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The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a contract to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories to create a silicon wafer based artificial retina to enable the blind to see. Early generations of the device in testing have allowed blind people to see light and faint outlines in front of them. Later generations are expected to provide enough detail that legally blind individuals can function effectively in the sighted world.

I think this is exciting to a very high degree. This technology may not make us into the Borg, but it is a step in the right direction for people who have been functioning on one less sense.

How many of you think emptying the trash bin on your Windows based machine gets all the temp files that accumulate on your machine?

If you answered "NO", you were correct. There is a lot more stuff out there that gets left behind and accumulates until it fills up your disk. My favorite "free" program is CC Cleaner, which has never failed me yet.

You can configure it to be as aggressive in its cleaning as you want, including specifying custom directories it should clean out. Here is an image from the latest version that shows how I configure it:

I never let it clean out cookies, because I have a lot of sites that use cookies that keep my where I was before (like FindItByMe.com). Since this is on a development machine, I configured it to clean up IIS log files and some temp files from Visual Studio. The later versions of this program run very fast, and in no time you'll notice that your browsing is much faster.

While browsers keep a copy of certain image files and other temp files eliminate repeated downloads of the same graphic from the server, over time this accumulates into a massive number of files and directories. CC Cleaner knows which browsers you have on your system and cleans out all their temp spaces (including Google Chrome).

I highly recommend CC Cleaner for all your day to day housekeeping computer needs.

Disclaimer: I used to use Internet Explorer up until version 8. It seemed that web sites that used to work always showed 'errors' and even parts of Microsoft's web site did not render properly. I was forced to become a FireFox user just so I could browse the Internet. I really liked IE 8, but I felt I had no choice.

The current version of FireFox is version 3.7 as I write this article. There is an add-on for FireFox called Adblock, and the add-on is available directly through FireFox or you can go to adblockplus.org/en and download it from there. This product works by not allowing most advertising such as banners or other irritating distractions from ruining your browsing experience. Why site owners think it is OK to bombard us with these obnoxious distractions is beyond me, but I'm sure there is a good reason for it. I just don't want to have to look at the ads.Adblock to the rescue!

From the Tools menu (just to the left of Help), click on Add-ons which is the third item from the top.

 You will see a new window:

Click on Get Add-ons and you will see another screen:

Click on Browse All Add-ons, which appears as a hyperlink at the right side of the screen. Search for Adblock Plus, and their screen will appear. You will be presented with a green button: click on it and follow the prompts to add Adblock Plus to Firefox. After it is installed, you will not believe the difference in your browsing experience.

Today, Panasonic announced new products, which it often does. But today marks the availability of the LUMIX DMC-ZS7, which offers GPS tagging of pictures taken. To my knowledge, the only other cameras to offer this were the Ricoh Caplio 500SE and certain Sony cameras which needed to be connected to a GPS transceiver.

Two points stand out:

• It has a 12 megapixel capacity
• It's GPS has a disclaimer that it won't work in China, or near border regions of China.

I find the second point interesting. Does anybody know why the Panasonic's GPS system might not work in China?