'Bunch of me

Quiz-b-gone: No more 'Quizzes' on your Facebook frontpage

2009-04-23T13:06:00.007+06:00

I came across this amazing Greasemonkey script for Firefox today that blocks off all those pesky quizzes and 3-rd Party application updates that your friends are littering your frontpage with. No more would you have to tolerate mindless questionnaires like "Which herbivorous rodent were you in your past life?" or front-page updates that involves a contact of yours finding which movie villainess she resembles.

What this script does is it filters your front-page news items, strips them off the 3-rd Party quiz/apps nuiscense and leaves you with news items of/related to original Facebook apps (like status updates,photo uploads,event updates etc ).

Here's what you should do:

* Install Greasemonkey.
* Install "Facebook Purity". Don't worry it's a harmless javascript file. Tested and cerfied.
* Browse Facebook minus the annoyance.

Power Tip: The author of the script suggest you keep an eye on the script homepage for regular updates. I know I sure will.

* Update: It turns out, "Facebook Purity", the above mentioned blessing of a Greasemonkey script even goes as far as showing how many 'app msgs' has been blocked ! Neat, right? The blocking notification is available on the top-right corner of your FB frontpage. Here' s a screencap under my A/C:

Posted via email

Downloading books from "Google" for free, and a few casual words

2009-03-25T01:19:00.002+06:00

First of all, first thing first , from now on I'm going to discontinue my previous 'formal' attitude towards blogging . I've had it with long, arduous and boring blog posts that stresses over and over again the more 'subtle' aspects of the subject in question and experiments with English lit. The NEW ME would post short, possibly humorous posts. These so called 'short stints' would be far more casual and 'regular' ( I must stress ) than before.

Ok, onto the actual jig. The other day I was looking for a way to download "Spell of , an awesome book on the Sundarbans. After a number of nudges here and there, I was left with a few options. The first 'obvious' choice was the Google Book Downloader. Then I found out that I had to install the latest version of the .NET framework which I was somewhat allergic to. So scratch that.

Then I did what I always do when left with no other option with which to exploit/manipulate web-service like "Google Books", turn to Greasemonkey. It turns out that there's a very potent GS script out there (also ironically called Google Book Downloader ) that might help freeloaders like myself to do our bidding. Here's how you can use Greasemonkey and a compatible script to download your favourite book from Google Books :

1) Install Greasemonkey if you haven't already.

2) Install the Google Book Downloader script. Don't worry, this piece of JS-code is fang-less.

3) Browse to the book of your choice in Google Books. A "Download this Book" dialogue (shown below) will become visible. Click that fat, pale button.

4) The dowload will progress (shown below). Once done, you can now download individual pages as .png files or use the FlashGot extension to download all pages at once.

Productivity Tip: If you want to make a nice PDF file out of the image files downloaded, I recommend using doPDF which happens to be an excellent 'anything to pdf converter' and its totally free!

Phew, who knew writing 'small' can be tiresome as well :(

Posted via email

Crank that UDMA setting to boost-up your pc

2009-02-12T14:10:00.002+06:00

Experiencing violent upsurge in the CPU usage characteristics of your PC ? Browsers, word processors and other everyday applications/softwares taking days to start up or respond ? Chances are, you haven’t unleashed a special, ‘superpower’ tucked hidden in the architecture of your hard disk drive. Its called the UDMA (* U stands for ‘ultra’, how trite, right?) mode. It should’ve been the ~~default~~ only option automatically selected by Windows XP during a fresh installation due to its vast superiority in direct memory access & bus speed support of over 16 Mbit/sec, but unfortunately they had to include an exception. Whenever you install a Windows OS and it decides (with great margin of error) that your ATAPI drive is not suitable for UDMA (when in actuality every HDD built after 2002 is), the OS would revert back to the ancient PIO ( Programmed Input / Output ) mode . Now, there’s nothing wrong with PIO except the fact that its slow as a slumdog trillionaire (not to be mistaken with an analogous movie title) and as mr duck puts it “Nothing built this century should be using PIO.”

