you decides to recline—and you may not be able to read it at all.
Until the MacBook Air gets a much-needed screen upgrade (when’s that happening, Apple?), this svelte number from Sony is arguably the best ultralight money can buy.
OCEARCH
A few weeks ago we reported that Nate Richardson, the CEO and co-founder of Waywire, would be leaving the company as it makes a strategic shift from content creation to content curation. Well now we know where he's landed: Richardson has joined our parent company AOL as the President of 
Back in 2011 Doo 
