Up For Anything

Living life to the Full

The best wireless headphones for watching TV

By Leave a Comment

Wireless headphones which are also used for TV watching might seem silly for some, but the reality is that there are a couple of situations where using them becomes handy or even necessary. For instance, if you share a room with someone who’s trying to get some sleep and you want to binge watch your favourite TV series, then, using a wireless headphones definitely fixes the situation.

However, choosing the right pair to do the job entails some personal considerations, which includes comfort, sound quality, wireless range (just in case you’re a foodie and tend to run to the fridge for a quick snack or booze), noise-reduction technology (to tune out the background noise) and more. Looking for a little buying advice? Here are a couple of great picks for the best headphones for TV if you’re looking to get a pair soon.

Sennheiser PXC 550 Bluetooth Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. A fantastic viewing companion for those binge-watching and gaming moments. The Sennheiser PXC550 Bluetooth Wireless Over-Ear Headphones allows you to experience lively and immersive listening experience as you enjoy your TV shows. Sennheiser’s famous high-quality sound and NoiseGard™ hybrid adaptive noise cancellation offers up to 30 hours of enjoyment on a single charge.

JBL E65BTNC Wireless Over-Ear Noise Cancelling Headphones. Another proven television watching companion from JBL. The E65BTNC uses 40mm driver and active noise cancelling technology, which lets you watch your favourite movie or listen to music on the go and experience various audio content with spectacular clarity and detail.

Beats Studio3 Wireless Headphones. The beats brand revolutionize the music industry from since its inception and have effectively assimilated to the television industry via their speakers and headphones, one of which is the Beats Studio3, which delivers a full-range audio, elevating the high tones and blending the bass with depth for excellent listening pleasure regardless of the TV show or game. Integrated with an Apple W1 chip, it provides seamless connectivity for your television.

Sony XB650BT EXTRA BASS Wireless Headphones. Sony lover, are you? The Sony XB650BT EXTRA BASS Wireless Headphones is a crowd-favourite headphone that offers more than just high-quality sound and wireless convenience in a compact, lightweight build. You’ll be able to enjoy listening to your favourite television shows or favourite music when you’re out and about. It also capable of up to 30 hours of playback, which means you can treat your ears to a dynamic listening experience all-day and all-night long.

End Note

Indeed, getting a new TV is an awesome experience but if your choice is to listen to your favourite movies at only a fraction of the volume so you won’t distract the people around you can totally ruin the experience. With that said coupled with the suggestions above, copping up a pair of comfortable wireless headphones can instantly fix these issues and provide the best viewing experience you deserve. Check out a great selection of headphones form Harvey Norman and choose which features and price range suits you! Don’t forget to thoroughly research your chosen headphone brand, model, and don’t be afraid to ask questions or recommendations from your friends and family. Best of luck!

Understanding Big Data – Why it matters.

By Leave a Comment

Source

If you simply think analytics and big data are the same thing and assume you know how to use big data, you are already one step behind in the game. Big data will present you with a series of relevant details about your customer. It will rely on the use of social media information, Steven Scott Bayesian believes you can gather details about how a marketing campaign is working, and details about how to integrate online coupons/promos, and other savings, in order to get the most out of your campaigns. Analytics on the flip side is going to give you client-specific information (i.e., how many times a visitor came on your site, turnaround, sales figures, and funnels, etc.).

Big data and analytics should be used side by side, but are not the same thing. Understanding big data means you are understanding a comprehensive view of your business, how it is working, what is working (and what is not working), and will provide you with essential details so you can implement changes, and implement new strategies, in order to ensure your business is going to function as it should. Understanding big data will provide you the resources you need, and the details your company requires, in order to take an integrative approach at implementing and changing your company, to ensure you are making the most out of your marketing dollars (and your spending budget in general).

Why is it important to ensure you are understanding big data? Some reasons include:

– It provides a company in-depth guidance/review of how their marketing tactics are working.

– It allows you to implement other marketing tactics and social media guides, in order to get the best results when offering a sale, or providing customers with coupons they are going to use.

– It gives you charts, graphs, and other graphic details, so you can better view how your company is working.