Anyway, if you are experiencing mysterious cpu-hogups download and run Process Explorer, a free diagnostic tool from Microsoft SysInternals, which happens to be a much more potent tool than the windows task manager (what are the odds of that, right?…plenty). After running process-exp, look for a process called ‘hardware interrupts’ on the left hand bar of the screen. If the process is present on the 1st column and eating up a lot of memory (see the 3rd column titled ‘cpu’), then ‘presto’- thats your problem .

There are some registry hacks available on other sites that requires you to delete a few key registry entries, but my personal recommendation is that its better not to mess with the registry unless absolutely necessary . The registry is a fragile thing and can break down easily. So here’s a totally safe way to do the good deed:-

1) Go to device manager (right click on the My computer icon> Properties > Hardware.

2) Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller section ( press the + )

3) Right click on the Primary IDE channel (if you want to enable UDMA in your secondary drive too, you can repeat this process) and go to Properties > Advanced Setting

4) Now here’s the trick, regardless of what it says in the “Transfer Mode” section (even if “DMA if available” option is displayed ), you’ll have to manually reset and force XP to use UDMA. To do that, first select PIO only in the box for transfer mode for both Device 0 and Device 1. Then confirm by pressing the ok button

5) Then go back to the device manager screen again, right click on Primary IDE channel as before and go to advanced setting once again. Only this time, select “DMA if available” in both transfer mode boxes. Confirm your selection by pressing ok. You’ll see “Ultra DMA Mode 2” appearing in the current transfer mode box.

6) Restart and bask in the glory of your faster, more responsive system :)

This hack was extracted from an official Microsoft bulletin addressing the PIO/DMA issue (or as it is known in popular folklores, the “XP DMA BUG”)

Tags :Windows,Microsoft,XP,DMA,UDMA,PIO,HDD,Hack,Process,Explorer,performance

Posterous is awesome

2009-02-05T18:22:00.008+06:00

Thanks to Posterous, I can now update my blog-posts/status messages/twits/flickr-posts/tumbles and anything else with a simple email. Even raw markup used in the mail would get converted to actual HTML, posterous would also host any and I mean "ANY" media file attached with it :) Images, mp3s,videos,pdfs,documents you name it. They'll host all your files without (and I quote) "..you moving even a finger". They also have a sweet email syntax recognition system. For example, any email sent to #{text}@posterous.com would get posted on the services with url that contains that specific text. Like #mybd@posterous.com would get posted to my Flickr account ( http://flickr.com/photos/mybd ) but not to my Facebook profile. RAD! This means I can finally compose blog posts from my mobile with custom HTML. Not that it was impossible before, just not as effortless :)

Also in the review queue was Woopra, a new gen website analytic service. I got an exclusive beta invite couple of weeks ago and decided to check it out today. Their 'free' package is still down and undergoing updates, however what I was able to find out was that they do mean business. This is what they had to say in their FAQ section , I liked the fact that they weren't being vague about the whole 'beta-testing' fad.

Ask and receive answers in your inbox with Snap Ask

2009-01-04T21:18:00.002+06:00

Imagine a situation when your internet connection is recovering from a chronic phase, the bandwidth is still dwindling, but your boss/engineering-course demands an article on Puritanical Analysis of the Mughal Empire. Now in normal times, we would not hesitate frolicking here and there (i.e., Wikipedia) for writing materials. But remember, your internet is down, or at the very least in ‘rehab’. Now you are truly in a fix right?

What about the time you’ve come across a colloquial figure of speech and want to know if the Irish drunkard beside you called you ‘mighty’ or just cursed your entire family tree (READ: Urbandictionary), but hey you only have a mobile phone and that special page on Urbandict isn’t loading quite well. Is that frustrating or what?

