Author: coutinho

By Dennis Crouch, Patent Law Blog (Patently-O) – June 29, 2010 at 06:01PM

• Bilski v. Kappos: A Preliminary Analysis of the Opinion
• Bilski v. Kappos and the Anti-State-Street-Majority
• Mayo v. Prometheus Labs: Bilski and Medical Methods (Discussing the Post-Bilski GVR by the Supreme Court in this case)
• Ted Sichelman Guest Post: Why Bilski Benefits Startup Companies
• Shubha Ghosh Guest Post: Throwing Back the Gauntlet
• Don Chisum provides Notes on Bilski
• Tax Prof on The Impact of Bilski on Tax Strategy Patents
• Bilski v. Kappos: Read the Opinion

By Lee Mathews, Download Squad – June 28, 2010 at 05:00PM

Filed under: Utilities

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Redo Backup is a fast, easy way to image your hard drive originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Backup – Linux – Microsoft Windows – Hard disk drive – Download Squad

By (author unknown), MacOSXHints.com – June 28, 2010 at 10:30AM

There are a lot of good tools out there to restore data from corrupted memory cards but most of them are for Windows. I remembered using an open source command line tool for this purpose. It is called PhotoRec and is cross platform as well. Although their web site has detailed instructions on how to use the software I still wanted to share my straightforward procedure for doing so on a Mac (you are still doing it at your own risk).
Here is a summary of the step-by-step procedure.

• Download PhotoRec (the latest version is 6.11.3).
• Extract the files in the Finder (I downloaded it in Downloads folder and assume it is located there).
• Open the Terminal and type (watch out if you have a different version number):
  $ cd Downloads/testdisk-6.11.3/darwin/
• Run the PhotoRec with typing (no need to be super use …

By kdawson, Slashdot – June 28, 2010 at 12:23AM

eldavojohn writes “Working from the comfort of his home, Salman Khan has made available over fifteen hundred mini-lectures to educate the world. Subjects range from math and physics to finance, biology, and current economics. Kahn Academy amounts to little more than a YouTube channel and one very, very devoted man. He is trying to provide education in the way he wished he had been taught. With over 100,000 video views a day, the man is definitely making a measurable difference for many students young and old. In his FAQ he explains how he knows he is being effective. What will probably ensure his popularity (and provide a legacy surpassing that of the most highly-paid educators) is that everything is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. He only needs his time, a $200 Camtasia Recorder, an $80 Wacom Bamboo Tablet, and a free copy of SmoothDraw3. While the lecturing may not be quite up to the Feynman level, it’s a great augmenter for advanced learners, and a lifeline for those without much access to learning resources.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – June 27, 2010 at 03:00AM

By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf – June 25, 2010 at 02:30PM

The number of websites cooking up recipes and dishes is more than you could shake a ladle at. We have a fair sprinkling as well; from recipe suggestion websites to a social network for foodies. There’s even one which lets you conduct a recipe search of the dishes they show in the movies.

Apart from the last, Yummly covers almost all the angles you can cook up for a foodie’s website.

Yes, Yummly goes the same way by indexing recipes from across the web. The number of recipes it is attempting to index is astounding – 500,000 recipes from sources like Allrecipes, Epicurious, Food Network, Chow, Food & Wine, Martha Stewart, My Recipes, Real Simple, and Recipezaar.

But Yummly goes way beyond a cut and dry recipe index. It adds a lot more to the way you cook or as a wannabe Julia Child would like to cook.

Let’s uncover Yummly and see what’s brewing. You can use the recipe search engine without a log-in, but creating your own free account helps socially.

Is Yummly Just a Recipe Search Engine?

Yummly is a semantic search engine. Traditional search engines search on the basis of keywords, often ignoring the sense of the specific word or the context in which it is used. A semantic search is meant to bridge that gap.

Semantic search may be web gobbledygook; in simple terms Yummly gives you so many filters to play around with, that finding the right recipe becomes easy. Here’s a working example with a search for a pasta recipe.

The Yummly recipe search engine reaches into its database and returns 21,915 recipes. But I want to be more specific. So, I take the help of the FoodFinder. The FoodFinder is a set of seven filters which you can use to pinpoint the specific nature of recipe you want.

For example, I prefer my pasta to be a bit on the spicy side. I can move the slider from No Preference to Really Like. The results immediately update to my choice for the Taste Match. A filter like Courses helps to narrow it down to the exact time of my meal. Cooking time and cost are also great for a bachelor like me who needs to cook it fast and inexpensively. All text entry fields come with dropdown suggestions and they are comprehensive.

Nutrition, Diets, and Allergies should appeal to pound watchers. The Allergies part is really helpful to watch out for potential landmines.

