Monthly Archives: April 2012

New App Helps Reduce Exposure to High Levels of Radiation

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A new App Tawkon, has just hit the Android market as a free download. I, for one (of 10,000 others), am already sporting it on my HTC. The App monitors the radiation levels that you are being exposed to at all times. It will send you weekly status reports, if requested, to tell you how many minutes you used the phone for and at what exposure levels. A built-in warning system alerts you if you are being exposed to high levels of radiation and will suggest ways to reduce the levels.

The Israeli-based company, Tawkon, reveals that one minute of exposure to high levels of radiation can be equivalent to 5 hours exposure at low radiation levels. According to Gil Friedlander, the App developer, radiation can be affected by such variables as usage minutes, handset placement, distance to the mobile phone towers, weather conditions, number of users in a specific mobile area and intensity of the signal. The two key and most straight forward suggestions tawkon provides are changing your location (just a few feet away and the phone radiation can drop) and distancing the phone from head/body — using a speaker phone headset or Bluetooth.

The World Health Organisation lists mobile phone use in the same ‘carcinogenic hazard’ category as lead, engine exhaust, and chloroform. Despite numerous reports over the last two decades there is still no direct link to adverse health conditions from using our mobiles.  This is good news, but like so many other things, in time the links may yet reveal themselves. I am all for proceeding with caution. The App has some neat features that you can include the whole family in, and very watchable animations that talk you through the benefits. Search Tawkon or log on to www.tawkon.com.

New Software launched by Big Brother IFLOW

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Software developed by DiaryBook’s big brother company IFLOW has just been launched on the global market. EXCELSEND and SQLSEND can now be downloaded from www.iflow.net/software.
IFLOW provides an online, secure texting service to users and businesses from all walks of life. Normal usage of the online IFLOW service means loading the data i.e. mobile numbers, onto Iflow’s server and using Iflow’s integrated telecom service provider. EXCELSEND and SQLSEND downloads allow anyone to send text messages to mobile phone data stored on their own computer and they can also use their own telecom service provider. The basic software is free or a licenced copy can be purchased with all the features (including delay sends and updates) for a once off payment.
EXCELSEND does what it says on the tin, and will prepare text messages from Excel documents stored on your computer, you can then preview and only send messages that you want to send. SQLSEND will prepare text messages from other types of databases on your computer, such as SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Access, Postgre to name but a few.
The only requirement to download the software is that you have Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.
IFLOW brought DiaryBook to the market in 2006 and continues to develop up-to-the-minute email, text, voice and fax services to enhance and improve businesses and organisations globally.

Commodore Pet Computer Founder Dies at 83

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Jack Tamiel, industry pioneer and founder of the earliest personal computers, the Commodore PET, and C64 range passed away on Sunday, April 8. According to The Globe and Mail, Mr. Tamiel’s son Leonard confirmed his father’s death.

Mr. Tamiel, the son of polish-born immigrants who had survived the Auschwitz concentration camps, emigrated to the US in the late 1940s and worked at maintaining typewriters for the US Army. He later started his own typewriter manufacturing business Commodore International, before moving into the calculator business.

When Texas Instruments (TI) chips, used in all calculator production at the time, shot up their price, Tamiel began looking around for a chip manufacturing company to buy outright. This was in the mid 1970s when Steve Jobs was on the circuit. He and Wozniak demonstrated their Apple II prototype to Commodore hoping for a sale. But Commodore found their price too high (not much has changed!) and instead created the Commodore PET 2001 in time for the 1977 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The first Commodore PET 2001 computers were built with 6502 processors that controlled the keyboard, screen, cassette tape recorders and expansion ports. The first models included either 4 kB or 8 kB of 8-bit RAM with a cassette reader on the keyboard itself.  Tamiel’s work during this time sowed the seeds for what ultimately became the popular home and games machine in the early 1980s, the C64 at a time.

Jack Tamiel was outsted from Commodore after a stockholder dispute and moved on to acquire Atari where he continued his gaming market development that he had first began with the C64. He will be remembered for popularising home computers and games, “We sell to the masses and not the classes,” he is quoted as saying.

The Commodore Pet Computer Business Machine (CBM) of the early 1980s was the training ground of the founder and CEO of Diarybook, Dermot O’Sullivan.

Expansion of SMS Early Warning System to Prevent Human Trafficking

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A non-governmental organisation has been piloting a text messaging project to prevent human exploitation, in several communities in Ghana. The organisation known as Enslavement Prevention Alliance-West Africa (EPAWA) launched the project last year supplying monitors in twenty different communities with mobile phones and laptops to report instances of violence, exploitation and trafficking witnessed in their localities, via SMS messages or mobile phone calls. The technology connects a network of professionals who can respond in a crisis and send timely information to parents and communities.

Chief Executive Director of EPAWA, Miss Tatiana Kotlyarenko, said that the project had proven to be successful with over eighty cases of human trafficking reported and currently under investigation by relevant bodies since last year. The pilot is due to be extended to 4 other regions of Ghana, but Miss Kotlyarenko warned that the project would be unsustainable without the involvement of the media, government and other international bodies.

The organisation will work closely with the UNiTE campaign (The United Nations Secretary General global campaign to end violence against women) to enlist the support it needs to continue in its work.

EPAWA website reports that:

 “The trafficking of Ghanaian citizens, particularly children, within the country is more common than the transnational trafficking of foreign migrants. This internal trafficking is characterized largely by the movement of children from rural to urban areas or from one rural area to another, such as from farming to fishing communities. Ghanaian boys and girls are subjected to conditions of forced labor within the country in fishing, domestic service, street hawking, begging, portering, and agriculture. Ghanaian girls, and to a lesser extent boys, are subjected to prostitution within Ghana.”