Well, just Snap Ask your questions then. Snap Ask is a web service that delivers freshly baked answers to your dire questions in a jiffy. All you got to do is send them a mail at Ask@SnapAsk.com with a proper subject line. In a prompt reply-mail you’ll receive your desired answer. They’ve introduced a technique that involves putting special ‘commands’ or ‘’key word(s)’ in your mail’s subject. These commands are ‘service specific’, meaning to use a different service like Wikipedia or Urbandictionary or perhaps Google Define, you’ll have to use different command lines. The format of your subject line would be something like < command > + subject/question/query

Where the command section (without < > signs) is to be replaced by ‘wiki’ (for wikipedia) or ‘news’ (for news articles). The whole list of commands is available on the homepage.

Neat eh? Who says ‘Email’ is a dead technology? Evidently, Snap Ask can prove to quite the friend when you are down at home with heaps of homework and a sick sick internet connection.

>> Visit Snap Ask.

Tags :Snap Ask,Webapp,Google,Wikipedia,Services,Urban,Information

JPGmag is going down

2009-01-02T18:03:00.005+06:00

Just breaking my ‘blogger’s block’ to announces that one of my all time favourite photography sites, JPGmag is going down the drain. Apparently it seems, the economic downterm in the U.S has started to bite the world wide web hard. Today around 1:10 pm I received an email, a particularly grim one, from Laura Brunow Miner, the editor in chief of JPGmag. In the text that followed was the sad tale of a publishing company who tried to make a difference in the photography community by making this art form something that even commoners like myself can take a muck at and receive humble words at the end of the day. But with the whole economy in shambles, it was not long before they started realizing he inexplicable truth that they to let their venture go.

JPG is offering a chunk of their old archives for download. You can visit the archive here and relive some of the memories. There’s also an old, unofficial Flickr group for the JPGers that you can take an account of.

* Update: Official announcement and goodbys are on the blog

* Update 2: Hey, there might be hope for JPGmag after all. They're currently considering a few acquisition offers. If the deal seals off, we can hopefully see a few more issues of JPG.

Tags:code,photography,jpgmag,magazine,ezine,economy,USA,U.S economy,WWW,web-meme,photos,camera,Nikon,Canon

Annoyed by Imageshack's free Torrent downloader ?

2008-11-22T20:00:00.002+06:00

Ok first things first, I’m back..from the dead..again..after a hefty battle with term projects and presentations. Sorry for all the, err.. ‘disappointments’ when you found that your feed reader didn’t contain fresh new content from ‘Bunch of Me’. I promise to be a good boy from now on.

Now onto my new post. Some of you are already familiar with Imageshack’s o-so-awesome torrent downloader service, right? If not, let me explain in short what it is then. “Tor”- is the answer to the prayers of many internet users out there whose bandwidth scales never venture into the Mbit/sec mark. Who have to wait for hours, or even days to download a single..AHEM! “New Movie Release”. Anywho, TOR brought sanity back into the world of torrent downloads. With imageshack’s fast servers, it would download any big torrent file in and instance and then offer you a nice, high speed, resumable http link. Sounds oddly humble right?

Wrong.

There are always catches with things that glitter. TOR too had (or still ‘has’ to be precise) its downside. After going through the delusional phase when you are just getting ready to stop praising the CEOs of Imageshack and start your first actual download, the service presents you with a screen that I’d like to call “The insanely irritating Nag-screen no 1”.

What this window basically tells you is that, your ‘free’ account has limits, you should realize that and wait for a decent/off-peak hour to start your downloads when the paid members aren’t busy downloading ~~you know what~~. Offcourse a fast solution to your headache is to buy an actual ‘Paid Monthly Package’’ that would, in their words ‘Prioritize your downloading needs’.

But hey, we are cheapskate, blood-sucking nerds, right? Why spend when we can bend the rules of the consumerist cy-economists ? If you believe in the same, then hop on.