Basically, when you understand the ins and outs of big data, you understand the intricacies of how your company is working. You will understand why some projects/campaigns work, and why some do not work. You will be able to implement your social media campaigns, your sales teams, and integrate how you can implement further changes within your organization, in order to ensure you do what the customer is looking for and to get the returns you are hoping to get as a business owner.

Big data, especially in today’s competitive industry/online driven world, is what can differentiate your company from a local competitor. It can be the missing link that your company has been looking for, to help push you over the top when it comes to implementing a social media strategy. It can provide you the details you’ve been missing, so you can learn what your customer wants (versus what you think they want).

As a business owner, you have to utilize all resources presented to you. Big data is a major component to helping you grow, develop, and ensure your company gets the most out of the campaigns you implement, no matter how much you have to spend when marketing/targeting your audience.

What you should know about the Meltdown and Spectre Bugs

By 2 Comments

2018 isn’t off to great start when it comes to cybersecurity. At the beginning of the year, a couple of vulnerabilities for CPUs were found that can have potentially devastating effects. The Meltdown and Spectre Bugs have not only increased security risks for computers, but also for tablets and smartphones. Applying fixes can reverse the security risk, but at the cost of processing speed. For example, you can find the Meltdown and Spectre Debian patches here.

What is Meltdown

This vulnerability allows for access of private memory in the Kernel, which can contain passwords and other secrets of the operating system, including other programs. This can leave you open to attacks, as malicious programs can easily find every password from the kernel’s private memory zone. Even running JavaScript from a website is a security risk when using an unpatched CPU.

Luckily, there are system updates that can fix this, as well, since Microsoft, Apple, and Google have rolled updates to fix the bugs, as well as the developers of several Linux Distributions.

What is Spectre

Even though Spectre also deals with kernel memory, it’s slightly different than Meltdown. Instead of directly accessing the private memory zone, Spectre allows a malicious program to trick another process to run on the same system in order to leak private information. This means that it can trick programs like your browser to reveal all currently used passwords.

This vulnerability is not exclusive to Intel, but it also affects AMD and ARM devices. In other words, practically any device, including tablets and smartphones. Spectre is difficult to patch, but also difficult to exploit, and currently, there are ongoing struggles to permanently patch the bug.

Intel was probably aware of Meltdown

As per Intel’s statement, even with Meltdown, everything is working as intended. Intel executives have also been accused of insider trading, and the engineers working to develop the chips had to sign NDAs that forbid them from talking about the bugs that can have excessive security risks.

Even Linus Torvalds – the creator of Linux – has accused Intel of not willing to provide a fix. The debacle resulted in a drop in Intel’s share prices, while AMD’s have gone up.

Protection against the exploits

Since this is a high-risk situation, there isn’t much to do than waiting for the updates to roll in. If you haven’t updated your system, this is a good time as any, since that’s the best way to protect your device from the bugs. Most, if not all, Linux distros should’ve already gotten the updates, and if not, they’ll get the fix soon.

Updating the browsers is also a must, because they pose a security risk too.

This has been a horrible event for security. Even if Intel wanted to appear to have faster CPUs than AMD, users shouldn’t be left vulnerable to exploits and bugs. Patching the bugs will slow down your CPUs significantly, from 10-30% so Intel users should be more careful when purchasing an Intel CPU next time.

Apps To Budget Your Finance

By Leave a Comment

For many from the older generations, they know what it means to be poor. Those days, money was hard to come by and many lived from hand to mouth. There was hardly enough money to make ends meet and every cents were accounted for. Money tracking was never a problem because there was so little money and we knew where every cent went. But this is a different story for the present young generation.

Life for our present young generation has been much easier and many need not have to worry about money. They have more than enough to spend without worrying about where the money comes from. All they know is that their parents will provide for them. Of course, these young people are not to be blamed for spending their parents’ money freely or extravagantly. These parents tend to be overly generous because they want the best for their children what they themselves could not enjoy in their young days.

