Logo Origins

When you look at current logos that are floating around today, such as the siren for Starbucks, the Medusa for Versace, or even the snakes around the staff for medicine, have you thought about where they actually came from? The use of the caduceus as a symbol of medicine came into vogue in the 1850s, most likely due to a hilarious misunderstanding -- another image, the rod of Asclepius, is actually the ancient symbol for the god of medicine and healing, but it only has one snake and no wings. Interestingly enough, if the snakes are depicted as poisonous, then the winged staff with the twin snakes would be more suited for the medical insurance companies rather than the doctors themselves. If you have ever seen the Starbucks logo of the funny woman holding fins in both hand, and statistics say that you are probably in one right now blabbing away on your internet phone with your neighbor getting exponentially annoyed with you by the minute, you never considered what it means. Well it is a siren, which was meant to represent something nautical since the coffee shop started in Seattle but it in fact is a personification of the sea, violent and brutally attractive.

Saving Your Laptop Battery

With as many devices as we use everyday that run on batteries, it might be a good idea to learn how to save that battery life. This is important if you want a relatively fast wireless connection which is needed for great video quality in internet phone services. If you are running a meeting, it would be horrible for the video to stop constantly and interrupt you. One of the ways that you can save battery life is by lowering the screen brightness. Another way is to get the scheduled tasks to run only on AC power when it is plugged in. If your notebook has a backlit keyboard, it will certainly help you see keys in a dark room, but it’s also sucking juice out of your battery. You’ll save some power by turning off that light. Every notebook has its own way of enabling or disabling its keyboard backlight, but the method usually involves hitting a Function key on the top row of the keyboard. While you’re surfing the Web, checking email or watching a movie, messaging apps such as Google Talk and Skype are hitting the Internet constantly, just to see which of your contacts are online and whether you’ve received any messages. Automatic updating apps from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Google may also be pinging the Internet to see if there are updates to your copies of Adobe Reader, Chrome browser or iTunes. To stop these silent power vampires before they start, prevent them from loading at boot time.

Military to Get New Android Phones

With the increasing technology and the need for improved security that comes with it, it is important for the military personnel to be at the top of their game and ahead of the curve with the latest smartphones and phone services. The phones will run a modified version of Google's Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said. The smartphones are first being deployed to U.S. soldiers, people familiar with the project said. Later, federal agencies are expected to get phones for sending and receiving government cables while away from their offices, sources said. Eventually, local governments and corporations could give workers phones with similar software. The Army has been testing touchscreen devices at U.S. bases for nearly two years, said Michael McCarthy, a director for the Army's Brigade Modernization Command, in a phone interview. About 40 phones were sent to fighters overseas a year ago, and the Army plans to ship 50 more phones and 75 tablets to soldiers abroad in March, he said. Currently, the United States doesn't allow government workers or soldiers to use smartphones for sending classified messages because the devices have not met security certifications. Officials have said they worry that hackers or rogue apps could tap into the commercial version of Android and spill state secrets to foreign governments or to the Web through a publisher such as WikiLeaks. As many as 5 million Android users may have had their phones compromised by a recent virus outbreak rooted in apps found on Google's market, said security software maker Symantec.

Holiday Scams

With every new holiday comes a new scam, whether it is through email or a phone service. Valentine's Day is coming up and the scammers are already jumping on the ball to get people early. The crop of emails Symantec found come with addresses including, "Valentine's Berries," "Valentine's Gifts," "Valentine's Day Sweets," and variations on the theme, and attempt to lure victims with subject lines such as: "Be Different! Give yourself a gift for Valentine's Day"; "Impossibly delicious berries from $19.99 — the PERFECT gift for Valentine's Day!"; or "Got Fat? Get Thin. Lose 30 pounds before Valentine's Day."

Like any phishing scam worth its weight in impossibly delicious berries, some of the emails redirect recipients to Web pages that request their personal information and bank acount details. Others, Symantec noted, take users to a phony Facebook app that, if installed, can fire any number of weapons upon victims' computers. To stay out of trouble when shopping for Valentine's Day gifts, make sure you go directly to a store's website; don't purchase anything from a site included in an unsolicited email. Make sure the site you buy from is secured with HTTPS encryption and, as always, install anti-malware and anti-virus software on your computer, which can help weed out email offers that are out to harm you.

The part that I found entertaining was the promise of weight loss by Valentine's Day. Are we as humans that shallow? Come on people, what happened to getting to know a person for who they really are and why are we so quick to pass judgements at first glance? Just something to think about.

Search and Find

Google and Bing are some of the biggest search engines around but this one, Beepl takes it to a different level. Not only will the site give you an answer to the question that's on your mind, it claims to know what types of questions you're likely to ask before you ever type them into the site's question-answer interface.

"Beepl ... understands the topics that questions relate to and users’ interests and expertise so that questions automatically reach the best people to answer them," the company said in a blog post on Monday, as the site went live to the public after three months of private trials. "It achieves this by employing natural language processing and machine learning to create a real-time network of experts in which questions are re-routed and matched to the most relevant users, marking Beepl out from similar Q&A sites." The site also leverages data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to serve up Q&As that might interest a particular person.

I wonder what other places it gets information from and what sort of hoop they had to jump through to have access to things like social media and even internet phone services, such as the ones from Facebook.