Stories by Mark Gibbs

Ever since I upgraded to Apple's "Mountain Lion" (Version 10.8) release of OS X I've been having a "small" problem with my iMac ... it keeps crashing. At least once per day, OS X gives up with a kernel panic and the System Diagnostic reports either "type 13=general protection" or "type 14=page fault." For what it's worth, the last two kernel extension events are for loading and unloading com.apple.driver.AppleUSBCDC4.1.21.

I know why you're excited this week ... you've seen the "Kuratas", a 13 foot tall, 9,900-pound robot you can ride in at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour and which is equipped with a water bottle cannon and Gatling guns that can fire 6,000 BBs per minute (the operator can fire the armaments just by smiling ... no, really, watch the video).

A few weeks ago here I wrote about the Stuxnet worm that was targeted at Siemens industrial control systems and is thought responsible for damaging centrifuges used by the Iranian nuclear program to purify uranium.

I know why you're excited ... you can't wait for Microsoft to release Windows 8 this fall.

We start this week with stealthy, James Bondish stuff: Let's say you're at a trade show and want to record your conversations as you pose as a prospect to the competition, or maybe you want to surreptitiously record the life-sucking, brain-damaging ennui of a staff meeting so you can show your better half what life is like at the coal face.

Last week's Backspin column on the United States government's attempts to extradite Richard O'Dwyer, a British citizen, to the U.S. to be prosecuted for "criminal copyright violation" for providing a website, TVShack.net (since shuttered by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE), that was an index of sites that hosted pirated television shows and movies got some great feedback.

UK citizen Richard O'Dwyer faces the possibility of ten years in the slammer for having a site that linked to pirated content

JavaScript, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Java language, has become a remarkable platform for elegantly solving programming problems and delivering effective solutions.

Incompetent bosses don't know enough to know they don't know enough ... that's why the wrong people get hired and $#!+ doesn't get done.

Cyberespionage is coming of age but the problem with weapons like Stuxnet is that they will be used against us

What a garden of delights we have for you this week. First up, do you want to learn how to build iOS apps? For free? If that sounds like something you'd like to do then yes, there's a course for that.

The Supreme Court will soon decide whether the "First-sale Doctrine" applies to products made outside the US ... let's hope they get it right ...

After all these years DVD ripping is, it seems, still a topic of mystery and experimentation. I've tried ripping DVDs many times with varying degrees of success, and today a friend on my favorite email list just raised the topic again: "What do people on this list use to rip a DVD to their hard drive so they can, for example, watch it on a laptop or a tablet? This was something I'd assumed would come up in a Google search, but I had a surprisingly hard time finding a solution."

A few months ago I started writing about my saga of getting AT&T U-verse DSL service established at the new location of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker.

Even though we're all walking around with computers in our pockets (a.k.a. smartphones) there's still lots of uses for even more and even smaller computers.