Technology and Body

Howto install XCache Debian on GNU / Linux to accelerate Apache Webserver – XCache Best alternative to outdated PHP cacher EAccelerator I was using Eaccelerator until recently on all Apache / PHP / MySQL  (LAMP) web-servers as a caching engine (Webserver accelerator)  across all Debian GNU / Linux Lenny / Squeeze / Etch servers . However recently, I've noticed in phpinfo output on some of the Debian hosts, that eaccelerator was loaded but showed:  Caching Enabled false Our servers are quite busy serving about 50 000 to 100 000 requests  and thus not having enabled caching puts a lot of extra load on the CPU and eats a lot of memory which were usually saved by eAccelerator. Logically I tried fixing the issues following some Stackoverflow threads recommendations such as this one  but didn't work I tried playing manually spending hours trying to make eaccelerator run again and as a final mean, I even tried to upgrade eaccelerator to ...

Tinder Plus Will Launch On Monday Tinder Plus , the dating app’s first step into the wonderful world of freemium monetization, will launch on Monday for $9.99, according to sources familiar with the matter. Tinder Plus includes at least one highly requested feature and a few others that are meant to add broader functionality to the service, which essentially boils down the usual online dating experience into a simple location-based “hot or not.” Tinder has since added features meant to boost engagement, such as Tinder Moments (photo messages sent to all of a user’s matches), but this is the first time Tinder has asked its users to start paying for a product. Tinder has been testing pricing on the app in a number of markets over the past few months, with prices ranging from $.99 all the way up to $19.99/month. Though sources say that pricing will vary from market to market, they also say that they expect the service to hit the U.S. market at a price...

Toward Our 3D Future Editor’s note: Antonio Rodriguez is a partner at Matrix Partners where he focuses on the future of computing, including virtual and augmented reality, wearables, and collaboration applications. He has made investments in Oculus VR, MakerBot, The Echo Nest (now Spotify) among others.   If the past couple of years have been about one theme for me investment-wise, they have been about exploring the bridge between bits and atoms with a series of bets aimed to make a path between the digital world and the physical one we populate. And no, I am not talking about ordering a pizza from my smartphone or getting a maid on-demand to come clean my house within an hour. I’m talking about turning the bits on your screen into something you can touch or turning the room in which you are reading these words in into a digital model that you can inhabit. I am referring to the worlds of 3D printing and virtual reality. Having made early inv...

Windows 10 Start Menu: Change Design, Disable Bing Search and More I can’t think or talk about design without thinking about Steve Jobs (and what he said about that). Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is “how it works” . And when you think about it, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how colorful or trendy a thing might appear to be. If it doesn’t work for the consumer, it’s broken. I feel design, or maybe the ‘design’ perspective changes from person to person. And that’s what brings me to the all-new Windows 10  Start Menu. Addressing user concerns from the previous versions of Windows, Microsoft has made the Windows 10 Start Menu a lot more customizable. Apart from the defacto Start Menu that Windows 10 comes with, you can transform it easily to get a Windows 7 type Start Menu or a fullscreen Windows 8 Start Screen , whatever fits you right. So in this article I will show you how to fully customize your start men...

How and When to Use Destructive and Non-destructive Adjustments in Photoshop For many people, Photoshop is this strange, complicated application that almost everyone knows about but finds daunting to use mainly because Photoshop’s options seem to be obscure and confusing. This can sometimes lead to photos with changes that you can no longer edit or with changes that simply don’t show up or are not available next time you open your image. Today, we’ll see an example of one such option: Photoshop’s destructive and non-destructive adjustments. And in this entry we’ll show you how and when to use them so that once you learn them, you will notice that with a little understanding of this image editor, Photoshop can become a very powerful tool that can provide you with a lot of flexibility. If you’ve worked with Photoshop before, then you know it’s all about the layers that it creates for images in order to keep your edits more organized. However, when it comes to adju...

PhotoMath Brings Its Awesome Math Equation Solving App To Android PhotoMath is a nifty little app. You point your phone camera at a math equation, and it will give you the answer and show you all the steps to solve this particular equation. Following its huge success in the App Store, the app is coming to Android . When I first played with PhotoMath before the team took the stage in our Battlefield competition at Disrupt London, I was impressed by its design and overall user experience. Solving a math equation with a computer is nothing new — WolframAlpha has been doing that for years. But typing an equation inside WolframAlpha’s app is a painful process. With PhotoMath, you point, you shoot and you’re done. And now, in addition to coming to Android, the app now supports quadratic equations, inequalities and more. The app is faster and the solution screen has been revamped as well.     What I didn’t expect ...

Google Unveils Plans For Flexible, Biodome-Like Headquarters In Mountain View Google just unveiled plans for a new headquarters in Mountain View that looks like a series of canopies or even almost geodesic-dome like formations. This is the first time the company has designed and built offices from scratch, and it’s partnering with Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio, which will lead to a better way of working. Instead of very permanent buildings, Ingels and Heatherwick conceived of lightweight block structures that can be moved around as Google gets into new areas as it has in the past with self-driving cars and smart contact lenses. Moreover, the company envisions a campus that more seamlessly blends into the surrounding area. Areas are open to the public as well as Google employees. “It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Goog...

