Yummy Wakame Weblog

How to get what you want when customer support repeatedly sucks.

Did you know that every time you connect to your ftp site using regular "ftp://" (or not specifying at all), your username and password are fully visible to anyone sniffing around at the right time, which exposes your site to being hacked.

Most reputable hosts these days support secure FTP, and if you're using an average to good FTP program you can choose to connect using SFTP. Once you do this it will likely trigger a security certificate issue (which you just accept) and you're on your way to having fully encrypted data transfers. In CuteFTP I simply connect to sftp://yummy-wakame.com instead of ftp://yummy-wakame.com, and it changes the ports and all the settings automatically for me. Depending on your FTP client it may be a little more complicated than this but its definitely worth a try. I now connect to all my clients websites in this way and thought I'd share.

Scientists in Newcastle, UK have figured out how to create sperm cells from human embryos. The researchers believe the work could eventually help men with fertility problems to conceive, though they think it will be at least 5 years before the technique is perfected. Other experts say they are not convinced that fully developed sperm have been created. Full details and video on BBC News

How they did it:
They began with stem cell lines derived from human embryos donated following IVF treatment. The stem cells had been removed when the embryo was a few days old and were stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen. The stem cells were brought to body temperature and put in a chemical mixture to encourage them to grow. They were "tagged" with a genetic marker which enabled the scientists to identify and separate so-called "germline" stem cells from which eggs and sperm are developed. The male, XY stem cells underwent the crucial process of "meiosis" - halving the number of chromosomes. The process over creating and developing the sperm took four to six weeks. The Newcastle team say the sperm were fully mature, mobile sperm and they have produced a video to back up the research.

"This understanding could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own."

Reminds me of that episode of Star Trek about the planet of women that figured out how to reproduce without men. I often wondered if that would ever be a possibility in my lifetime. But at the cost of extracting them out of a fertilised egg, a developing embryo - this will likely be a topic of huge debate for decades.

This is too sweet! So I recently signed up with Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. So for example, you could get paid 10c each time you correct some data on a form, or 50c to add a title and description to a video, that sort of thing.

Well today I stumbled across the Kind Machine! You can get paid 50c to take a photo of you, your kind machine and your good deed. This is how it works.

1. Print out a kind machine or draw one. Here are some examples:

2. Think of a good deed

3. Take a photo of you with your kind machine, doing a good deed.

4. Submit it to the site along with the description and reason for your good deed. 50c in the bank too! hehe. Sweet!