WatchMyCell

Freeware system tray app WatchMyCell logs into your cell phone account and keeps a watchful eye on how many minutes you’ve used for the month.

Just download and install the program, set it up with your provider (currently supports Cingular, Verizon, T-mobile, Sprint, and Nextel), then define your rules for how soon you’d like to be alerted of your dwindling minutes and what form you’d like that alert to take (email or SMS). This little app should come in handy for anyone who’s stared down the barrel of an unexpectedly large cell phone bill.  — Adam Pash

WatchMyCell [via Download Squad]

Source: Download of the Day: WatchMyCell (Windows) - Lifehacker

Get 25GB of free online storage at Streamload MediaMax

 LifeHacker: 25GB of free online storage at Streamload MediaMax

Many of you expressed excitement over the 25GB of free online storage offered by KeepVault, a media-oriented backup service. Turns out, that storage is provided by Streamload MediaMax, and you don’t need KeepVault to get an account: It’s free for the asking.

MediaMax provides not only raw file storage that’s accessible from any PC, but also file sharing and hosting, MP3 streaming and backup/sync software. Of course, the real highlight is the amount of storage—five times what you get from services like XDrive. However, you’re limited to 1GB’ worth of downloads per month, and the maximum file size is 25MB. Upgrading to a paid MediaMax account (starting at $4.95/month) raises or eliminates these kinds of restrictions. But you don’t even need a credit card to sign up for a free account—just a username and password.

If you’re looking for copious online storage, whether for backup purposes, file sharing or media streaming, you should definitely give MediaMax a look. — Rick Broida

Streamload MediaMax

Source: Get 25GB of free online storage at Streamload MediaMax - Lifehacker

Breaking the Myth of Megapixels

By DAVID POGUE

For an industry that’s built on science, the technology world sure has its share of myths. Thousands of people believe that forwarding a certain e-mail message to 50 friends will bring great riches, that the gigahertz rating of a computer is a good comparative speed score, or that Bill Gates once said “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.”

          

Illustration by Stuart Goldenberg

Shawn King, a library patron in Westport, Conn., examining photographs shot using various pixel levels. Few could discern differences.

But one myth is so deeply ingrained, millions of people waste money on it every year. I’m referring, of course, to the Megapixel Myth.

It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”

It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

A megapixel is one million tiny colored dots in a photo. It seems logical that more megapixels would mean a sharper photo. In truth, though, it could just mean a terrible photo made of more dots. A camera’s lens, circuitry and sensor — not to mention your mastery of lighting, composition and the camera’s controls — are far more important factors.

I can show you plenty of enlargements from a 4-megapixel camera that look much sharper and better than ones from an 8-megapixel model. Meanwhile, a camera with more megapixels usually costs more, and its photos fill up your memory card and hard drive much faster. And more densely packed pixels on a sensor chip means more heat, which can introduce speckles into low-light shots.

But you can repeat this lesson until you’re blue in the newspaper column, and some people still won’t believe you. They still worry that their 5-megapixel camera from 2005 is obsolete. They still feel sales pressure when shopping for new cameras.

So as the host of a TV series (“It’s All Geek to Me,” to begin in April on Discovery HD and the Science Channel), I thought I finally had a chance to settle this thing once and for all. At the climax of the camera episode, I would test the Megapixel Myth on camera, supplying visual proof for the world to see.

I created three versions of the same photograph, showing a cute baby with spiky hair in a rowboat. One was a 5-megapixel shot, one was 8 megapixels and one was 13.

I asked 291 Digital, a New York graphic imaging company whose clients include ad agencies and fashion companies, to print each one at a posterlike 16 by 24 inches. (They were digital C prints, printed on Durst Lambda at 400 dpi, if that means anything to you.)

We mounted the three prints on a wall in Union Square in Manhattan. Then, cameras rolling, we asked passers-by if they could see any difference.

A small crowd gathered, and several dozen people volunteered to take the test. They were allowed to mash their faces up against the print, step back and squint, whatever they liked.

Only one person correctly identified which were the low-, medium-, and high-resolution prints. Everybody else either guessed wrong or gave up, conceding that there was absolutely no difference.

I described the test on my blog (nytimes.com/pogue), confident that I would be hailed for blowing up the camera companies’ pet morsel of misinformation.

In the following days, 450 readers responded to the article. Many endorsed the test results, citing their own similar experiences.

But there was also an angry group who didn’t like my methods. They took issue with the way I produced the lower-resolution images: by using Adobe’s Photoshop software to subtract megapixels from the 13-megapixel shot.

“More ignorant rantings by the NYT,” went comment No. 206. “If you want to see the difference, take frames of the same scene using different cameras.”

These readers felt that “down-rezzing” a 13-megapixel photo tested only Photoshop’s pixel-subtraction techniques — not camera sensors.

I’m not entirely convinced. The Megapixel Myth suggests that you’ll see less detail in a 5-megapixel shot than a 13-megapixel one; how it gets down to 5 megapixels shouldn’t make much difference. Fewer dots is fewer dots.

