6 amazing things you didn’t know about your computer By Odubanjo Bolarinwa
It’s a ritual across the globe: somewhere between sticking the kettle on
and complaining about last night’s match, you’ll probably hit the button on
your ageing company PC and wait while it slowly thinks about turning on.
Rather than take it for granted,... more »
Apple seeing huge demand for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models
Both carriers and Apple reported tremendous demand
for iPhone 6 preorders over the weekend with new orders expected to take
weeks to fill.
Image: MacRumors
On
Friday, Apple -- plus its carrier and retail partners -- began
accepting pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The orders were record
breaking for several companies.
Apple issued a press release,
claiming 4 million pre-orders in the first 24 hours of availability,
breaking the previously announced record of 2 million pre-orders for the
iPhone 5 two years ago.
AT&T said it was that company's
biggest pre-order ever, without releasing specifics. By all accounts,
the iPhone 6 will be very, very popular.
If you didn't get your
iPhone 6 pre-order in on Friday, bad news: you could be waiting a while.
Apple's own online store is quoting 3-4 week ship times for all iPhone 6
and 6 Plus models across most countries. Verizon and AT&T are
quoting similarly delayed shipping times, with the iPhone 6 Plus pushed
to mid-November in some cases. SEE: CNET's review of the iPhone 6 Plus
UBS
analyst Steven Milunovich believes Apple could sell as many as 100
million iPhones in the second half of calendar 2014, reflecting 18% unit
growth over last year's 85 million iPhones sold.
For consumers
looking to pick up an iPhone 6 sooner, their best bet is to head to an
Apple Retail or carrier store on Friday morning. It's likely that Apple
Retail Stores will see long lines, perhaps running overnight at larger
locations, and it's unknown what stock levels will be like -- however,
Apple is almost certain to sell out of initial iPhone 6 stocks at some
point on Friday.
Other stores, like Best Buy and Walmart, may have stocks as well, with Walmart looking to push sales thanks to modest $20 discounts on purchases.
Apple,
for its part, is shipping millions of iPhones from its partner assembly
facilities in China to the United States and the other 8 launch
countries of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan,
Singapore and the United Kingdom.
Images shared by a MacRumors reader
who is also a pilot for a cargo shipping company show 195,000 iPhones
packed onto pallets. He claims the phones were flown from China to
Anchorage, Alaska, and then on to Chicago's O'Hare airport, consistent
with shipments from prior iPhone launches.
This
tutorial will walk you through the difficult process of installing Kali
Linux in VMware Player, a free virtual machine manager that can be
downloaded from www.vmware.com. This
tutorial assumes that you have some basic knowledge of your computer
(amount of RAM number of processors, etc.) This tutorial is also
intended for beginners who haven’t worked with VMware or Kali Linux
before.
Step One:
First we need to download Kali from http://kali.org/downloads/.
If you have a 64-bit capable computer (like me), then you probably will
want the 64-bit version of Kali for performance reasons. Expand the drop down menu’s to find the version you need. Select the 64-bit version ONLY if you have a 64-bit computer. Step Two: If
you don’t have a torrent program, then click the link highlighted above
and select “Save” when the download notification appears. Make sure you
know where you saved it.
If you have a torrent program, then I highly recommend using the torrent option. Click on the Torrent link,it will open the torrent file in your browser. Just copy the URL of it and enter it in your torrent program.
Now wait for Kali to download, this might take several hours, depending on your internet speed. Step Three: When Kali has finished downloading, open VMware Player and click Create a new virtual machine. Step Four:
In the window that opens, select Installer disc image file (iso) and browse to the location of and select the Kali Linux ISO file that you just downloaded. Once you have selected the file, click Next. Step Five:
In the next step, select a name for the virtual machine. I’m going to name it Tutorial Kali
for this tutorial. You also need to select a location for it, I
recommend creating a folder called “Virtual machines” in My Documents.
