The Martin Aircraft Company in Christchurch, New Zealand is behind this huge jetpack that enables the wearer to fly up to 30 miles at 30 mph on one tank of fuel. The company is hoping that the world has enough rich and insane people to reach their goal of selling 500 of these a year at over $76,000 USD.

Want one of these 200-horsepower machines strapped to your back? Head on over to the Martin Jetpack website and put an order in.

We (Visual Moxie) completed and launched another site today. CityComputer.com went on a bit longer than I had expected, mostly because of the thousands of products that needed to be imported and communication with various vendors and suppliers, but it's up and running and our client can get back to selling! Just in time for the new year!


Permalink to Pinwire.com

I recently found myself in dire need of a dust collection system. After doing a bit of research and trying to find a model that would suit my needs I finally settled on a 13 Gallon Industrial Portable Dust Collector for sale at Harbor Freight.

Permalink at Pinwire.com

One of the concerns I had when shopping for a dust collection system was how much noise they made. After a few hours of research it became overwhelmingly clear that dust collectors in general are very noisy. Dust collectors move about ten times the amount of air that a large shop vac does and with that extra typhoon suction comes noise!

The only non internet purchasing options I had locally were Woodcraft and Harbor Freight. The pricing at Woodcraft put this type of product out of reach. So I headed over to Harbor Freight to test out the two small portable models they had in stock. Fortunately I was able to plug them in and found that the larger system (31810-1VGA) was marginally quieter than the smaller one (94029-3VGA). The smaller 1 HP Mini Dust Collector sounded a bit more ‘angry’ so I opted for the larger one. As luck would have it the larger model was on sale for the same price as the smaller one.

The lights dim just a little bit while the dust collector spin’s up, but once it’s purring along the electrical load drops.

I just completed my first project using the new dust collection system and found that it actually lost some of it’s suction as I progressed with my project.

Some notes on the project I was making. I was making a fountain pen using a Jet mini lathe and the material I was using for the body of the pen is a particular type of acrylic popular among pen makers. Here is a photo of a fountain pen constructed from the same type of acrylic material. (FossilBluff.com) Back to the, losing suction, topic.

If you are not a wood turner and you have not happened to work with acrylic, then you may not know that when you start to turn the pen blank in to a cylinder you start to generate extremely long streamers of thin acrylic strands that I imagine easily reach hundreds of feet long. The effect is similar as if you were to peel an apple in one long motion resulting in a long continuous strip of apple peel. While this is ‘cool’ to watch the unfortunate side effect is that the long streamers of acrylic get packed up against the intake vent of the dust collector which comes with a crude screen to prevent large items from getting chewed up in the fan blades. It’s sort of like a wad of hair that sits on top of a drain.

So, for now I have to stop mid way in through the project and disconnect the hose at the dust collector so that I can clean out the mess of acrylic streamers. I have some ideas about how to overcome this dilemma but it requires that more floor space be used and space is limited!

Permalink to the full article

After almost five years of reliable service, Mininova deleted over a million torrent files when it partly shut down its website. The new format only allows approved publishers to upload torrent files to the website. Never fear! There are plenty of alternatives Bit Torrent replacement sites that you can use.

With more than 175,800,000 visits and close to a billion page views on average each month, Mininova had set a record which I'm sure they will be unable to break any time soon. This all started last August when a Dutch court ruled that Mininova had to remove all links to ‘infringing’ torrent files, or face disastrous consequences.

Since it is technically impossible, or at least very difficult, to pre-approve or filter every potentially offending torrent file, Mininova decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents which are submitted by approved uploaders. Doing so resulted in the deletion of over a million torrents, most of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thank goodness, there are still plenty of alternatives for those Bit Torrent users who are looking for the latest of whatever suit's their fancy.

Here is a random list of public torrent sites that are still up and running. There are hundreds more sites available. If your personal favorite torrent site is missing, please share it with us by posting it in the comments below - also let us know why we should include it in any upcoming lists.

1. Torrentzap
2. Fenopy
3. ExtraTorrent
4. KickassTorrents
5. BTjunkie
6. Monova
7. isoHunt
8. yourBitTorrent
9. The Pirate Bay
10. ShareReactor

I always watch my server logs for any suspicious behavior. And as usual, at least several times an hour, I see some poor ignorant script-kiddie poking at me trying to find some way to exploit my cluster. In this instance the attacker was looking for an installation of PHP MyAdmin, a popular open source MySQL database management tool.

You can see they tried the usual installation locations in the hopes of being able to inject some malicious code allowing them unauthorized access to my servers. This attackers IP address resolves to Moscow, Russia.

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that I installed PHP MyAdmin at my own secret URL.

No Luck Sucka!