Check out the trusted sources that go into these calculations. It’s listed under Nutrition, Allergy, Diet & Price section of the FAQ.

Tweak Recipes to Your Taste

If the option rich FoodFinder was a help, then the individual recipe page takes the guesswork out of cooking. You can tweak any recipe by changing the number of servings and modifying the ingredients. Changing the ingredients as per servings is usually where things go wrong. This is where the web application recalculates the optimum quantities that should go into the recipe.

The preparation steps stay the same though. You can also substitute one ingredient with another. The web app includes the substitutions via a dropdown.

You can check the nutrition facts and other details on the right. The recipe page also gives you the option to upload your own photo of the dish. Make the modified recipe your own with a click on Save.

That’s not the only way you can build your recipe collection.

Yummly allows you to import your recipes from food sites like All Recipes and Food Network. But the feature to upload your own recipe is still missing.

The Good Word from the Curry Crowd

Cooking tips from the social community on Yummly is a great way to discover likeminded souls. Yummly calls them TasteBuds. Think of them as your ‘taste buddies’ with whom you may want to share similar tastes with, or recipes and ideas. You can invite them over from Facebook or check out the Leaderboard.

The easiest place could be the homepage itself which gives a fair inkling of what’s going on in the site. Once you start frequenting the site, getting a gathering of foodies isn’t going to be a chore.

So, polish the pan and hop over to Yummly and let us know if this fresh web service is done just right.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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By Ryan Dube, MakeUseOf – June 25, 2010 at 12:30PM

I have to admit that when it comes to organizing email, I’m a bit lazy. When I get an email from someone, I usually just fire off a quick reply and leave the email sitting in my inbox. When I used to use Yahoo Mail a lot, this resulted in my inbox growing to about 3000 to 4000 messages. Now, how exactly do you go about fixing a nightmare scenario like that?

The situation becomes even more critical when you start working remotely. Your job tasks and team discussions all occur via email. This makes email organization and streamlining even more important, because it can impact the quality of your work and whether you come across as a well-organized and highly functional person or not.

First of all, MakeUseOf is clearly the place to turn when you need help with your Gmail account. Two of my favorite MUO articles that focus on streamlining Gmail are Angelina’s awesome list of ways to use Gmail as a multitasking tool; and I also really enjoyed Ann Smarty’s article with some examples of how to use Gmail filters to improve your productivity. In this article, I’m going to share three powerful ways that you can get your Inbox to organize itself, rather than spending hours trying to repair the effects of your laziness in one sitting.

Cleaning Up Your Inbox as an Evolutionary Process

Organizing and cleaning up my Gmail inbox is about as appealing to me as doing the laundry or washing the dishes. However, instead of organizing your entire inbox and the entire pile of messages accumulated there, you can make a habit of doing just a few things differently moving forward. These “few things” will eventually cause your Inbox to clean itself up. Sound impossible? It’s not – it’s just a matter training your Gmail inbox to act more intelligently and to sort out your messages for you.

The first step making a promise to yourself to handle incoming emails by telling Gmail how to sort or organize them. By redirecting common incoming emails, you’ll discover that your Inbox cleans itself up very quickly.

For example, I recently set up Google Calendar to issue me reminder emails for the tasks that I’ve planned to do for the day. While this is a nice way to get things done, it’s also a great way to muddy up an inbox in very short order. I’ve let these messages pile up, but now I’m dealing with the notification emails that I’ve just received today and use it to retroactively go back and reorganize all of the ones currently cluttering my Inbox. While you have the message open, all you have to do is click on “More Actions” and then select “Filter messages like these.

This way, you don’t have to figure out what filter criteria you should use to apply to this group of images, the email system already knows the email address that the email came from, and it automatically fills out the “From” field for you.

Remember, in dealing with such emails as they come into your inbox today, you’ll be teaching your email account how to organize your inbox for you. This may take extra time today or tomorrow, but after a while you’ll realize that your Gmail account is keeping itself clean and organized! The real secret to “teaching” your Gmail account what to do with the message comes in the next step of setting up the filter.

If you’ve just started doing this, then you probably don’t have any labels ready for the messages that you hope to organize. Have no fear – just use the dropdown box next to “Apply the label” to select “New label…”  This will allow you to assign a label that well describes this type of email. For example, in this case I called the email type “Calendar_Notifications,” and then told Gmail to apply this new rule to past messages.

This is what streamlines your efforts. Rather than going back and reorganizing your thousands of old emails, you can let your efforts with the new emails that come in result in a cleanup of the existing pile of assorted mail cluttering up your inbox.

