Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Device handles chest compression part of CPR

Thanks to my grandma Tice for sending me this article:

The Lucas system runs on high-pressure air from either a compressed air tank or an air wall outlet in a hospital. The device is indicated for treating adults who have acute circulatory arrest – meaning they lack spontaneous breathing and pulse – as well as loss of consciousness.

Mechanical compression allows medical personnel to provide other therapies, the company said. The machine also should provide quality chest compressions for a longer period of time than a human can.

A 1995 study found that fatigue makes it difficult for even well-trained medical personnel to provide more than one minute’s worth of effective chest compressions, said Anne Devine, a Medtronic spokeswoman.

“Clearly these devices do much better compressions than humans do,” said Dr. Charles Lick, medical director of Allina Medical Transportation in Minneapolis.

Sounds kind of difficult to use, but apparently the EMTs like them enough that they’re putting them in ambulances.

iChat and the Netgear WGR614v6

My sister recently purchased a new MacBook, and I’ve been trying to do a video iChat with her for the last few days. It worked once and mysteriously stopped. I know that my router works, because I use it with Amanda. I had to turn on UPnP for it to work reliably, but

I finally got things working today. I had turned on UPnP on her router, but things still weren’t working. It turns out that there was some “secure” vs. “open” NAT option in the WAN set-up. Turning that option to “open” fixed the problem.

Hopefully this post will help someone else with the same problem.

GraphClick for Digitizing

As a scientist, I often read others’ scientific writing and work. Typically such written work includes plots and graphs — much more efficient and insightful ways of showing data than extensive tables. However, sometimes it’s important to extract more exact values from such plots. Traditionally this was done with a digitizer, a fancy mouse that worked on a special pad. You’d place a printed figure on the pad, and use the crosshairs on the mouse to pick out points. Then, using some scaling calibration, you’d derive values from points on the graph.

GraphClick does the same thing, but with digital figures. Typically, I use it with figures snapped directly from PDFs of papers, though it would work just as well with figures scanned from hard copies. Rather than explain more about how it works, I’ll direct you to the screencasted tour.

GraphiClick is a commercial, closed-source application, but it is available for free use with a limited feature set. I never found in using it that I needed any of the more advanced features. If you ever need to pull data from figures, and you’re a mac user, I highly recommend you try it out. I used it extensively for my soon-to-be-published paper, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better.

“Blink” Technology in my Credit Card – No Thanks

UPDATE 2007-11-11:
De-Blinked Chase Freedom Card
Card de-Blinked. Original post below:

My wife and I recently signed up for our first joint credit card. This will allow us to do things like buying plane tickets to see each other and dinners out without having to constantly update our Karma spreadsheet. The Karma spreadsheet (thanks Google) will remain in use for non-credit purchases.

That’s not what this post is about.

What it is about is the plastic cards that come with the account. When I arrived here in New Orleans today, I opened up the envelope and dutifully read the documentation that came with the credit cards. I noticed a mention of the cards having “Blink” contact-less checkout ability. I felt a lurch in my stomach. Sure enough, a quick inspection of the card and some googling revealed that this “Blink” thing is nothing more than a nice name for RFID.

RFID is insecure as used in this application. Your credit card number can be read from afar (up to 69 feet) while sitting in your wallet in your pocket or purse, without your knowledge. As detailed in the linked article, it is then trivial to create a duplicate card.

Of course, our government is also keen on RFID in passports. In the case of Chase, it turns out you can simply request new cards or get creative with a drill. I was going to do the latter, but ended up doing the former, because I want it to register with Chase that I don’t want RFID in my credit cards. It was no problem getting new cards ordered — for all my quibbles with Chase, their customer service on the phone is generally both helpful and English-speaking.

If you want to de-RFID your passport, I believe the recommended method is by hammer blow, but here are instructions for making an RFID-fryer from a disposable camera. Apparently tampering with passports is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, so tamper at your own risk.