GPS maker Garmin has announced a voluntary recall of 1.25 million of their popular units because of a potential battery fire. A little over half of those were sold in the United States. All registered owners will get a letter from Garmin about the recall and how to get their units replaced. 

Runaway cars have made some scary news in recent months and there have been a few thoughts posted about what to do if it happens when you're in the driver's seat. Surprisingly, according to a definitive article and video posted at the Consumer Reports "Cars" blog, many of those ideas are not just wrong, but a couple could actually make things worse.

The number one no-no is pumping the brakes. It turns out that in some car systems this may actual cause the brakes to stop working altogether! Instead step hard on the brakes and hold them down.

Facebook has had and still has a very serious problem with malware running on its own developer platform. These so called "rogue apps" use the loopholes in Facebook privacy policies to take Facebook users private data from users and users Facebook "friends".

It's bad enough -- really, its worse than bad enough -- that the more or less legitimate Facebook apps have a free hand with users' private data, but, for some reason Facebook management has, untill now, pretty much turned a blind eye to the rogue apps that are just there to spam and/or steal private data.

Now Facebook declares that, as of June 2, 2010,  "[they] are requiring every developer to verify his or her Facebook account to create new applications. This is the same quick process that users go through when they want to do things like upload large videos"

Larry Dignan has an article over at ZDnet about 3D computers starting to roll out in 2010. (Mr. Dignan is referring to a report by a tech market research firm: Jon Peddie Research.

I've been thinking that 3D TV is going to take longer to catch on than the TV makers would like to think. But 3D PCs? Wow. Don't know why they didn't show up first.

The focus on the article and, apparently, the research paper is that 3D capable graphics hardware is going to be -- actually, it is -- rolling into the market in 2010 and that a certain amount of that is going to be coupled with 3D monitors and glasses and actually capable of showing 3D content.

An article at USA Today says that Holiday Inns is going to start testing a system that uses smartphones as guest room keys. The thinking behind it is focused on the fact that some guests would prefer to skip interacting with the front desk and just go straight to their rooms.

The idea is that you reserve your room online and then get issued a virtual "key" that goes into an app on your smartphone. No stopping to checking and be issued a key at the front desk -- you just go straight to your room and let yourself in.

The basic concept sounds great, but it's some holes that will have to be filled. But hey; that's what tests are for.

It's an odd feature of the internet business world that, over and over again, a genius idea erupts on the scene and then, like a little Mount St. Helens, blows it's own top off simply because it isn't prepared to deal with its own internal growth pressure. 

The nits of what undoes these internet products and their companies rarely is technical. A good idea can survive technical glitches -- remember Twitter being crushed by volume over and over? But users kept coming back to the good idea. 

Usually what undoes these guys is something like adolescent arrogance. Thinking that because you're getting really big, really fast; that this also means that you must be really smart and grown up too.  That you know what's best.

Facebook is on the verge of becoming yet another genius product that self-destructs because didn't know how to deal with itself. It doesn't know how to behave itself in company.

Big news today for iPod Touch fans. (My hand is raised.)  The Tinhe website in Vietnam has posted photos of what appears to be an iPod Touch manufacturing prototype with a built-in camera.

Don't know where or how they got it, and there's plenty of speculation about whether it's even really an Apple prototype,

I looks believable to me. It also looks like a very good idea. More like, it's about time. The camera has really been missing from iPod Touch v1.

Yay iPod Touch with Camera!

Adobe's Flash player has been around from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. As a platform for developing and showing animation on the web, the existance of Flash has helped propel some of the most significant innovations in the medium of the web. Love Flash or not, the mediums of human communications were advanced by it.

Flash has always had its issues, from esoteric arguments about its openness as a standard platform for human communications to more mundane matters of compatitibility, security, and performance.

This is real science fiction stuff. A laser being used to quickly seal and heal wounds. But this real one does it without any smokey, flashing dramatic burning. A cool, visible-light green laser is used along with some special pink dye to excite proteins in your tissue to bind together.

Technically it's called "photochemical tissue bonding" and its new enough that, as of this writing, it isn't even in Wikipedia yet. I'm guessing that it pretty quickly get a handier name, like "laser stitching" or "light suture" (I like that one. You heard it here!)

Google has published a very simple but extremely helpful Crisis Response Site following the oil spill disaster in Gulf of Mexico. Whatever your involvement or interest level in the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf, this site will be useful to you.

An explosion in April on a deepwater oil rig run by BP (British Petroleum) killed 11 workers and injuried 17 more. First reports said that automatic systems had kicked in to stop the flow of oil from the well 5,000 feet deep under the "Deepwater Horizon" platform. Those early reports turned out to be false and the gushing well unleashed extensive damage to the ecosystem and wildlife off the coasts of four states.

The Google crisis response site is a public service site (no ads) similar to those that Google provided following the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. The site includes visual information from several sources overlayed on Google Maps plus helpful links to more news and to relief organizations so that you can find some things that you can do to help out.