rescue

The Real Deal 196: Emergency preparedness tech (podcast)

What kinds of tech gadgets should you have in your emergency kits? We give you some ideas and take some from the audience.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video)… Read more

Become a blimp pilot

Blimp: The Flying Adventures is a blimp-piloting arcade game that has polished production values and gameplay similarities to both taxi and classic thrust-and-land games. Its interface makes great use of the iPhone and iPod Touch: you tilt your device left and right to control your blimp's pitch, and you tap a touch-screen button (again and again) with your right thumb for thrust. After the first few levels, you can also drop a limited supply of bombs with a left-thumb button.

In the game's sci-fi story, you play Captain Zed Pelin working for a merchant company on the planet … Read more

Technology that makes rescuers want to lock up hikers

Perhaps you might be one of those who believes that there should be a very remote and unremitting island, somewhere in the Northern Baltic Sea, reserved for all those who act in an utterly inconsiderate manner.

You know these people well: those who sneeze and don't cover their mouths; those who come to your house for dinner and don't bring a bottle or a smile; and those, at least for members of the rescue services, who have bought a personal locator beacon.

According the the Associated Press, as these beacons have become cheaper, there appear to have been … Read more

Make a Windows 7 system repair disc

Windows 7 seems great at first, but what if something should go wrong. Hard drives do crash! It's not pleasant, but you should think about what you'd do in a data disaster. You need some sort of protection. And Windows 7 makes it easy to create what it calls a System Repair Disc.

Here's how:

Click the Windows button aka "Start."

Type "System repair" in the search box.

Then choose Create a System Repair Disc.

Put in a blank CD or DVD and choose the correct drive from the drop-down.

Press Create Disc.… Read more

First GPS-enabled asthma inhaler prototype

The concept of a GPS-enabled asthma inhaler emerged less than a month ago, and already it is very nearly a reality.

SiliconSky GPS announced Tuesday that is has successfully developed a prototype of the first-of-its-kind asthma inhaler with built-in GPS tracking.

This is the result of a collaboration between SiliconSky GPS and David Van Sickle, the University of Wisconsin researcher who first unveiled the concept. It took them six months to come up with the design.

Design was a huge challenge, as the the inhaler had to remain small enough to carry on the go and wouldn't sacrifice the … Read more

Disease detective plans GPS-enabled asthma inhaler

Thanks to David Van Sickle, we'll soon be able to track (and hopefully eliminate) recurring asthma attack outbreaks. Van Sickle, a scholar in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working with students in the biomedical engineering program to create an asthma inhaler with a built-in GPS receiver.

The project is still in its early stages, but David's goal is to eventually map out danger zones that could be life-threatening to those stricken with the lung disease. He already has it all mapped out: "rescue inhalers" will pinpoint the location of … Read more

Get your data back for NTFS

Accidentally deleted your files? GetDataBack Data Recovery can track them down--for a price. It even works with corrupted drives and those not recognized by Windows. This version only recovers files from NTFS drives, but it does offer a search tool for quickly locating a file by its date, name, or size.

If you suspect your actual disk is about to bite the dust, you can create a drive image to use during recovery. The utility can't make rescue discs, however, so if you want to do that, you'll need to build yourself a bootable Windows PE disc and … Read more

Rescue the little dudes

Retro is an affordable, slickly produced cave-flyer game, similar to arcade classics such as Lunar Lander and Gravitar. You pilot a small ship that must navigate through increasingly tortuous caverns to rescue stranded scientists, tilting left and right while making judicious use of your main thruster to control your trajectory and overcome gravity's pull.

The interface makes smart use of your iPhone or iPod Touch's accelerometer for the game's core mechanic: you tilt the device to steer, and you tap the screen to thrust. You have to make a series of safe landings on each increasingly intricate … Read more

Leave it to Japan: Robotic disaster rescue vehicle

I live in an earthquake-prone city. I live in this city in a very old building made out of unreinforced brick. This building is on the back of a steep hill over a freeway and then a lake. Thus, I'm likely to be crushed under tons of rubble and debris if a major earthquake hits Seattle.

If that does happen, it might take rescuers hours--or even days!--to get to me. And when they do, they'll have to get me to safety somehow.

Hopefully by that time they'll be using this amazing Japanese safety robot tank stretcher thing … Read more