Once these young people go out to work for their own living, they find that they have problem managing their finance. They have been so used to spending freely without learning to budget and I am sure many have learned the hard way. I may be wrong but in my personal opinion, those who have gone through the struggle and later learned the importance of budgeting, they are the ones that designed the best money management app. We are so fortunate to have so many types of money management apps to help us manage our money.

If you happened to be one that is always short of money before the next salary comes in, then it is high time you need to download a Google Play spending tracker onto your smartphone or an applicable version onto your iPhone. Here are some reasons why you need to track your spending:

  1. To make sure that you are spending on things that need your urgent attention first.
  2. If you don’t know where your money goes, then you will not be able to save for your goals.
  3. By tracking your spending, you will be able to see your weak spending habits and avoid them.
  4. It will also makes you aware of your current bank balance and keep you from over spending.
  5. It also gives you control over your finance and expenses.

Downloading one of the free cash back apps not only keeps track of your money and act as your money manager, you will also get to earn cash back through your purchases. If is never too late to learn to budget with the help of a money tracking app.

How Technology is Changing Modern Romance

By Leave a Comment

Source

When it comes to finding romance, nearly 4% of Americans claim to have found their partners through online dating websites and social media. Digital technology has transformed many aspects of society including how we meet others and communicate with peers. However, with the increase of unlimited online dating apps, modern technology has changed the way Millennials actually show their affection towards each other.

Researchers believe that the “Paradox of Choice” suggests that having more options will make people unhappy with the choices of relationships they make. In fact, having more options allows people to jump in and out of relationships and straight towards new ones. So, does technology really help us find love, or does simply ruin the benefits of dating? Here’s how technology is changing romance.

Technology Sends the Wrong Message

For most online daters, many have admitted to using Photoshop to enhance their photos. While you might have the intentions to simply enhance the image, it can also display the wrong intentions. When you decide to post photos of yourself at the age of 18 and now 45 and trying to find a partner, these photos may be construed as misleading and untrustworthy.

Searching For Perfection on Social Media

Social media has been found to accelerate relationships for better and for worst. In fact, millennials have become so impatient with dating that we’ve begun to judge potential partners just by a quick glance at their details and photos online. On the bright side, couples are able to determine their partner’s attitude and personality simply based on their social media pages.

Infidelity is Easier to Achieve

According to studies conducted by the University of Montreal, the findings claim that nearly 41% of participants in the study had admitted to cheating on their partner, while 68% of participants had recently considered infidelity. While we cannot focus the blame on dating apps, research also tells us that over 42% of Tinder users are already in a relationship or married.

Redefining Modern Romance

In the digital age, technology isn’t necessarily killing courtship, but rather redefining what romance looks like. More couples would rather text instead of speak, FaceTime instead of meeting face-to-face, and even scan through online dating profiles as they would when reading a menu.

As we age, it is becoming a struggle to meet new people that we often resort to using what’s more convenient for us. However, the most we search for love online without any motivation to socialize in person, the more disconnected we can become.

What Is UEBA and Why Does it Matter

By Leave a Comment

Have you heard of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA)? If not, then it is time you got on board with it! Basically, it is a technology that helps you to identify attempted security breaches before they actually make it through. It does this by developing a baseline of activity, something that it classes as “normal”, and that instantly identifies anything that moves away from this norm. It is used alongside other forms of technology and works particularly well in organizations that produce and store a lot of big data.

Why Does UEBA Matter?

We live in a world where attackers have almost made a game of trying to breach through various defenses. Web gateways, intrusion prevention systems, and firewalls are all important, but they simply aren’t enough anymore. Today, organizations, and particularly large ones, have such a vast, jagged, and porous IT perimeter that it has become almost unmanageable. Security experts, managers, and executives, therefore, are having to look at it from a different perspective. No longer can they focus only on prevention, they must focus on detection.

The tools and technology that are available today are important and powerful, creating logs and alerts, but they are also significantly lacking. This is because they focus on strict and simple rules of correlation, and experienced hackers can easily evade these. This is because existing systems focus on real time actions, when today’s attacks often take several months to complete. A good UEBA, by contrast, doesn’t rely on rules or signatures. Instead, it uses a variety of risk scoring methodologies and algorithms to figure out what is really happening.