The trick to bypass this screen (not really, ‘bypass’ .Its more in the line of ‘get rid of’) is to keep refreshing the page until grumpy gnomes in charge of keeping the servers tidy give up and lets you in (meaning, allows your download to start). However, at times it can take over 20~22 reloads/refreshes to get er’ done, which to be frank, becomes quite annoying after a awhile. What to do ? Why not take help from our good ole’ extendible buddy , “Firefox’? As it turns out, FF has an extension called “Reload Every” that lets you automatically reload any given page after a preset time. You can customize the “Time to wait before a reload”. Just install the extension and when the so called ‘ Insanely Irritating Nag-Screen no 1” appears, simply right-click > select reload every___ (fill in the blanks with the time-lag you wish) > sit back and relax. (see the screen-caps below for reference)

In due time your downloads would resume :) Everyone’s happy now right ?

E.T.A of death for this trick, “VERY SOON!” Hope no one from Imageshack reads my blog.

Links:

Download Reload Every 3.0.0 [ Direct link ]

Reload Every on FF Addons page.

Explanation of Imageshack’s Torrent Downloader [ via :TorrentFreak ]

Reddit should've "made my day" a month ago

2008-10-11T18:11:00.001+06:00

This comment on a popular reddit article published a month ago about a NSFW posts not being properly tagged made my day :)

Dang, I wish I had seen it in due time . That almost had me rolling in the floor. The whole thread is full of nerdy, web-memes and pop-culture references like the now legendary trend of “ Rickrolling ”

Click here to read the SFW reddit post about a possibly NSFW tagging rule violation (You’ve been warned! Its fully of Über-nerdy web-antics and memes).

Tags :web-meme,rickrolling,rick astley,pop-culture,reddit,nsfw,sft,tagging,nerdy

Track your favorite Tv-Show releases with MyTv RSS

2008-10-04T20:02:00.001+06:00

Want to know if Family Guy has a new episode out ? What about that new season of Southpark that starts this fall ? Nothing sucks more than watching the season pilot (or perhaps any new episode) of your favorite shows at a days (or two) delay. That is where mytv rss comes into effect.

The site lists a growing number of popular tv-shows that you can select to get notified of whenever a new episode is on air. Just check the box next to your favourite tv shows and then click the “Create Feed” button at the bottom of the page. A rss feed would be generated that you can subscribe to and receive periodical updates on episode releases. Have fun.

LINK: MyTV RSS

Tags :Southpark,episodes,tv-show,Familyguy,ATHF,RSS,release,soap

Boost your torrent downloads with some tracker juice

2008-09-19T22:51:00.015+06:00

Everyone uses p2p networks these days. There's hardly a soul out there who haven't taken advantage of this, err..'controversial' technology to get hold of their favorites. Softwares, movies, music, ebooks you name it and the world of Bit-torrent has them in store for you. One of the terms closely associated with bit-torrent is "BitTorrent Tracker". These are servers that "Assist in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol." In short, the bigger the number of active trackers, the smoother and faster your torrent downloads would be.

However, torrents have not been a pleasant source to scour for those suffering from bandwidth deficiencies like myself. To add insult to an injury, popular torrent files these days are riddled with Fake IPs/trackers jamming your peers. Sponsored by draconian media authorities like the MPAA and RIAA, they can cripple your download speed in a matter of minutes. What to do ...what to do?

Thankfully, there's a cleaver way to dodge some of these big-torrent smut. Basically, our technique would consist of finding extra trackers for our designated downloads and verifying which of them actually work. At the end, we'll end up with a sleaze-free torrent file filled with healthy, high-speec, active trackers :D Here's what you'll have to do:

1) Download your favorite torrent file. I recommend searching in hybrid indexers like Scrapetorrent that automatically searches several torrent hosts at ones and catagorizes the results according to the number of seeders:leechers (or whatever you wish).

