Iron Man 2 And Star Wars Rule Hasbro's Toy Fair Gala [Toy Fair]

Iron Man 2 And Star Wars Rule Hasbro's Toy Fair Gala [Toy Fair]

from io9 by Cyriaque Lamar

io9 was at Hasbro's Toy Fair showroom yesterday, getting an exclusive first look at the toymaker's upcoming Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Marvel, and Transformers lines. And no, the life-size Bumblebee in the lobby sadly won't be hitting shelves anytime soon.

What's big for Hasbro? A whole slew of Iron Man 2 toys, a new Vintage line of Star Wars figures to commemorate the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, a remodeled Cobra H.I.S.S. tank, and the release of the Transformers: War For Cybertron video game. io9 was on the scene yesterday, checking out all this resplendence in plastic.

The crown jewel of the Iron Man 2 line is the remote-controlled Iron Man armor. It can walk, talk, shoot repulsors, charm the pants off of models, and scare the bejeezus out of your cat.

Tony Starch, the Invincible Iron Mash.

Armani suit + one of these detachable suction-powered arc reactors = easiest Tony Stark Halloween costume ever.

No Iron Man toy line would be complete without a helmet. This one flips open.

Mickey Rourke as Whiplash.

Iron Man Operation (liver transplant not included).

The Iron Man repulsor.

A 19" light-up, talking Galactus, for all your planet-consuming needs.

An RC flying Millennium Falcon. Again, another toy that will put your cat into conniptions.

I'm not going to lie - this Firefighter Droid action figure was my favorite toy of the show.

Team-up your Cloud Car Driver with C-3PO for an adventure of mildly thrilling proportions.

General Grievous' rotating lightsaber.

Mandalorians are so in this season.

I take it back, the Star Tours action figure set might have been my fave of the day.

The giant AT-AT walker for the ESB 30th anniversary.

The RC Hailfire droid.

The electronic Boba Fett helmet.

Bounty hunter Dengar and a very dapper Han Solo. Note the Vintage Boba Fett mailaway.

The remodeled Cobra H.I.S.S. tank.

Snake Eyes and his dog Timber.

Attendees saw gameplay from the upcoming Transformers: War for Cybertron video games.

Posted by mehdi.zarei at 12:53 AM

Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010

Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010

from Lifehacker: Top by Jason Fitzpatrick

Despite the proliferation of laptops and netbooks, the vast majority of students still use their computers like $500 typewriters. Stop working so hard and be a better student by leveraging some clever computer tools to your advantage.

Photo by Brad K..

Every semester I get a new wave of college freshman into my classroom, most of them armed with laptops. For the last several semesters, I have been informally tracking how they use their computers. I always assumed that my students were using their computers to their full potential to help them with school, research, and such, but almost all of them were simply using their laptops as extremely expensive typewriters and instant-messaging terminals.

What good is all the computing power of the pre-1960s world sitting on your lap if you're not using it to make college life easier? The following is a guide for students everywhere that want to spend less time on the tedious stuff, and more time on the things like study and research that actually produce results.

Never Do Anything Yourself That Your Computer Can Do For You

Never, ever, do something the hard way without checking to see if any easy way exists. Applications come in every shape and form to automate tasks on the computer. Never undertake a tedious task on your computer without first visiting a search engine and searching for a method of automating it. Whether you're resizing photos for a class project, renaming files, or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, check for the simple—and automatic!—way first. Photo by striatic.

File Renamers: Renaming tons of files has to be one of the most boring and grinding tasks you can undertake. Never waste time renaming files. If you're on a PC, check out the powerful Bulk Rename Utility for a dashboard of options and the less-overwhelming but still effective Ken Rename. If you're on a Mac, you can download specialty apps like File List, but it pays to become acquainted with Automator, which can do so much more than simple file renaming.