Use Superstars to Quickly Flag Emails

If you’re anything like me, you may get emails coming in from all over the place – informational emails from your bank or other organizations you do business with, emails from coworkers or people you manage, or important messages from team members that you’re working with. If you are dealing with a massive influx of email, then it’s a very smart idea to start “flagging” your email messages with stars.

Usually, starring a message means that the message is very important, but it is also a great way to break those “important” emails into subcategories for fast and easy searching later on. You can do this by enabling the “Superstars” Gmail Labs feature.

This feature lets you use up to 12 unique star icons so that you can not only separate important messages from the rest of the inbox pile, but you can sort those important messages into their own special type. You’ll need to know the name of the icon for searching, so in your Gmail settings page, just hover the mouse over the icon for the icon name.  When you’re reading a new email and you want to mark it as important and sort it – you can click on the “star” option and then click multiple times to change star type. In this case, I clicked five times to mark the message as an important informational email about my Orbitz travel plans.

Later, when you want to recall those important messages from within your inbox pile of emails, just conduct a search for the type by typing “has:blue-info” or whatever the name of the icon type is – and only those messages that you’ve flagged will get returned. For example, here are all of the messages that I flagged as important informational emails.

This makes it very easy to quickly find those messages that you used to have to hunt through your inbox for – saving time and avoiding a major headache.

Flag Critical Emails With Quick Links

Another important way to organize and keep track of those critical emails that you know you’ll need to deal with the first moment you can is by enabling the Quick Links feature in Gmail Labs. This sets up a simple Quick Links feature in the left menu pane of your Gmail account.

When you receive an email that you know you’re going to have to come back and find later, just click on “Add Quick Link” and Gmail will automatically record the URL for that image and add it to the left menu listing. You can give the link text any title you like.

This lists the email links in the left menu bar with the titles you chose. This is a very useful way to avoid the need to dig for those emails that have important information like someone’s phone number that they’ve emailed you. When it’s time to call them, all you have to do is click on the link – no need to sift through all of your other emails to find that important information.

Notice that there are “x” options next to each Quick Link. This is because this feature is meant for quickly saving information that you’re going to need in short order. Once you’ve used the information, it’s a very good idea to delete the quick link so that you can keep your list of Quick Links as short as possible. It’s basically a quick scratch pad to keep track of those critical emails that you know you’ll need to go back to again soon.

Do you know of any other useful tips to help organize and streamline your Inbox? Share your own ideas and tips in the comments section below.

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By Karl L. Gechlik, MakeUseOf – June 25, 2010 at 11:30AM

There is a new website called PilotHandwriting that allows you to create a font out of your own handwriting and send emails (or letters as they call them) with it.

I will show you how it works and how to capture the text for use in your own images using a little bit of a workaround. We have to use that workaround because as of now, PilotHandwriting does not allow you to download your font. If you are looking to be able to download the font for use in your word processing application then check out 2 Free Tools To Make Your Own Text Font.

Upon arriving at their website, you will be greeted by a little flash animation which surprisingly is not over the top and compliments the site.

You will then be shown a YouTube video about how it works. When it is complete, you will see a printable chart for you to fill in. That chart is shown below:

Go ahead and hit the Print button, print out the chart and then hit the right arrow on the screen to continue on to the next step. You will then fill in each letter or number in their respective spaces on the chart. Then when you are finished, you will have a few options to get the template back to the website. You can use a webcam, a scanner or a digital camera (cell phones work fine).

Hit the button for the option you want to use and get ready to upload. If you are using the scanner or camera options, you will need to upload your image in JPG form. I chose to snap the picture with my camera phone and upload that JPG.

Here is what my template looked like when I finished it:

Note that where I was not centered or wrote over the black lines, those letters were not recognized. So like they taught you in pre-school – stay in the lines, kiddies! Then get ready to upload your image:

Follow the on screen instructions for your particular method of upload and continue on. The web application will suck in your template and you will see each letter flash across the screen as it is processed like this:

When it is complete, you will see something that looks like this:

Hmm looks like some of my letters were not recognized. The best thing to do is rewrite the template and re-upload. But they do give you options to fix them onscreen. The problematic letters are marked with pictures of a pencil.

Then when you are complete, they will hit you up to log in. If you do not have an account, you can create one here:

When you are finished you will be taken to a text editor where you can compose your message like this:

Type away and when you are finished, use a screen capture application to copy the text as an image and you will be able to paste it anywhere you want using your favorite graphic application like GIMP or Photoshop. When you are finished, you can also email the picture above to any email recipient by filling in the following form:

Hit that check box and they will give you a snarky message telling you to send snail mail. Does anyone really use a paper and pen anymore?

Then the message will come through with the image in the body. It will also come through with a link to view the image on their website if it did not come through properly.