Uber Database Breach Exposed Information Of 50,000 Drivers, Company Confirms Uber announced today that its database was breached by an unauthorized third party last year. The company confirmed the breach in a company blog post published this afternoon, authored by Uber’s managing counsel of data private Katherine Tassi. The breach, which occurred on May 13 2014, revealed the names and license plate numbers of approximately 50,000 drivers across various states. Uber says that the number of drivers who had their information exposed during the breach represents “a small percentage of current and former driver partners” and that thus far, there have been no reports of misuse of the information that was exposed. Uber is currently notifying the drivers. Uber said in the post that it discovered a breach occurred in September 2014, and that it subsequently immediately changed its access protocols and began investigating. The company hasn’t specified why it waited this long ...

TypeSnippets Is a Visual Text Expansion Keyboard for iOS iOS: We all know text expansion is great, but sometimes it's hard to remember the abbreviations you make. TypeSnippets solves this by making it a more visual experience. Once you create your snippets, you can just pull up the keyboard and click on options like, "phone number," "website," "Twitter," or whatever else. It's all about keeping a quick log of the snippets you use most of mobile and for those purposes it works really well. Of course, you can always set up your own shortcuts, but TypeSnippets makes them easier to pull up. TypeSnippets is similar to the previously mentioned KuaiBoard, but sports a design that's a little easier to navigate through quickly.

Facebook adds new gender option for users: fill in the blank Facebook users who don't fit any of the 58 gender identity options offered by the social media giant are now being given a rather big 59th option: fill in the blank. "Now, if you do not identify with the pre-populated list of gender identities, you are able to add your own," said a Facebook announcement published online Thursday morning and shared in advance with The Associated Press. Facebook software engineer Ari Chivukula, who identifies as transgender and was part of the team that made the free-form option, thinks the change will lead to more widespread acceptance of people who don't identify themselves as a man or woman. "We're hoping this will open up the dialogue," Chivukula said. Alison C.K. Fogarty, a gender identity researcher at Stanford University, said giving users control over the words describing their gender is a significant step in social recog...

The 10 Best Mobile Games You Can Buy Right Now Overwhelmed by the App Store? Think Google Play’s too clunky? With so many mobile games being released every week, finding the ones worth a download can be a daunting task. Most often that means sticking to the top-grossing charts, but you’ll often miss some great stuff if you don’t dig deeper. Rather than have you do the digging, though, we’re more than happy to handle the shovel. Here are the 10 best new mobile games of February 2015, and be sure to check back next month for an updated list. Alto’s Adventure (iOS | $1.99) Few genres have been driven into the ground like the endless runner, but Alto’s Adventure proves there’s still plenty of life left here. This side-scrolling snowboarding game features stylish visuals, haunting music, and spot-on controls. Pause it at any moment and you’ve got yourself a gorgeous desktop background. Not to be missed. Radiation Island (iOS | $2.99) Outsid...

Lenovo to allay security concerns with free McAfee LiveSafe Lenovo tablets and mobile phones are displayed during a news conference on the company's annual results in Hong Kong (Reuters) - China's Lenovo Group Ltd on Friday said it will offer free subscriptions to Intel Corp security software to customers who bought laptops that were shipped with a program known as "Superfish," which made PCs vulnerable to cyberattacks. Lenovo, the world's biggest personal computer maker, last week advised customers to uninstall the Superfish program. Security experts and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommended the program be removed because it made users vulnerable to what are known as SSL spoofing techniques that can enable remote attackers to read encrypted web traffic, steal credentials and perform other attacks. Lenovo announced the offer to provide six-month subscriptions to Intel's McAf...

How to Organize Google+ Auto Uploaded Photos into Albums Photo sharing services  are available in abundance these days with Facebook and Flickr being the top contenders. While most of my friends and family are on Facebook, I still stick to Google+ when it comes to photo sharing. I can give you not just one, but many reasons I prefer Google over Facebook and other similar services. The auto upload feature whenever I am connected to Wi-Fi saves my time. The Auto Awesome  effects created by Google+ are fun to view and share and the Stories they create are like icing on the cake. Adding to all that, the unlimited storage space for photos uploaded under 2048px is like winning a lottery. Go ahead, make a photo album of all your lottery tickets. Image via Flickr . But with all these photos that are automatically uploaded by the apps, it is always recommended to create albums every once in a while. These albums help to better o...

How to Create a Rdio or Spotify Playlist from Shazam on iPhone “Music is all around us, all you have to do is listen.” I remember that line from the movie August Rush . I’ve been more aware of the sounds playing around me ever since (natural and otherwise). August turned out to be a talented musician. I can’t pull off the higher notes from Lost Stars (one day I will, Levine, one day). As the nerd that I am, being aware of the music for me is only half the battle. I need to identify it, remember it, and catalog it so that I can come back to it. This is why I love Shazam (just remember to turn off notifications in iOS, they’ve gotten really click-baity recently). Doesn’t matter what kind of music I point it towards, Shazam identifies it all. It can be purely instrumental music playing in an Italian cafe, or a Bollywood song on the top of a busy street in Delhi. Weirdly enough, none of it’s a problem for Shazam. Shazam introduced me to Angus ...