Text Replacement: Unless you're writing the next great American novel, chances are you type a fair number of things with a high degree of frequency. Your email address, common phrases you use, formatting you find yourself typing over and over again when working on papers or taking notes, and so on, it might not seem like much but you can easily save hours over the course of a semester by using text replacement. How does text replacement work? Each text replacement tool handles things a little bit differently, but nearly all of them have two basic methods: instant replacement and hot keys.

With replacement, you tell your computer to replace every instance of a string with another string—like notes1 becomes your favorite bullet-list format for taking notes, or mymail becomes your full email address.

Hot keys allow you to assign a phrase to a bit of shorthand plus a hotkey. For example, I have a phrase that is XXX+TAB. Typing it takes only four key strokes but it types out a phrase that would require 53 keystrokes if I typed it manually.

If you're on a PC, you can try out our home-grown text replacement tool Texter, or other capable tools like Phrase Express. Mac users should check out TextExpander or become more familiar with the built in text-replacement tools in Snow Leopard, and Linux users can give AutoKey a whirl.

Regardless of what you're trying to do, you'll almost always be able to find a tool online to automate or at least make that task easier. Get in the habit of always asking yourself, no matter what the task, "Could the computer do this faster and with less input from me?". Over time you'll build up a set of tools for quickly completing common tasks.

Keyboard shortcuts

Learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything: your word processor, your note-taking tools, your email client. Slinging the mouse around for tasks that can be accomplished with a keystroke or two is a really inefficient way to work, and far less comfortable. If you're furiously taking down notes in class do you really want to break your stride to dig around in the toolbar or menus for something like a bullet point activation? You can find shortcut lists for every operating system and application under the sun; hit up Google with a search query like "myapplication shortcut list" to find more shortcuts than you knew existed. Photo by John A. Ward.

Take Better Notes

Note taking is an art form, and it is most definitely not simply writing down everything your professor says or that is in bold print in your textbook. How you take notes is a highly personal thing and heavily influenced by your learning style, but everyone can stand to improve their note taking with a tip or two. Photo by D'Arcy Norman.

Study Note-Taking Techniques: We've shared tips with you on how to take more effective notes and how to utilize different note-taking styles and you'll find no shortage of resources elsewhere on the web for being a more effective note-taker. You can further hone your note-taking skills by researching subject-specific note taking techniques—how you take notes in Medieval Literature won't be the same way you take notes in Organic Chemistry.

Ditch the Pen:

People who love to take handwritten notes love to take handwritten notes, and we don't expect to dissuade the everything-looks-better-on-a-Moleskin crowd from abandoning their pens. For the rest of you, taking paper notes is, quite literally, so last century. It's 2010, and there is no reason for you not to have dynamic, media-rich, cross-indexed, and always available notes. At the end of the semester, do you really want to pick through a hundred pages of hand written notes looking for specific bits of information? No, you don't. You want to be able to search through your notes quickly and efficiently the same way you use major search engines like Google.

Two extremely popular note-taking tools are Microsoft OneNote and Evernote—so popular, in fact, we faced them off in a reader poll last year. The awesome features of the two applications are beyond the scope of a paragraph, but suffice to say they both have excellent systems for searching (with handwriting recognition!), organizing, and accessing your notes—I use OneNote for everything from graduate school to teaching to writing for Lifehacker. You can check out our overview of OneNote here and Evernote here.

Use the Computer to Network

We're not talking about Facebook-ing everyone in your class. We're talking about actively using online study and collaboration tools to interact with your classmates. Sharing notes, discussing assignments and class topics, and collaborating on group projects are but a few of the ways you can take advantage of the hyper-connectivity the information age has brought about. Photo by krossbow.

Share Your Notes:The first objection I usually hear to the idea of sharing notes is that people don't want to share their hard work and they don't think that other people should benefit from it. Fair enough, how you deal with who participates in your class-centered groups and note sharing sessions is your business but as an instructor I can tell you this: the kind of person who doesn't bother to take their own notes isn't exactly the kind of person you're going to have to fight for the top grade in the class.