Then click Next. Step Six:
Next
step, you need to select a maximum size for Kali. I recommend doing at
least 30 GB’s as Kali tends to expand over time. After you’ve entered
your desired value (no less than 20 GB) change the next option to Store virtual disk as a single file and click Next. Step Seven:
In the next window, we need to customize some hardware settings, so click on the Customize Hardware… button. Step Eight:
You will now be presented with a Hardware window. In the left pane select Memory
in the left pane of the window, and slide the slider on the right side
to at least 512 MB*. This is for performance. Since I have 8 GB of RAM
on my computer, I’m going to put it at 2 GB’s (2000 Mb’s).*Note,
you should give a virtual machine a maximum of half the RAM installed
on your computer. If your computer has 4 GB of RAM, then the max you
want to slide it to is 2 GB. If your computer has 8 GB, then you can go
to a max of 4 GB etc..
Now highlight Processors in
the left pane. This option really depends on your computer, if you have
multiple processors, then you can select two or more. If you have a
regular computer, with two or less, then I suggest leaving this number
at one.
Moving on, click on Network Adapter in the left pane. On the right side, move the dot to the Bridged (top) option. Now click on the Configure Adapters button.
In the small window that pops up, uncheck all the boxes except for the one next to your regular network adapter and hit OK.
You can now click on Close at the bottom of the Hardware windowand then click on Finish in the Wizard. Step Nine:
After you click Finish
the window will close and the new virtual machine file will be added to
the VM library. Now all we have to do is start Kali and install it! To
do this, highlight the name of the newly created virtual machine by
clicking on it, and click Play virtual machine in the right pane.
This will start Kali for the first time. Step 10:
At the boot menu, use the arrow keys to scroll down to Graphical install and hit enter. Step 11:
The next screen will ask you to select your preferred language, you can use the mouse to select this, then click Continue. Step 12:
On the next screen, select your location and hit Continue.
It’ll now ask you for your standard keymap. If you use the standard American English keyboard, then just click Continue. Step 14:
Wait until Kali finishes detecting the hardware on your computer. During this, you might be presented with this screen:
Just hit Continue and select Do not configure the network at this time on the next screen. Step 15:
You
will now be asked to supply a hostname, which is kind of like a
computer name. You can enter anything you want, or you can just leave it
as kali. When you’re done, hit Continue. Step 16:
Kali will now ask you to enter a password for the root (main) account. Make sure you can easily remember this password, if you forget it, you’ll have to reinstall Kali. Hit Continue after you’ve enter and re-entered the password of your choice. Step 17:
The next step will ask you for your time zone, select it and click Continue. Step 18:
Wait until Kali detects the disk partitions. When you are presented with the next step, select Guided – use entire disk. (this is usually the top option) then click Continue.
The installer will now confirm that you want to use this partition. Hit Continue.
One more question about the partition will appear. Select the option that says All files in one partition and hit Continue. Step 19:
Confirm that you want to make these changes by selecting Finish partitioning and write changes to disk. Then hit Continue. Step 20:
The last question! Confirm that you really want to make these changes by moving the dot to Yes and hitting Continue for the last time.
Kali will now start installing! Wait until it has completed, this might take upwards of 30 minutes. Step 21:
Alright,
Kali has finished installing and now you are presented with a window
that asks you about a network mirror. You can just select No and hit Continue. Step 22:
After a few minutes, the installer will ask you if you want to install GRUB boot loader. Click Yes and Continue. Step 23:
The installation should now complete, and you’ll be shown with the following notification message:
Click Continue. Step 24:
After it restarts, login to it with the user name root and the password that you created earlier.
You’ve successfully installed Kali Linux in VMware.
The prevention of Ebola HF presents many challenges. Because
it is still unknown how exactly people are infected with Ebola HF,
there are few established primary prevention measures.
When cases of the disease do appear, there is increased risk
of transmission within health care settings. Therefore, health care
workers must be able to recognize a case of Ebola HF and be ready to
employ practical viral hemorrhagic fever isolation precautions or
barrier nursing techniques. They should also have the capability to
request diagnostic tests or prepare samples for shipping and testing
elsewhere.
wearing of protective clothing (such as masks, gloves, gowns, and goggles)
the use of infection-control measures (such as complete equipment sterilization and routine use of disinfectant)
isolation of Ebola HF patients from contact with unprotected persons.