Understanding the Behavior Graph

UEBA is a completely unique approach to security as it uses what is known as a “behavioral graph”. This creates a visual picture that enables people to track and detect threats. This ensures security analysts can always see their entire IT environment and what it should look like, so that they can easily spot any anomalies. This makes it more accurate than any other solution has been able to achieve to date. This is interesting, since UEBAs were originally developed to gain a greater understanding of consumer behavior, not to provide a security feature.

One of the key things that UEBAs do, is to generate a risk score and to create these for a range of different types of entities. These findings are then instantly communicated to the relevant analyst. They look at individual entities, but also collections of entities and, in so doing, they can determine how big a risk actually is, so that a security expert isn’t contacted every time someone accidentally allows a popup on their computer, for instance. Rather, it will highlight potential lateral movements, malicious beaconing, data exfiltration, and data staging instead. Those are key signals that something is actually going wrong and, by providing security experts with those signals as and when they appear, there is a far greater chance of plugging a potential hole in the security before someone actually manages to get through.

Revolutionising The Workplace With Technology

By 1 Comment

Source

Working in healthcare can be incredibly rewarding, especially if you’re working as a nurse or doctor or some other form of hands on job. Even if you aren’t, working behind the scenes can be not just exciting, interesting and rewarding, but incredibly educational as well. Sometimes you can run into situations in the office and laboratory, even in the hospital or clinic that are less than great, but with the technological advances in things like scheduling and communication, problems are becoming fewer and further between. So what are some ways to help maximise the efficiency of your workforce? Read ahead…

Be Flexible and Fair With Employees and Colleagues

Flexibility in the workplace is one way to really help maximise efficiency and productivity of your workforce, but be careful to not appear to be favouring any one person in terms of flexibility over another. For example, always giving a parent the opportunity to work from home but denying the same requests from other employees who may ask only occasionally can cause a rift in the team. Flexibility in scheduling if you work in a shift environment can additionally be beneficial, allowing people to have the time off they request within reason and providing as much adherence to preferences can help your employees understand that management does care about their individual lives and is willing to help them maintain their dedication to their role within the organisation as well as their role outside of it in their individual lives. Providing this kind of support to employees and colleagues can help them to be happy in the role they are in and helps them want to go the extra mile for the business, which in turn increases productivity and efficiency on the job.

Take Advantage Of Technology

Technology in the medical profession is always changing and always improving, which helps employees to improve the way they work as well. This helps to maximise efficiency in the workplace and with companies such as IDBS.com now providing some amazing solutions to working, it has never been easier to get the most out of projects and communication in the clinic, lab or office. With new tablets being developed that have specifications geared toward sharing spreadsheets, schedules, and the like, it is helping take collaboration, communication and efficiency to the next level with ease, especially when everyone has their own dedicated tablet capable of accessing work related information or intranets on the go.

Brainstorm, Collate and Evaluate

It’s no secret that the more you get together with your colleagues and superiors to discuss new ideas and suggestions, the more you will be able to bring beneficial changes to the table and actually implement them in a work setting. Not only will your colleagues and employees have their voices heard over potentially great ideas and improvements being implemented but you can get everyone on board and help create an overall work environment that everyone can enjoy and look forward to coming into. Improvements are always possible in every work environment whether it’s within a lab, hospital, clinic or office and so getting colleagues together to brainstorm can help everyone create the ideal place for themselves to thrive. Hold regular follow up sessions after idea implementations to see how it’s working for everyone for added workplace benefit.

In all, technology has been revolutionising the workplace through the easy access of data and sharing said data. Bog businesses throughout the world, regardless of their specialisation can benefit from the use of data sharing to help drive sales, business and to help improve efficiency. Even if a company doesn’t specialise in sales of any kind, the use of big data can help promote a more streamlined, efficient network of colleagues that bring out the best in the business in the long run. Try implementing some of these ideas from this article into your work place and watch how it starts to blossom into a productive powerhouse, seemingly overnight!