You can share notes and collaborate in quite a few ways but it would help your cause to stick with methods that have a low barrier to entry—most people don't want to sign up for a bunch of services just for a class. Google Notebook and Documents are great tools since having a Gmail account is nearly universal. You could also set up your own wiki with free tools like Luminotes or customize MediaWiki into your own personal collaboration server.

Build a Contact Web: Whether it's a group on Facebook, an email list, or a list of phone numbers for text messaging, it's wise to create a way you can quickly communicate with other students. Many times you have a question about an assignment, something that happened in class, or what you missed when you were absent and sending out an email to your fellow students will result in a faster response than waiting to hear back from the professor. It also helps you build a contact list of your peers—not as important in a freshman Psychology 110 course, but by the time you're in at the end of your schooling you'll be taking more focused classes and meeting people in your career path you'll want to stay in contact with.

Backup, Backup, Backup

You have no excuse for not backing up your data—none. The number and methods for backing up data, especially the small volume that constitutes text-based research and class notes, are so numerous that there simply is no excuse for doing something foolish like keeping all your hard work on a single hard disk or flash drive. Photo by Jeff Wilcox.

Dropbox: It's free, the basic account can more than hold a semester's worth of work—short of a film school project—and it syncs to all your computers and to the web. "I accidentally deleted my homework" wasn't a very good excuse ten years ago and it's an unforgivable one now. You can sync your passwords, your OneNote notebooks, and access your favorite portable apps from anywhere.

Online Backup: While Dropbox is great for syncing files, if you want to go all out you'll definitely want to check out some full-fledged computer backup tools like Mozy and Carbonite. Check out our Hive Five on best Windows backup tools to get more information.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:12 AM

6 Reasons Why You Should Be Your Own Boss

6 Reasons Why You Should Be Your Own Boss

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Mark Foo

If you’ve decided that you’d like to be your own boss, it doesn’t have to remain a dream forever. In fact, with some proper planning on your part, you can become your own boss in no time.

If you want to be your own boss you need to start your own business. Being self-employed will more than likely seem overwhelming in the beginning, but in the end many people feel that the benefits far outweigh the costs. So start brainstorming some business opportunities!

Here are some reasons why you should be your own boss:

1. You’re in Charge of Your Income. This can be seen as a pro or a con at first, but eventually the sky will be the limit as you develop your business. In the beginning, seeking self-employment might not make you as much as you used to, and you also may have to worry about issues like individual insurance coverage. The huge advantage is the fact that you keep every dime that you make and your salary is not capped by your employer.

2. You Have Creative Control. You get to make all of your decisions, no one else is telling you what to do. This is huge because many people run into boredom issues at their jobs. If you can choose the business you want, you can also pick and choose the types of jobs you accept. You do what you want, when you want.

3. You’re Responsible for Your Success. If you’re self-employed you can truly make a difference when you start your own business. This is because the success of the business lies on your shoulders. When you work for a large corporation, it’s easy to mix in with the rest of the employees and feel like it doesn’t even matter whether or not you show up to work. While you’ll still have to work hard when you’re self-employed, you really matter because you are your business.

4. You Set Your Own Hours. Setting your own hours is a huge advantage. You know yourself best and you’ll be able to build a schedule that’s most efficient for you. If you want to work really hard one day, and take a half day the next day, that’s perfectly fine when you’re self-employed. You can work all night and sleep all day if that’s your personal preference!

5. You’ll Be Challenged. Most people will find that they not only reach a salary cap when they work for someone else, but they also reach a point where they’re no longer challenged. When you embark on this new journey for yourself, it’ll be a risk and it’ll be a challenge. Also, as you keep gaining experience and income, you’ll continue to be challenged as you reach higher and higher levels.

6. You Can’t Get Fired. This is a great reason in itself. In the self-employment world you can’t get fired! You can change your mind about certain business opportunities, but that would just be shifting the focus of your business, you’d never be firing yourself. This takes a certain amount of burden off your shoulders because you don’t need to worry about someone suddenly taking away your income just because of cutbacks even if you’re doing a superb job.