Still, on the blog, I offered to repeat the test using more scientific methods.

The “use different cameras” suggestion, however, was out of the question. Different cameras have different lenses, sensors and circuitry — factors that do produce meaningful differences.

I challenged readers to devise a test that would isolate megapixels as the sole difference between the test photos — without involving Photoshop.

Ellis Vener came to the rescue.

“I am a professional photographer and a technical editor at Professional Photographer magazine,” his e-mail message began. “I’ll be happy to do the following test.”

Using a professional camera (the 16.7-megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II) in his studio, he would take three photos of the same subject, zooming out each time. Then, by cropping out the background until the subject filled the same amount of the frame in each shot, he would wind up with nearly identical photos at three different resolutions: 7 megapixels, 10 and 16.7. “Frankly, I’m interested in the results as well,” he wrote.

I gave him a green light for the new test.

His choice of subject also put to rest another objection to my original test. Instead of a smooth-skinned baby, Mr. Vener’s model was positively bristling with detail: curly hair, textured clothing, a vividly patterned background and a spectacular multicolored tattoo on a hairy arm.

We set up the new 16-by-24-inch enlargements on identical easels at a public library. (Why the library? Because it was warm, it was flooded with natural light and its director gave me permission.) Clipboard in hand, we conducted the test again.

Surprise, surprise: the results were the same. This time, out of about 50 test subjects, only three could say which photo was which.

So is the lesson, “Megapixels don’t matter?”

Not exactly.

First of all, having some extra megapixels can be extremely useful in one important situation: cropping. You can crop out unwanted background and still have enough pixels left for a decent print. (Blog comment No. 376, for example, imagines “a child’s face that looked priceless at the time the shot was taken — and it occupied 5 percent of the photo. For this rare occasion, it is worth being safe rather than sorry.”)

Of course, it’s better to get your composition right when you take the photo, but this is still a great trick to fall back on.

Megapixels may matter to professionals, too, especially those who produce photos for wall-size retail displays. And even in consumer cameras, there are certainly limits to the irrelevance of megapixels; my test went only to 16 by 24 inches, which is the biggest I figured most amateurs would go.

(As one reader put it: “Why not downsample your photo to 1 pixel by 1 pixel, and then print 16-by-24-foot pictures?” Well, yes, then you’d see a difference.)

The actual lesson, then, is this: “For the nonprofessional, five or six megapixels is plenty, even if you intend to make poster-size prints.”

Or, as comment No. 370 put it: “For the average consumer trying to decide between 5 megapixels and 8 megapixels on similar cameras, Mr. Pogue’s test might save them a little bit of money and a lot of hard-drive space.”

Unfortunately, blowing up the Megapixel Myth also takes away a convenient crutch for millions of camera shoppers. If you’re torn between two camera models, you now know that you shouldn’t use the megapixel rating as a handy one-digit comparison score.

So what replaces it? What other handy comparison grade is there?

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing. Take advice from your friends, take sample shots if you get a chance, and read the reviews at nytimes.com, cnet.com, dpreview.com and dcresource.com. What can I say? Life is rarely black and white; it’s far more often filled with shades of gray.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Source: Breaking the Myth of Megapixels - New York Times

Find restaurant secrets at Top Secret Recipes

Lifehacker: Find restaurant secrets at Top Secret Recipes

Want to make a cherry Slurpee in your own kitchen? How about California Pizza Kitchen’s famous BBQ Chicken Pizza? And homemade Cinnabon for dessert? You can find these recipes and hundreds more at Top Secret Recipes.

The site organizes the recipes by brand, starting with Applebee’s and ending with Z’Tejas Southwestern Grill. In between you’ll find not only restaurants, but also individual foods and drinks: AriZona tea, Bisquick, Mrs. Dash and so on. Each recipe includes comments and user ratings, most of which are overwhelmingly positive. The site promises a new recipe each week, and although there’s no RSS feed for easily tracking them, you can subscribe to a once-weekly e-mail newsletter.

I have to say, browsing this site made me feel like a kid in a Mrs. Fields store (yes, her storied cookie recipe is here). However, while some of the recipes are free, most will set you back 79 cents. But if you love to cook (or just want to save money on dining out), that’s a pretty small price to pay. — Rick Broida

Top Secret Recipes

Source: Find restaurant secrets at Top Secret Recipes - Lifehacker

Lock Bumping and Bump Keys

See video of news story on lock bumping: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hr23tpWX8lM

Lockpicks See Security Flaw in Most Locks

As lockpicking gains traction as a hobby, a surprisingly easy new technique has been circulating online and among hackers.

By Brian Braiker

Newsweek

How many locks figure prominently in your daily routine? Maybe one or two to get you into your house or apartment? One for your office, your car and your mailbox? Once you turn the key, chances are you feel pretty secure. That's what locks do, after all, they keep things shut; they keep you protected. How naive.

