There’s evidence to suggest that mandating seat-belts actually increases the accident rate in a country. The hypothesis is that drivers are likely to take more risk in cars with visible security features like seat-belts than in cars without these safety features. Ironically feeling safe–is the most dangerous thing drivers are at risk from. In addition because car drivers felt safe...
A popular question I get, is how to boost a WiFi signal. Folks struggle to get good WiFi connections on the 2nd (or 3rd) floors of their homes because the routers they have don’t pump enough ‘juice’ to go around. This is particularly true for those that work from home, having poor WiFi while trying to have a teleconference– just sucks. While other applications like...
On April 28th, 4 men were caught for installing card-skimming devices on ATM cash machines in Bangkok Thailand. They were all Malaysian. On the 14th of May, 6 men were caught for installing similar devices in ATM machines in Jakarta Indonesia. They were all Malaysian. On the 8th of June, 2 men were convicted in Singapore for installing card-skimming devices on ATMs in Singapore. They were both...
I remember this problem from watching an episode of numbers. You’re a contestant on a game show–and you’re given 3 doors to choose from. Behind one door is a shiny new sports car–behind the other 2 are goats. Your goal is to get the sportscar, by choosing a door. But after you choose a door the host reveals one of doors with the goats. Leaving you with you just two doors...
The truth is we all have something to hide–secrets we wished the world would never know. A political stance we once had, a video of ourselves after too many drinks, or even just a sentence we once uttered at a party somewhere. If you think you’ve got nothing to hide–you should think harder. So, when European Court of Justice recently ruled that Google had to comply with certain...
The understatement of the month would be calling this a peculiar moment. This is far from peculiar–this is straightup WTF?! My favorite encryption software, TrueCrypt, has been abruptly and mysteriously shut-down(que dramatic music!!!). The official TrueCrypt website now only has some information on ‘alternatives’ and offers the following advice. WARNING: Using TrueCrypt...
A Coalition of Muslim NGOs have asked for Cadbury to pay for the ‘cleansing’ of the blood of Muslims to remove any traces of Pig DNA they might have consumed from having eaten Cadbury chocolates. I’m not going to debate the religious and legal implications, just the scientific aspect. The aspect which says that the DNA of what you eat doesn’t enter your blood–and...
Pi has always held a special place in my heart and probably yours as well. When people ask me to pick a number between 1 to 10, I always pick Pi (or sometimes the square root of two), which hasn’t made me the life of many parties. And there’s an entire community of Pi lovers like me out there–people who are just fanatical about calculating pi to the trillions of digits? With...
Last weekend I had an issue with my hosting provider, WPWebHost. I switched to WPWebHost 2 years ago, and recommended them because they promised wordpress hosting at an affordable rate. WordPress hosting is where the hosting provider would support wordpress specific features, e.g. help troubleshoot plugin and theme issues, perform nightly backups, and offer ‘higher availability’ for...
There’s a highway they want to build from Damansara to Puchong–called Kidex, and just like any other highway before, people are understandably worried about the construction. This excerpt from the KL-Chronicle details the causes of anxiety: [box icon=”chat”]Kidex will be constructed over heavily built-up residential areas in Petaling Jaya and will pass very close to...