Founded in 2006, Inflection aggregates public records and data from past and present and currently operates Archives.com, a site that sources historical records made available on the web. Archives is meant to allow people to access birth, death, marriage, divorce, and other historical vital records to get information about deceased members of their families. Currently the site has more than 2 million members conducting searches and sees 3 million unique visitors per month.

http://hackaday.com/2010/08/27/hydropower-generator/

From Hack a Day:

….tapped into a reservoir about 200 feet upstream, split the flow into four smaller hoses, and channeled that into a five-gallon bucket. Inside the bucket you’ll find a Pelton wheel he built which turns a low-RPM generator. He manages to generate 56 VDC at 10 A with this setup, more than enough to charge a bank of batteries.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/vintage-calculators/

From Wired:

Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.

It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15, in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/08/new-windows-dll-security-flaw-everything-old-is-new-again.ars

From Ars:

Last week, HD Moore, creator of the Metasploit penetration testing suite, tweeted about a newly patched iTunes flaw. The tweet said that many other (unspecified) Windows applications were susceptible to the same issue—40 at the time, but probably hundreds.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/19/1757229/40-Windows-Apps-Said-To-Contain-Critical-Bug?from=rss

From /.:

About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Gregg Keizer reports that the bug was patched by Apple in its iTunes software for Windows four months ago, but remains in more than three dozen other Windows programs, s.

Google has just released an updated version of Google Calendar Sync which works with the latest version of Microsoft’s enterprise workhorse… well, mostly anyways.

Sync only works with 32-bit installs of Outlook 2010, though to be fair even Microsoft recommended that users roll with that version to prevent plug-in compatibility issues. 64-bit support will likely come later on — when 64-bit Office installs are a bit more commonplace.

http://gigaom.com/2010/08/18/free-wi-fi-hotspots-outnumber-paid-wi-fi-in-the-u-s-says-jiwire/

From GigaOm:

The number of free wireless hotspots in the U.S. outnumber paid Wi-Fi locations for the first time, with 55.1 percent of public Wi-Fi locations available at no charge, according to a report from JiWire, an advertising company that focuses marketing specifically through Wi-Fi networks.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180479/Stupid_data_center_tricks

From CW:

According to the Uptime Institute, a New York-based research and consulting organization that focuses on data-center performance, human error causes roughly 70% of the problems that plague data centers today. The group analyzed 4,500 data-center incidents, including 400 full downtime events, says Julian Kudritzki, a vice president at the Uptime Institute, which recently published a set of guidelines for operational sustainability of data centers.

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20012833-247.html

From CNet:

The fiber-based laser technology, called BeamPath, was provided by OmniGuide in Cambridge, Mass. The BeamPath CO2 laser fibers have FDA clearance for a variety of open, endoscopic, and laparoscopic soft-tissue-cutting applications, and they can be scaled to channel different wavelengths of light for greater precision.