Niri | Blog

The food industry has been working hard to instill in your head that infusing every consumable product in your local supermarket with high fructose corn syrup is a great idea. Commercials on TV aim to ridicule those who slam high fructose corn syrup as a bad product, and make baseless claims about how it’s just as harmless as any other sweetener.

These rats aren’t just getting fat; they’re demonstrating characteristics of obesity, including substantial increases in abdominal fat and circulating triglycerides.

Thankfully a team of smart people with long titles at Princeton can finally give you some hard facts on this “wonder” sugar. Short message: AVOID HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP AT ALL COSTS!

The team of nerds scientists used control groups of rats to find the true nature of high fructose corn syrup in your diet, and it’s scary.

Compared to animals eating only rat chow, rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet. In humans, this would be equivalent to a 200-pound man gaining 96 pounds.

I really recommend reading the entire article and start reading your food labels as well. I added HFCS to my list of “This shit will kill you” a long time ago.

A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain.

Turns out Bank of America has some of the worst customers in America when it comes to not paying their bills. Check out this list of the 6 “top” credit card companies.

Delinquencies

More than 30 days overdue.

Chargeoffs

When a consumer debt is written off the books and sold to an outside collector.

If you’re having trouble getting on top of your credit card debt, you might want to check out the Use Snowball Method Spreadsheet To Pay Off Debts article over at Consumerist.com.

[Consumerist]

Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.

These are the words of security expert Charlie Miller.

If you use a Mac but you don’t know who Charlie Miller is, you will soon. Charlie is about to disclose a whopping 20 security holes in Mac OS X, all at once – a record for sure.

He uses a technique called fuzzing, which essentially involves spamming an application’s input channels with corrupted data until it crashes, revealing the flaw. You can read more about it from clicking the link.

According to Miller, us Mac users have enjoyed a false sense of security from not being attacked as most attacks are focused on the market leader, Windows. Market share has played a big role in this, but with Apple gaining more and more of this coveted market share we can only speculate what will happen.

Apparently in cracking competitions, it’s often Apple systems that get cracked first. We already know Apple is concerned about security with it’s big vulnerability fix back in late 2009, not long after Snow Leopard was released.

There’s nothing wrong about feeling safe using Mac OS X. It’s not a very popular platform to attack, not because it’s super secure but not enough people use it to make it worthwhile. Many “fan boys” in the Apple community have laughed at Windows for being attacked and exposed as a vulnerable operating system but I’m sure they would shut up if the tide suddenly turned.

I still wouldn’t recommend running out and installing crap-ware like Norton Antivirus on your shiny Mac, but it doesn’t hurt to adopt some healthy web surfing habits

I use Firefox with Firebug. Love it. There’s no other combination out there right now that works as well as Firebug does for web development and HTML/CSS analysis. It’s a power house for dissecting the code and layout and nothing else compares for tweaking, or playing with, style and HTML code live. I can absolutely recommend it to anybody doing web development.

Turns out however that Firebug does not play nice with Gmail these days. I had noticed a lot of slowdowns when using my Gmail account and I thought it was somehow linked to the recent release of Google Buzz, but I was wrong. The culprit was the one and only Firebug! (Did you click the link already. It’s not like I’m dropping subtle hints here!)

Gmail to the rescue with their quick walk through on how to disable Firebug for its Gmail pages, or disable the offending services if you insist on using Firebug with Gmail.

For the best Gmail performance, we suggest disabling Firebug for www.google.com.

Windows or Linux Users

To disable Firebug:

1. Open the Firebug pane in your Gmail tab by clicking the Firebug icon.
2. Click the down arrow next to the Net tab, and select Disable monitor for mail.google.com
3. Repeat Step 2 on the Console and Script tabs.

If you’d like to keep Firebug running, you may improve Gmail performance by following these steps:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the Console tab.
3. Select Options.
4. Uncheck Show XMLHttpRequests.
5. Click the Net tab.
6. Select Options.
7. Check Disable Network Monitoring.

Mac Users

To disable Firebug:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If disabling Firebug for Gmail doesn’t improve performance results, you may have to entirely disable Firebug.

Following these steps has made my Gmail nice and spiffy again. I won’t stop using Firebug unless a better product comes along so Gmail and Firebug will just have to learn to live together. For now the sandbox has been divided until these two can learn to play nice together.

If you have an iPhone you probably also have the lightsaber app (PhoneSaber and/orLightsaber Unleashed) or , if you’re too hardcore to admit it, you can at least admit you have heard of it. Well, soon there will be a new lightsaber app, this one called Lightsaber Duel (THQ) and it’s bluetooth enabled!

This new Star Wars nerdage-uber-app will let you pair your iPhone with a fellow nerd and fight through grueling dueling session with lightsabers belonging to 11 Star Wars characters.

True Jedi you will become.

Sony was pushing their PlayStation Move pretty heavily at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and I was completely underwhelmed.

Look like an idiot while playing boring games...

This feels like a complete Wii ripoff, nothing more. They are even releasing the thing with a sports game compilation called…wait for it… Champion Sports. It comes with exciting games like Table tennis, bowling, golf, archery and so on.

Yay, more table tennis! *yawn*

Bah, I’m already bored playing this on the Wii, and I don’t see myself spending hundreds of dollars so I can play more of the same sports game in HD, even if Sony claims their system more accurately tracks the controller compared to Nintendo’s Wii controller.

We're like innovative and stuff.

Wired even referred to the games Sony showed off at GDC as janky, visual gimmicks and even laggy and not much fun.

Almost feels like Sony’s fumbling in the dark to keep the PS3 relevant. First they completely screw up the Playstation Home concept, probably wasting millions of dollars. Now they’re trying to bank on the Wii’s thunder by copying their success. What are they going to do next, copy Microsoft’s XBox Live service?

Sony = FAIL

Photos blatantly stolen from Jon Snyder/Wired.com.