Remember that there’s always a certain amount of risk associated with making a major change in your life. It’s never easy when it involves income and the future of your family. However, if you want to be your own boss, you can certainly do so. It may end up opening many doors to better your financial future.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:13 AM

Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots

Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots

from Lifehacker: Top by Gina Trapani

The new Nexus One is a sleek, awesome handset, but the most important ingredient in touchscreen smartphones is software. The screen is just a canvas that software paints on, and Android 2.1 is a work of art.

Coming from the chunky G1, the thin and flat Nexus One hearkens back to my iPhone days. (In my pocket it doesn't make my thigh look fat, and it doesn't require a holster—it gets lots of vanity points there.) The screen is huge and crisp; the dual noise-canceling microphone action is sweet; the true headphone jack is much-appreciated, and the glowing trackball is a nice touch.

Still—the best part of the Nexus One is Android 2.1, and if all goes well, many existing Android users will get that update even if they don't get a new handset. After spending just a few hours with my new phone, here are a few of my favorite Android 2.1 features, in screenshots.

Click to enlarge each image to actual size (including the image of my current home screen, shown here).

First off, Android 2.1 has some satisfying eye candy that doesn't necessarily make you more productive, but does make the phone more fun to use.

The application menu button has been replaced with a button that looks like a grid (see bottom of the first screenshot). When you tap it, your application icons fly into place to take over the desktop in their own grid, and you can scroll them back and forward as if they were on a 3-D cube, shown here.

Android 2.1's Live Wallpapers are pulse in different ways when you touch the desktop—again, not strictly useful, but they make the phone feel as if it is alive in your hand and responding to your every action. Two new desktop widgets come in way handy: One offers one-click toggle of your most important settings (GPS, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and Wi-Fi on/off), and the other has top news stories for idle browsing when you're on line at the grocery store. I'm not a widget gal—I trashed that big old clock first thing when I set up Android 1.5/6—but these two, along with the Google search box, are keepers.

Every single text area in Android 2.1 is speech-to-text enabled, which means you can say your text messages, emails, tweets, notes to self, whatever.

It works like Google's voice-enabled search box does. You tap the microphone button on the keyboard, speak, and then the spinner grinds away at the recording, translating it to text.

The conversion takes a few seconds, depending on how much you said, and it requires a decent internet connection to complete. In a spotty area I got a few "Connection error" messages when I tried to speak my first tweet from the Nexus One using Seesmic. (That was disappointing.)

The results are hit or miss.

Sometimes they're pretty decent. Here I said, "Every text area is speech-to-text enabled so you can speak your email, text messages, or tweets." I didn't say the punctuation, and you can see it borked the "is," and missed the "so." Not bad.

Not all results are that close, though. This is another set of results I got, saying the same exact thing as above.

Android continues to offer the best Gmail mobile client available on any platform. The latest version of Google's Gmail Android app supports "Undo." When you archive, label, or delete a Gmail conversation, you get the option to Undo the action. (Great for when you accidentally tap something you didn't mean to.)

The upgraded Gmail app also supports multiple accounts, so you can get mail from your work, personal, and moonlighting Gmail accounts in one interface.

Another "oh, that's cool!" Gmail discovery: if you tap the dot next to a contact's name, you get a popup with one-click access to that person's information with their photo.

Contact photos are a powerful thing on a mobile device, and Android 2.1 ships with the Facebook application, which can sync your contacts' Facebook photos into your contact list. LOVE IT.

New to me (but not Droid owners) is Android's new Car Home screen, for navigational purposes on the road. I haven't had the chance to try this out yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. (My trusted Android informant Kevin at Lifehacker gave it his thumbs-up.)