A large majority of locks that open with a key, called pin tumbler locks, have structural weaknesses built into them that can be exploited with picks and practice. But a relatively new lockpicking technique known as "bumping" takes advantage of that weakness and requires no real understanding of how locks work. "You don't need expensive tools or anything," says encryption expert Barry Wels. "Any 15-year-old who's motivated can learn how to do it in 15 minutes on the Internet."

Wels ought to know. He heads The Open Organization of Lockpickers (TOOOL), which bills itself "the most well-behaved sporting association in the Netherlands." He picks locks, he says, not with criminal intent, but more in the spirit of puzzle-solving. One man's pin tumbler, it seems, is another's Rubik's Cube. In fact, lockpicking as a hobby has developed a substantial worldwide following in recent years, thanks mostly to the unprecedented availability of information online and geek charisma of polymaths like Wels (whose nickname is The Key, natch). Enthusiasts share tips and engage in flamewars at lockpicking101.com; they attend Locksport International meetings and post videos on YouTube.

For more tangible evidence of sport-picking's growth, consider a recent Friday afternoon. Wels delivered a lecture on lockpicking last month at an occasionally occurring hackers' convention called HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York's Pennsylvania Hotel.  Despite seeming a little, well, analog for a hackers' convention, the lockpicking discussion felt perfectly in tune with the weekend's ethos. "Old school, new school: we do it all," says Eric Corley (also known by the hacker pseudonym Emmanuel Goldstein), the founder and editor of 2600 magazine, which hosts the conference.  The three-day affair drew some 2,500 technology enthusiasts together to consider such diverse topics as "biometrics in science fiction," how to decipher barcodes with the naked eye and why Macromedia Flash "sucks for advertisers." But none of HOPE's lectures attracted quite the crowd that Wels's did.

And few were as sobering. The bulk of the talk—which Wels cohosted with Marc Tobias, a lawyer, technical-fraud expert and author—was devoted to bumping. They explained how most locks can be bumped open with any key that fits that lock, but does not open it. If, for example, you live in an apartment complex, chances are your key will fit into (but not open) the doors to other units in your building. Similarly, if you open your mailbox with a key, your key will probably fit into other mailboxes not just in your building but on your block—even though postal locks are uniquely designed and protected under federal law. Wels and Tobias demonstrated that by modifying the key, that key could be used as a universal "bump key" for any lock it will fit into.  To say nothing of breaking and entering, "this was made for identity theft," explains Tobias. "The U.S. Postal Service's worst nightmare is Ted Kaczynski with a bump key."

(A caveat for those taking notes at home: NEWSWEEK is intentionally omitting specific details about how to make, and use, bump keys. But as our reporter learned from the HOPE conference and interviews, they are very easy to make using readily available tools.  No lock is perfect.  Bumping, which takes its name from how the key actually undoes a lock, is simply easier to master than picking locks and, if done well, can leave very little trace behind.  The principle that makes it possible is as old as Newtonian physics.)

Tobias demonstrated the technique to the U.S. Postal Service, hoping to convey the potential threat to millions of mailboxes nationwide (and push for legislation that would outlaw shipping bump keys through the mail, which is currently legal). The Postal Service subsequently examined their inventory to see how vulnerable their locks are, according to spokesman Bob Anderson. "The engineering and inspection services have identified some security issues," he tells NEWSWEEK. "We see it as a potential threat. We have identified where the risks are, but we have no recorded incidents of people reporting a bumping." Anderson declined to elaborate what vulnerabilities were discovered and what steps were being taken to remedy them.

Others are less concerned, at least publicly. "We've been around for 26 years and this is not a problem," says Richard Hallabrin, corporate spokesman for Mail Boxes Etc., the world's largest franchisor of retail mailboxes. "If people continue to go out to the media and say, 'Here's how you break into any lock,' yeah, there's going to be an increase." Fair point, but the information is already available to anyone with an Internet connection. "Lockpicking information until very recently has been hidden not from the bad guys, but from us, the consumers," says security guru and author Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer with enough clout to get a little shout out in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." "There's no economic motivator for anyone to make a better lock because you, the consumer, don't know [how vulnerable your lock really is]."

There are ways to improve upon locks, says Schneier. He points to the auto industry, which has an incentive to build cars that are tougher to break into. "If your car is easier to steal, your insurance will be more [expensive]," he points out. So automakers have begun equipping cars with locks that open only with the swipe of a card or in close proximity to a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip.

Perhaps surprisingly, Clyde Roberson, the technical director at Medeco High Security Locks (which are praised by lock aficionados as being virtually unpickable), tends to agree with Schneier. "Bumping is real. It is a vulnerability," he concedes. "Do I think lots of guys are running around bumping locks to get into mailboxes? No. Do you publicize it knowing people may take advantage of it so that you can educate people? I don't know what the answer is."

It's an interesting ethical question. But while the experts ponder it, the curious can find the information they need with a quick Google search. The pressure, say Schneier and Tobias, should be on the lock manufacturers to do something about it.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14157179/from/ET/

Link to YouTube - Lock Bumping and Bump Keys