Is Your Hard Drive About to Fail? You Need to Act Now

By Leave a Comment

If your PC or laptop has been acting up recently, you shouldn’t just write it off as a dodgy connection or having too many programs running. Your hard drive could be about to fail – and if that happens, you’ll be at risk of losing everything. Unless you’re already very clued up and back all your documents up to the cloud or an external hard drive, your built-in hard drive failing will cause lots of issues. However, if it hasn’t failed yet, you still have time to take precautions and save all your files. It could go at any point, so if you have any suspicions, it’s much safer to act fast and take all preventative measures first.

How do you know it’s about to fail?

There are a number of symptoms you should look out for if you suspect a failing hard drive, and luckily, most of them are quite obvious so you don’t need to be an expert to spot them. The most obvious symptom is noise: if your laptop has always been quiet before and it’s suddenly started making a loud noise, you should be concerned. This might sound like whirring, grinding or like a fan running very loudly.

You should also look out for frequent crashing, error messages, files disappearing, and systems running slowly. While other issues can cause one or two of these symptoms, if you’re seeing more than one as well as hearing a noise, you can be quite confident that it’s the hard drive.

What can you do to stop it?

If you’ve managed to catch your hard drive before it crashes, there are a number of ways you can save your data before the drive corrupts. You can use software to copy all of your data – all your documents, files, photos and music – and then save it onto either another device or onto an external hard drive.

It takes more time, but you can also do this without any specialist software. You can buy an external hard drive and save everything onto it. Or, you can create accounts with online cloud-based platforms, and upload everything onto the cloud. Examples include Dropbox and OneDrive. Depending on what laptop you have, this might happen automatically – some Microsoft-based devices will save your work to OneDrive as you go.

What happens if it fails before you’ve taken action?

Some people aren’t fortunate enough to catch their hard drive before it corrupts. If this happens to you, don’t worry or panic. There are ways of getting all of your documents and data back. One of the easiest, safest ways of getting your data back is by going to professionals. They can use a data retrieval center to get everything back to you – and some can even restore the hard drive for you.

There’s some software on the market to help you do this yourself, but if you’re not an IT genius or computer technician, it can be a stressful and expensive process – especially if it doesn’t work out in the end for you.

From Sci-Fi to the Real World: 3D Printing Applications in Healthcare

By 1 Comment

Source

The 3D printed medical devices market is projected to grow to $1469.4 million by the end of 2026. 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object from a digital file. This process has revolutionized healthcare by cutting down on surgery time, developing custom devices to fit each individual patient, and ultimately creating innovative devices that help save lives. Originally used for hearing aids, arm prosthesis, and dental crowns, 3D printing is becoming used for so much more. Here are some ways that science is testing its capabilities to help medical patients live happier and longer.

Fertility: Medical 3D printing is entering the reproduction world to help women recover fertility. A recent study by the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and McCormick School of Engineering showed that doctors can now imitate ovaries. The team of scientists at the schools removed the ovary from female mice and replaced it with a new 3D-printed version. This new printed ovary helped to better house immature eggs, increasing their survivability rate and boosting hormone production. The infertile mice were then able to ovulate and produce healthy babies.

Hearing: The affordability and innovations of 3D printing have allowed universities to incorporate it into their scientific achievements. Taking the advancements a step further from creating simple hearing aids, scientists at Princeton University have used 3D printing tools to develop a functional ear. They combined antenna electronics with tissue and developed a human ear that not only replicates human ability, but extends it far beyond the range of human capability. Although not completely finished, they expect to be able to connect the ear to a patient’s nerve endings much like a hearing aid and provide patients with a renewed sense of sound.

Feeling: Recently, human skin has been added to the list of endless possibilities provided by 3D printing. Scientists have mastered the ability to print skin which can augment human capabilities. These printed skin cells include hair follicles, sweat glands, and now heat detection. Engineers and researchers at Caltech and ETH Zurich have recently announced that they have incorporated the ability for artificial skin to detect temperature changes. This new breakthrough could pave the way to returning touch sensations to burn victims or amputees in the near-future.

3D printing has made major strides in the medical world. Although it is still fairly new, many researchers and scientists are working fast to make it a reality in the industry.