2) Once the .torrent file is downloaded, head over to BtReannouncer. Upload the previously downloaded torrent file in the upload section. What the site does is find alternative trackers for your torrent meta file. These trackers are then shown along with the original trackers. Select the extra trackers you'd like to add to your new metafile on the screen shown below. Then press the "Reannounce" button.

3) Download the reannounced torrent file on the next screen

4) Now head over to Torrenteditor. This site does the hard work of finding obsolete trackers for you. Upload the reannounced torrent file in the first page and press the edit button. On the next screen, the "tracker verification" would start. Bad trackers are demarcated by a red highlight. Cross off bad-trackers on this step

5) Scroll down and click 'update'. After the good trackers are loaded onto your new torrent file, download the final fruit of your labor by pressing the "Download" button.

Thats it. Now you are left with a healthy torrent file free of all the scum of the world wide web. A disease free .torrent file like this can do wonders to your download speed.

Happy downloading !

Friend Feed grinds my gears, finally

2008-09-08T22:54:00.008+06:00

Friend feed has been on the web 2.0 scene for sometime. When it first came out, I was resentive of its services as it appeared to be "just another web-aggregator yearning for attention". The mantra of 'owned and operated by former Google employees' have all but died out (every other random startup these days have propritors of or formerly related to the Google empire) . However, since then..weeks have passed, and recently due to some peripheral coercing from a friend of mine, I finally did sign up.

After bits of mawing, I came to the conclusion that friend feed does hold some potential for the apparently "active" users of the web. For starters, it gives a decent effort to sort, categorize and label your erratic web-antics. Say for example you are a member of countless number of popular social networking sites/experiments/abominations like Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Furl and what not. Keeping track of all these sites everyday and sharing updates with friends and foes alike becomes a major pain after a little while. That is where Friend Feed extends its helping (!) hand.

After signing up, you are asked to add "Services" to your page. These services are shown and categorized in your personal Friend Feed page. Later on, you can share this page with your friends or ask/request/plead to them to subscribe to your regular updates via email or RSS. This way, all your shananigans stay in one, single, fluid page instead of being scattered all over the world wide web.

Like the idea of Friend Feed? Sign Up for an account today.

Oh, and I almost forgot...DO SUBSCRIBE TO MY FRIEND FEED...arrr

Tags : friend feed,feed,subscribe,web app,web 2.0,youtube,facebook

Backup your Flickr collection with "Flickr Down"

2008-08-14T14:25:00.001+06:00

Lets say you've built a formidable collection of photographs on your Flickr gallery and suddenly, due to an awkward rift in the global IT-conspiracy, your photographs get sorted/categorized under a new , suspicious T.O.S and you are forced to move your flickr-collection elsewhere . Or, alternatively, lets say you've lost all your precious hard-disk backups of you past works and want to download your whole Flickr collection and start over. By a strange twist of fate the latter happened to me as I was left with a broken heart and a burnt, 250 GB SATA HDD with most of my photographs inside. I desperately needed to download my flickr gallery by somesort of a " Batch Downloader " as individual downloads would probably drive me crazy.

On came, "Flickr Down", by Greggman. This tiny (~378 kb) app lets you download all your flickr photos in a batch, and at their largest size/resolution. Once the app is installed, you just have to authorize its use first after entering your user name. After the download location is selected, press the small download button and a window like the one on the screencap will appear. You can select individual photographs to backup or select all of them at once. Thats about it :)

Note that, you must have Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework installed beforehand. If you don't have it installed (most folks do these days), then download it from here.

Productivity Tip: Even if you are not planning to backup/download your Flickr collection in a jiffy, you can still download the galleries of your favorite photographer/artist at a single click. Just remain loyal to creative and artistic rights, that's all.

Link: Download Flickr Down | Alt Link.