62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:22 -0600] "GET /phpmyadmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:22 -0600] "GET /phpMyAdmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:23 -0600] "GET /PMA/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:23 -0600] "GET /pma/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:24 -0600] "GET /dbadmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:24 -0600] "GET /mysql/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:24 -0600] "GET /myadmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:25 -0600] "GET /phpmyadmin2/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:25 -0600] "GET /phpMyAdmin2/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:26 -0600] "GET /phpMyAdmin-2/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:26 -0600] "GET /php-my-admin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:26 -0600] "GET /sqlmanager/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:27 -0600] "GET /mysqlmanager/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:27 -0600] "GET /p/m/a/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:27 -0600] "GET /PMA2005/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:28 -0600] "GET /pma2005/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:28 -0600] "GET /phpmanager/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:28 -0600] "GET /php-myadmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:29 -0600] "GET /phpmy-admin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:29 -0600] "GET /webadmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:29 -0600] "GET /sqlweb/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:30 -0600] "GET /websql/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:30 -0600] "GET /webdb/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:31 -0600] "GET /mysqladmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:31 -0600] "GET /mysql-admin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-" 62.117.85.164 zsource.com - [16/Nov/2009:20:07:31 -0600] "GET /Tools/phpMyAdmin/index.php HTTP/1.1" 302 234 "-" "-"

This email about the percentage of rejected claims from health insurance companies found its way into my inbox yesterday and I felt it revealed some interesting data related to the hot-button topic of government run healthcare. I'm not going to comment either way about this now but wanted to add it to the Tom archives for later retrospection.

Metric 12 - Percentages of claim lines (i.e., records) denied
Description: What percentage of records submitted are denied by the payer for reasons other than a claim edit? A denial is defined as: allowed amount equal to the billed charge and the payment equals $0.
Source: National Healthcare Exchange Services (NHXS)

Payer	Count of records	Denied Records	Percent ofclaim lines denied	Date Range
Aetna	637,293	43,317	6.8%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
Anthem	250,070	11,546	4.62%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
CIGNA	263,728	9,060	3.44%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
Coventry	20,487	590	2.88%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
Health Net	4,975	193	3.88%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
Humana	143,026	4,142	2.90%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
Medicare	6,938,431	475,566	6.85%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008
UHC	1,127,691	30,177	2.68%	03/01/2007 - 03/10/2008

Yesterday we received numerous reports from our readers worried about an iPhone hack that allows a malicious programmer to take control of your iPhone using SMS messages. Most of the hysteria around this issue was caused by main stream media news outlets over hyping this issue as if iPhone’s were already getting hacked. Rest assured, there is no known SMS iPhone hack running loose in the wild, however, this doesn’t mean your not vulnerable to this attack.

Read on to get the straight facts a learn how you can secure your iPhone from this SMS flaw.

Description of the Update:
Impact: Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution

Description: A memory corruption issue exists in the decoding of SMS messages. Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved error handling. Credit to Charlie Miller of Independent Security Evaluators, and Collin Mulliner of Technical University Berlin for reporting this issue.

The fact of the matter is that security experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner discovered a weakness in the iPhone that could allow hackers or crackers to take control of your phone just by sending a single text message (SMS). They made their findings public at the Black Hat conference, which means of course, that criminals learn about this hole at the same time everyone else does for at the following less intense Defcon Hacking Conference. Both going on this week. This was misinterpreted by many people assuming that hackers or crackers were already sending SMS viruses to unsuspecting iPhone users. Fortunately, this was not the case and Apple has already responded by releasing a patch update that will make your iPhone more secure.

So why would these two people announce their findings at a hackers convention? Well, they say they told Apple about this earlier this month and got absolutely no response back. They wanted to bring attention to the flaw and what better way then telling a bunch of hackers? Apparently, that lit a fire under Apple’s rear and got them to get a security fix out the door today in the iPhone 3.0.1 update.

If you haven’t updated your iPhone’s OS, you should go do that soon. In the meantime, don’t accept any SMS messages that appear as a single square character because that could be a virus. You don’t have to do anything with the message to get hacked. Just by receiving it, you’ve already been hacked. If you see a message like this, you should turn off your phone immediately and take it to your nearest Apple Store.

This may seem completely out of the blue for most of you but I wanted to record this online so other Wordpress users could find out how to apply this little fix.

If you happen to use Wordpress with the Popularity Contest plug-in you may notice that there is a percentage number and mark in front of the titles. In Wordpress 2.8.2 the control panel option to remove the popularity rank doesn’t work.

If you want to make sure the rank for the posts is completely removed you will need to edit the popularity-contest.php file in your plug-in’s folder.

Comment out line 1447 which looks like this:
<span>'.$this->get_post_rank(null, $item->total).'</span>

Change it to:
<!-- <span>'.$this->get_post_rank(null, $item->total).'</span> -->

I came across this a few weeks ago. I can't believe someone would actually make something like this and put it on the market. Finally there is an affordable way for you to practice your Russian roulette skills without leaving a mess splattered all over the walls and floor! Read all about it!

For one of our friends, I know this would be absolutely terrifying! Not because of the game but because of having a balloon bursting right next to her head!

I have no idea what the languages written in below each of the images, maybe someone can translate it for me?

I totally get it how hearing a balloon popping right next to your ear would startle you.