The aim of all of these techniques is to
avoid contact with the blood or secretions of an infected patient. If a
patient with Ebola HF dies, it is equally important that direct
contact with the body of the deceased patient be prevented.
CDC, in conjunction with the World Health
Organization, has developed a set of guidelines to help prevent and
control the spread of Ebola HF. Entitled Infection Control for Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers In the African Health Care Setting, the manual describes how to:
recognize cases of viral hemorrhagic fever (such as Ebola HF)
prevent further transmission in health care setting by using locally available materials and minimal financial resources.
How businesses are getting creative with the Raspberry Pi
By Odubanjo Bolarinwa
How the $35 Linux board is being used to rapidly
piece together custom appliances to solve specific business problems.
The $35 Raspberry Pi Linux computer may have been launched to
teach kids to code but the credit-card sized board is increasingly being
used by businesses to build custom appliances.
Companies as
diverse as IBM and the Financial Times, have used the Pi to power ad-hoc
systems aimed at solving specific business challenges.
At the
FT the DevOps team were drowning in information sent by its automated
infrastructure monitoring software. The Nagios software running on its
servers monitors variables ranging from disk and CPU usage to HTTP
traffic and emails the team every time the state of one of these
variables changes.
Unfortunately these variables change so often
the team were getting swamped by emails and were starting to ignore
messages from Nagios.
In need of a clearer way to spot when
things were going wrong the team turned to the Raspberry Pi. They used a
Pi to power a system that changes the colour of a strip of LEDs
depending on the state of each server. Green, orange, yellow, red and
flashing red represent OK, Unknown, Warning, Critical or Critical for
more than 30 minutes respectively. The system was made using a flexible strip of 60 RGB LEDs
with an embedded microcontroller wired to a Pi, which runs various
Python scripts monitoring notifications from Nagios. More information on
how they put the system together is available here.
The monitoring system made by the FT.
The Financial Times
Meanwhile IBM is using the boards to glue together proof of concept systems for customers,
for example building a system to monitor a factory production line. The
demonstration system was built using Raspberry Pi boards, running the
Node-RED internet of things event processing engine, to connect Arduino
boards to webcams and temperature, pressure and humidity sensors.
"Particularly over the past year we've seen people starting to use the
Raspberry Pi board as a sub-component in what we call an industrial or
embedded application - using a Raspberry Pi as part of another product,"
said Eben Upton, one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
"We think embedded engineers are using the Raspberry Pi for a
combination of reasons - it's low cost, it's high performance and the
fact it has an incredibly stable board support package."
To help
others use the Pi to create custom appliances in this way the
Foundation is releasing a new compute-on-module (COM) version of the
board. The COM board packs the processor and memory of the Pi onto a
slim board the size of a memory module. The idea of the compute board is
to make it easier to bolt together a custom appliance using a Pi, as
the compute module can be plugged into a base board with all of the
necessary peripheral circuitry. The new board's smaller, slimmer form
factor will also make it easier to build products with an embedded Pi.
The compute board has the same ARM-based Broadcom 2835 processor as
the original Pi and 512MB of SDRAM, together with 4GB of eMMC flash
storage. The module is a 200-pin board based on the Jedec SODIMM form
factor.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module Development kit
The Raspberry Pi Foundation
Ahead of making the standalone compute board available the Foundation
is selling it as part of a package. The compute module development kit
consists of one compute module, compute module I/O board to plug the
module into and a couple of adapter boards that convert between the
ribbon cable format used on compute module and the ribbon cable format
used on the Raspberry Pi Camera, and that will be used on the official
display when it launches later this year. It also includes a 5V power
supply and micro USB cable for flashing the eMMC from a host PC.
The compute module development kit is available for $230 and the
compute module board is expected to be available individually by October
this year.