Tags : Flickr,Microsoft,batch,backup,yahoo,google,photography,gallery

Free your PDF documents from the shackles of all restrictions

2008-08-13T19:19:00.001+06:00

With the onslaught of ebooks,ezines, online documents and web-backups, Portable Document Format or PDF by Adobe has become the become the preferred modus operandi for thousands of e-publishers. Students these days download pdf versions of their text books from the internet (both legally and il-legally, btw) at a mad frequency. That's why a group of very shrewd software developers introduced the idea of protecting pdf documents so that opportunists and poor lowlifes like you and I are barred from printing or copying the content within pdf files. The otherday I came across a situation like that where I just had to print a page off a pdf file, but the integrated restrictions were preventing me from doing so.

What did I do then?

Why took help from the Big G himself (or herself for my women-lib readers) offcourse. After 5~6 minutes of searching I discovered "Freeware PDF Unlocker" that does just what I was looking for, unlocking pdf files. Just download and install FPU and you'll see two new icons on your desktop. The rest of the process is pretty self explanatory. One would say "PDF unlocker, drop PDF files here", you just have to drag and drop your locked pdf file onto that icon and wait for a few seconds while the black command screen does its job. A new pdf file will be created minus the restrictions on printing,copying or editing. Thats about it.

Tip: FPU can also be used to password protect your pdf files to prevent unauthorized access. But that kinda defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it?

Link: Download Freeware PDF Unlocker

[Via: GHacks]

Tags : pdf,adobe,unlock,hack,portable,ebook,document,freeware,free

Take control of your...err.. "Cookies"- with Cookie-Pie

2008-07-24T00:24:00.006+06:00

Yes, I'm finally back from the dead..with more spunk and a drastically low GPA in my last semester :D Now, that smiley represents a very oxymoronic grin...something lies beyond its actual facade.

Onto the topic of technological discussion now. How many times in your browsing endeavor have you come across the situation where you need to open more than one of your Gmail, or Yahoo or perhaps Facebook account(s) ?....and in the same browser! Plenty right? Man's urge to retain a peripheral sense of " Multiple Personality Disorder ", even ONLINE, has proven to be quite indomitable. The only solution so far has been to either open a different browser and browse to your second-existence there, or logout of your current account and sign back in with a whole new personality.

But wait, now you can play doctor jekyll and mr hyde right inside your Firefox browser window, without opening or experimenting with other browsers. Check out "Cookie Pie" , an ingenious Firefox extension that lets you maintain different cookie storage for different tabs, thus enabling you the comfort of spoiling your subconscious disorder..aaaahhh. Opening multiple GMail®/Yahoo Mail®/Hotmail® accounts in different tabs and windows simultaneously has never been more fun. No seriously, before Cookie Pie, it used to be a major pain in the pelvic region.

They even have an instructional video on the extension installation and use, swell.

Download Cookie Pie [Drag and Drop this link directly to your FF extensions window]

Word nerds ahoy, counter your vocab confusion with “Confusing Words”

2008-06-19T12:18:00.001+06:00

You know those times you are writing an essay or a review and you come across a jumble of confusing vocabulary and you don’t know what to use where and how? Like if its going to be it’s or not ? This is one problem a simple web search might not relieve. Enter ‘Confusing Words’ , a website (more like a web service) that lets you search through their database of so called ‘Confusing English vocabulary’. Which means, its just not ‘Another online dictionary and annoation service’. The site helps you with pairs of confusing words like capital and capitol , affluent and effluent etc which appear like bad itches whenever you’re writing a long, arduous article. Thanks to ‘Confusing Words’ (damn these oxymoronic domain names are freaking me out), you might not be troubled by ‘wordly paradigms’ any more (*bad pun intended). Confusing words currently supports ‘English’ abnormalities only.

Visit Confusing Words

Tags: words,vocabulary,dictionary,online,tool,web-service,language,English

The real life, 'Low res' dog

2008-06-19T10:52:00.003+06:00

Its amazing what the human cerebellum can cook up . I came across a ripe example of subtle, marketing brilliance the other day while strolling through tEh interweb.

