An Incubator from Car Parts

12 Replies Jonny Hankins

One of the most serious issues with using medical equipment in the developing world is breakage. Some statistics state that the average life of a large piece of machinery is about 5 years, and hospitals typically have stockpiles of broken machinery that they cannot use.

The problem is availability of spare parts. In some cases machines are taken out of service for minor problems, even fuse replacement, because the distribution network required to get the part does not service that area.

Here in Cambridge Massachusetts, a design company has produced as prototype of a baby incubator for use in such situations. The machine has all of the necessary functions of the most expensive incubators, but is built using car parts.

An easily repairable machine

Why car parts you might ask? Cars are found everywhere, and in many cases they are the only things that get regularly repaired. As a result parts are also available practically everywhere, both formal and informal networks serving even the most remote areas, and the designer believes that this makes the prototype product serviceable and repairable wherever it is found.

A simple idea that could have great knock on effects, I hazard to say. The incubator is heated using a pair of car headlights placed under the mattress, the temperature gauge is a car standard, as is the wiring loom and the air intake and filters. The alarm is a door bell and the emergency lights are direction turning indicators. If power is lost a motorbike battery takes over and it can even be run from jump leads.

The Massachusetts General Hospital has one of the prototypes on display in its museum, but unfortunately it looks as if the designers are still looking for a backer in order to put the project into mass production.

Given that millions of babies are born each year and many die on their first day of life, let us hope that somebody offers them some funds.

What are the risks of getting infected by malicious software?

11 Replies Alan

Have you ever thought of what is going to happen when you are infected by a computer malware? About a decade ago, computer virus aims were to replicate themselves and destroying key operating system functions. If you got a computer malware infection at that time, most probably your operating system will be corrupted by the malware and you will need to format your hard disk to solve your problem.

Today, malicious software behaves a little different. We have more than 10 types of computer security threats such as virus, trojan, worms, spyware and many more. Each type of malware has their own speciality and here are top 3 risks of getting infected by a computer malware.

1. Having your login credentials stolen

It is very popular today that a keylogger/keystroke logging is used to log a victim’s login credentials. Once the keylogger has a set of your username and password, they can login into the account and do almost everything unless your account is protected by a two factor authentication.

2. Losing hard disk space

Hard disk space today can be very cheap but we should not waste it on storing malicious software. Malware such as worms will replicate in your operating system and take up your hard disk space. You will not feel the burden at the beginning but as the process gets longer, you will start to feel the pain of having insufficient disk space.

3. Spending money on unnecessary stuff

There is also a type of malware where they scare you off by telling you that your computer has hundreds of infections which you actually don’t have. Upon scaring you, they urge you to purchase a bogus antivirus which claims that can clean all the mentioned infections. All in all, you end up actually paying for nothing.

4. Being part of a minion for DDoS attack

Have you ever thought of how DDoS can bring thousands to millions of traffic to a server? It is actually all the computers which are infected with some sort of trojan that explains how the attacker can have such massive amount of traffic. By getting a malware infection, you are at risk of becoming part of this big project which you do not want to be.

5. Losing your privacy

Another form of malware which is known as spyware is built to spy your daily activities. By knowing your daily activities, the attacker will be able to understand you better before attacking you. For instance, if you regularly surf to adult sites, the attacker will probably start off with some fake adult material to lure you into their trap.

Looking at someones internet usageBack to you now, are you able to take all the risks mentioned? If you are not, be sure you have a good habit when it comes to internet and computer security and always remember that having an antivirus and firewall is not sufficient for a good security.

Back to the Basics: De-cluttering your Computer

9 Replies Paul Morris

If you own a PC or if you are using one at work then you just earned for yourself an extra responsibility of organizing your files and even your folders. This is one task that could sound really easy when the PC is still new until you start accumulating hundreds of different files and see the bad effects of cluttering your computer with both important and useless files. Of course the most apparent effect of file chaos can be seen on the PC’s speed as it tends to become slow as the day goes by and then errors start to appear, and then the PC crashes ultimately. Again, it all began in ignoring a rather simple task – organizing your files.

Saving files, regardless of its size, can influence PC clog up. But this is one convenience of owning a PC; you can create files such as photos, documents, movies, music, and more, store them and retrieve them later when necessary. This is just the way it’s supposed to be, right? We cannot not save files in our PCs, most of the times it is a necessity. Thus, the best way to attack this challenge is to intelligently organize files and folders. When I said intelligently, I meant not just simply arranging files in a specific way, it means de-cluttering both your PC and your life.

The truth is, file organization is not really a complicated task; it’s just as straightforward as organizing paper files. It all comes down to storing files in folders by categories and sequences that make sense.

A Laptop Full of FilesBefore organizing your files though, make a habit of classifying files as important or useless at the earliest phase possible: before saving files. If you can, avoid saving redundant and unnecessary files, then please do. It doesn’t take much time to evaluate a file’s importance to see if you should save it or not. While you master this habit, try another one: design and follow a consistent way of naming your files and folders. For instance, if you are using a PC at work wherein you need to store files related to customers, dealers and even colleagues, you may want to create sub-folders for each group and then store all files and folders related to each group under them. You can make organization more fun and effective by applying related icons to each sub-folder for easy identification.

It may be wiser to group related files together whatever its type. It doesn’t help to create specific folder for Word files, a folder for Excel files, a folder for PowerPoint files and so on. In Windows Explorer, you can set it to arrange files in a folder alphabetically and by type so it is easier to identify each file type. Besides, each file type is represented by distinguishing icons so it won’t be hard to identify a file by its type. It is smart to group files by project though if this makes sense to you or by month if date is an essence.

Another way to organize files is to separate current files to the completed ones. You may want to create a folder named “On-going” for current files and “Completed” for the finished files. Once you are done with a current file, you can just transfer it to the completed folder. Again, you can use this method only of it makes sense to you and your nature of work.

Also, it would be wiser to break a large number of files into separate sub-folders. This would make navigating into a folder easier. You can create sequential subfolders for invoices for instance. Thus, if you have an “Invoices” subfolder, you may want to create subfolders “Invoice_Jan”, “Invoices_Feb”, “Invoices_Mar” and so on within it. The notion is to store files in a group of logical folders instead of having one big folder. It makes sense then not to create subfolders for a lesser number of files. It would only take time to click on different folders if you only store at most 5 files in each folder.

Now, this will be an entirely different story if you already cluttered your PC with files (probably most are unimportant). You may have to spend time cleaning up your PC by deleting unnecessary files first and then reorganize your important files into separate folders. In organizing files, an optimization tool can certainly help. Optimization tools can automatically delete unimportant files and even temporary files that may have been affecting your PC’s speed and performance.

File organization is one task you should not avoid, no matter how trivial or boring you may think it is. This is definitely a prevention task rather than a cure as it could prevent future problems in time management as well as in your PC’s performance. If you want to make your work and your life less complicated, get better in organizing your files. It’s easy when you know how!