It was great to see that Google Voice came pre-installed on the Nexus One, and telling GVoice to handle my new mobile number's voicemail was literally a one-click affair. (Hopefully no one will ever even know my new mobile number, since I hope to go completely Google Voice from here on in.)

Speaking of, setting up this phone in general was dead-easy. You simply sign into your Google account on the phone and instantly your contacts, email, calendar, and Google Voice calls/history are on the phone—no syncing or importing necessary. The only reason why I connected it to my computer was to take screenshots for this post, and later, to move some music onto it.

I'm still very much on the Nexus One/Android 2.1 honeymoon, but I do have two minor gripes. First, you still can't take screenshots on the device itself. WTF. (I had to jump through a bunch of developer hoops just to get screen caps for this post.) And second, I've accidentally tapped the Nexus One's search and home buttons while reaching for the spacebar on the touch keyboard more than twice. The touch keyboard in general is going to take some getting used to.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:10 AM

Riding The Nexus One Wave, Google Releases The Android 2.1 SDK

Riding The Nexus One Wave, Google Releases The Android 2.1 SDK

from TechCrunch by MG Siegler

One of the key features of the Nexus One has nothing to do with its hardware. The latest and greatest Android phone also is the first device to come with the new Android 2.1 OS. And while other phones, like the Droid, are going to get it too (likely later this month), for now, if you want to play around with it, you’ll need a Nexus One. Or, starting today, you can also download the Android 2.1 SDK.

As noted on the Android Developers Blog, the team is releasing it before most devices have it so that developers can play around with and build for the new features introduced in 2.1. Though Google calls 2.1 a “minor platform release” over Android 2.0, there are a number of new elements such as voice recognition, live wallpapers, a new launcher, more home screens, and some WebKit changes. Those who have ported it over to the Droid note that the new OS is also faster.

Google also notes that there is a new USB manager available through the SDK Manager that supports the Nexus One. This may or may not be related to the new services that it seems like Google wants to include with the device, such as a new docking station for backing up your data.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:03 AM

Pharmaceutical company funds documentary about over-eating

Pharmaceutical company funds documentary about over-eating

from Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker

GlaxoSmithKline is financing a documentary about over-eating, in the hopes that it will boost sales of Alli—their over-the-counter drug that blocks your body from absorbing some of the fat you eat. (Fun game: Read the recent Science Question from a Toddler on poop and see if you can guess what the common side-effects are.)

Glaxo says they won't have control over the content of the film and won't even be pushing to make sure Alli gets mentioned. They simply want to educate Americans about the fact that they eat too much.

The partners say they hope to emulate "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's celebrated 2006 documentary on climate change. It cost an estimated $1.5 million to produce and sold $50 million in tickets worldwide. Ms. Ferdinando summarized the film as "the 'Inconvenient Truth' of mindless eating," with the story taking a "behind-closed-doors, fly-on-the-wall" approach that highlights unhealthy relationships people have with food.

Artistically, the problem I see here is that successful documentaries—and really documentaries in general—are usually about challenging popular perception and either making a case for a viewpoint that's counter to "common-sense" or informing people about a situation that's mostly being ignored. The thesis "Fat People Eat Too Much" does not exactly fit into that mold.

New York Times: Glaxo, diet drug maker, to pay for film on eating

Image courtesy Flickr user yukariryu, via CC

Posted by Mahdi at 11:56 PM

Your Passwords Aren't As Secure As You Think; Here's How to Fix That

Your Passwords Aren't As Secure As You Think; Here's How to Fix That

from Lifehacker: Top by The How-To Geek

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you're properly encrypting them—and chances are pretty good you're not. Let's walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

For the purpose of this article, we'll assume that the people you allow into your house are trustworthy enough not to hack your passwords, and your laptop has been stolen instead—but the tips here should apply to either scenario. Regardless of how you choose to save your passwords, you should make sure to use great passwords and even stronger answers for security questions.