Personally, I think this is great and hopefully this tool to create a font will remain free and they will add an option to download your font. Any chance of getting that application updated, PilotHandwriting guys?

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – June 25, 2010 at 10:30AM

Earlier this week we sang the praises of a good bug spray, but what if you want to enjoy your backyard without all that bug spray every time you step out? Use these tips and DIYs to make your yard bug resistant.

As we highlighted in our guide to avoiding summer nuisances, nothing’s as effective as good ol’ DEET-based bug spray. We also understand that not everybody likes spraying chemicals on themselves, and even those of us not afraid to lather up with DEET don’t always want to hose on the bug spray every time we’re in the backyard. Photo by Sam Howzit.

The following tips will help you keep annoying summer bugs of various sorts away from your yard and patio, so you can enjoy your outdoor spaces while using less bug spray and shooing away fewer creepy crawlies.

Remove the Bug Attractors

One of the easiest things you can do to cut down on the number of bugs in your backyard is to cut down on the number of reasons those bugs would want to pay you a visit. A few minutes of tidying and rearranging things around the yard and patio can yield a huge return. Photo by edans.

Remove Standing Water: Mosquitoes lay eggs on standing water. Go around your yard and look for any place that water gathers: uneven gutters, kiddie pools, those buckets you left behind the garage, that planter tray you never got around to using. A single five gallon bucket left out in the rain can become a mosquito nursery in single day—the one I just dumped over beside my garage had easily several thousand larva in it.

If you can’t remove the standing water you can do two things to help. For things like rain barrels, buy some window screen and secure it to the top to keep the mosquitoes from landing on the water. For things like large bird baths or garden water features, add a small pump to agitate the surface to discourage mosquitoes from landing to lay eggs.

Move Trash and Recycling Far Away: Put your trash cans and recycling bins as far away from your house as you can, and while you’re at it make sure that the lids on your trash cans fit snugly. Flies love garbage and ants love the sugary residue in recyclables. Moving both away will cut down on the flies buzzing around your patio table and the ants crawling around near your house.

Keep Food Covered: When you’re outside enjoying a summer meal on the patio keep food covered. It won’t stop flies and such from being drawn over, but it will cut down on it and keep them from putting their disgusting little hands on your salad. You can find metal and nylon mesh “food tents” at your local grocer or online.

The Advanced Preventative, DIY Arsenal

While removing standing water and moving your garbage cans behind the garage might have helped, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty and invest a little time, money, and sweat into making your yard extra unpleasant for bugs. Photo by Kevin Briody.

Use Bug-Repelling Essential Oils: The right oils are workable deterrents whether you buy some tiki torches and load them up with citronella-infused lamp oil or make your own citronella-candles. Citronella torches/candles are only effective for about a four-foot radius so you’ll need enough of them to blanket the area you’re in. If you want to make some torches for your patio that don’t have the Tiki-Island-Adventure vibe, check out these DIY oil lamps.

Build a Bug Trap: The number of DIY insect traps that exist is a testament to how much people dislike being bothered by bugs and how much effort they’ll put into keeping bugs away. Earlier this week we shared the Cadillac of fly traps with you, a worthy time investment if you live in an area plagued with flies. Check out this fly trap for fly-snaring on a smaller scale. If the pests have followed you inside, this fruit fly deathtrap will make short work of them. Finally you can build a DIY mosquito trap to lure all your blood-sucking patio companions to their doom—and not to your neck.

Plant a Mosquito Repelling Garden: While having plants that contain mosquito-repelling oil in their leaves isn’t as effective as putting that mosquito-repelling oil on your skin—check out this combination DIY bug repellent and sunscreen to put those oils to good use or this all-natural bug spray here—it can’t hurt to plant some lush greenery that might have the added benefit of warding off bugs. Plants like Citronella grass, Rosemary, Catnip, and Marigolds all have properties that repel mosquitoes. You can read more about that here.

Use Non-Toxic Ant Repellents: Once ants find out the party on your patio is in full swing you can expect a continual stream of them. You can repel ants by putting a chalk line around the area you don’t want them to cross—just like the Smoke Monster!—or if they’re creeping into your house to find the party leftovers you can also use cucumber slices and other natural repellents.

When it comes to adventures in Malaria-infested jungle backwaters, your best bet is a strong bug spray with proven ingredients. When it comes to surviving your bug-heavy backyard without smelling like bug spray or dousing your patio with harsh chemicals, however, these tips should help get you through without wearing Deep Woods Off! as your new cologne of choice.

Have a handy tip or trick for making your yard bug-resistant? Let’s hear about it in the comments so your fellow Lifehacker readers can enjoy a bug-free summer.

By Cheezburger Network, Very Demotivational – June 24, 2010 at 06:00PM

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