Once You Click "Remember Password" It's All Over

Almost any application that requires you to login to something will also provide an option to save your password, and once you've done that, your password may as well be plain text. Behind the scenes, even if the application encrypts the account information, it's doing so with a static key that can be easily deciphered through some reverse engineering, and somebody not only can, but already has created a utility to recover those passwords.

It doesn't even matter all that much if you've got a tough Windows password; anybody with physical access to your PC can use an Ubuntu Live CD to copy all of your data onto an external drive without modifying anything, and crack your files on another machine whenever they please (assuming you don't have your entire hard drive encrypted). If they had a little more time, they could use Ophcrack to figure out your password, or they could just be mean and use the System Rescue CD to change your Windows password.

Once that person has access to your files, they can recover your passwords with free tools easily—you can recover passwords in a few clicks from Outlook, Instant Messenger, Wi-Fi, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or any number of other applications. All it takes is a quick Google search to find even more cracking utilities.

Pidgin Stores Passwords in Plain Text

That's right, your favorite open-source, multi-protocol instant messenger client stores your passwords in plain text. If you don't believe me, just open up your %appdata%\.purple\accounts.xml file in your favorite text editor, and you'll see your passwords right there for anybody to read.

The decision to store the passwords in plain text is a deliberate one that's been thoughtfully considered, and while you might initially think it's a terribly insecure way to handle security, keep in mind that you can simply download any number of utilities like Nirsoft's MessenPass and recover the passwords from AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Trillian, Miranda, Google Talk, Digsby, etc. The Pidgin developers point out that their option is actually the preferred method for security:

Having our passwords in plaintext is more secure than obfuscating them precisely because, when a user is not misled by a false sense of security, he is likely to use the software in a more secure manner.

The best answer, of course, is to not allow your IM client to store your passwords at all—but if you must store them, you should at least use the built-in Windows encryption, if not a full-blown TrueCrypt setup. Either option would be better than the pseudo-protection most other applications provide.

Password Managers Are the Only Secure Storage

The only truly secure way to store your passwords is to use a password manager to securely track your passwords, combined with a a great master password to protect the rest of your saved passwords—if you use an easy password for your password manager, it would be easy to crack with a brute force attack. Don't lure yourself into a false sense of security by just using one—your password manager password should be at least 10 alpha-numeric characters if you really want to be secure.

You've got a number of great password managers to choose from, like reader favorite Keepass, a cross-platform tool which has many plugins that help you master your passwords and make using a password manager easier to deal with. And, of course, let's not forget that Firefox has a full password manager built right into the application.

Use a Firefox Master Password (With More Than 8 Characters)

If you want to use Firefox to save the passwords for all your web accounts, you should make sure to enable a Firefox Master Password by heading into Tools –> Options –> Security and checking the box for Use a master password.

Once you've done this, Firefox will store all of your passwords with nearly unbreakable AES encryption—providing you use a password with more than 8 alpha-numeric characters and at least one capitalized letter. If you used a weak and pathetic password like "secret", it could be broken in a matter of minutes with a brute force cracking tool, but a decent 8+ random character password will take at least 73 years for a brute force attack.

Each time you start Firefox and go to a site that requires a saved password, you'll be first prompted for your master password. By default, the master password authentication will be active for the entire session, but you can use the Master Password Timeout extension to lock your master password again after a certain interval, which is handy if you walk away from your desk without remembering to lock it with Win+L.

Use TrueCrypt to Encrypt Everything

Rather than deal with password managers or whether or not to save your passwords, you could simply create a separate, encrypted TrueCrypt drive, and use portable versions of your applications to keep everything totally secure. If you're even more paranoid, you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt the entire hard drive—you will be prompted for a password every time you boot, but you can relax knowing that anything you do will be encrypted, even if you use scripts with your passwords stored in plain text. If TrueCrypt isn't your thing, you can use the built-in encryption functionality in Windows—just keep in mind that if you change your password your data will be inaccessible, and your Windows password can be cracked, giving them full access to your files.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:06 AM