This here is an ongoing ad-campaign for the 'Leica D-Lux' camera. They made a real looking low res dog out of paper cutouts, son ! And it looks amazing, don't you think? Now, that is what I call a real opt-out for "Seeing it in more detail".

[Via: Core 77 ]

Firefox Download Day 2008: Pledge your allegiance today

2008-06-05T00:58:00.001+06:00

Calling all Firefox users,fans,well-wishers and patrons..mozilla needs your help to set a new Guinness World Record for " Most software downloads in 24 hours " on the launch date of the much awaited Firefox 3 . The official date for the launch would be announced here soon.

Firefox has served us well for over 5 yrs, constantly reminding us the horrors of IE...and even persuading Microsoft to incorporate/copy much needed security features in their 'once dominant' web browser. Now our lovable little fox has reached a new milestone, the soon to be announced Firefox version 3.0. Being a shameless caterer for the cause of open-source, I must confess that like its predecessors, Firefox 3.0 packs enough heat to make your jaw drop. Its faster, sleeker, more secure and like always, flawlessly customizable with a plethora of extensions and themes. Now its time to pay your debt back. Make your favorite browser stand out, preach its verses, support Firefox 3.0 on its launch date by downloading it and by informing /coercing/ forcing/ influencing your friends and family to download it on the very same date as well ;) If you want to promote Firefox in your university, school or college campus, you can do that too. Just head over here for more info on how to contribute.

Finally, if you are a lonely, self-centred geek like myself then there's something for you do...pledge your allegiance personally. Head over here.

Make Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 a complete success. Pave the way for better, cleaner browsing.

Tags: firefox,google,microsoft,windows,internet explorer,browser

Major makeover coming up for Facebook

2008-05-10T01:42:00.004+06:00

Here we go, straight from the horse's mouth (in this case, that would be Justin Smith, a developer for Facebook) :

This spring, Facebook will be launching a redesigned profile aimed at making things simpler, cleaner, and more relevant, while still giving you control over your own profile. We want profiles to be a destination to learn about and interact with your friends.

Its about damn time too. Those incessant applications and the whole 'bushwacking' look of Facebook was getting pretty annoying. Apperantly, as the developer(s) claim, our dear ole' FB is going to have whitespaces this time, lots of it ( Screencap, please).

The navigation system is going to go through some swell redesigning too. Instead of the ugly, ugly profile section, the site will divide its existing profile applications into five default tabs, including Feed, Info, Wall, Photos, and Boxes. That means no more scrolling down through thousands of lines of javascript powered cra* to write on the 'normal' wall of your friends. Amen to all that. In the mean time, for a quick sneak peak of the whole shananigan, keep your eyes peeled on the page of Facebook profile preview page and its albums(didn't know any such thing existed).

[Via : Appscout]

Tags: facebook,orkut,myspace,social,networking,redesign

PC Power tip: Spring cleaning your system

2008-05-01T23:43:00.001+06:00

Those who are unaccustomed to the slob-like ways of students such as myself often feel uncomfortable at the sight of heaps of junk lying around. These earthly nuisances might be easy to detect and get rid of, but what about their virtual brothers? Your pc is a magnet for virtual junk. Left-away pieces of softwares, previously installed driver files, old chkdsk reports/logs and what not. These things not only make your system run like a hog, but also eats up your HDD space (which you could be using to store an otherwise huge amount of downloaded youtube videos). So what can you do to recover some of your precious HDD space without deleting heaps of data-files or multimedia from your pc? Here are a few alternatives:

Tip-1: Turn off "System Restore"

Unless you feel that using the "System Restore" feature of windows is absolutely necessary to your everyday life, my suggestion is, 'Get rid of it'. System Restore eats up a hefty amount of hard disk space, and lets face it..it has never proved to be as vital anyway. To turn of 'System Restore', go to Control Panel > System > System Restore tab > Check the 'Turn of System Restore on all drives' check box.

Tip-2: Run the 'Disk Cleanup' utility

Unbeknown to the technologically native, Windows XP has a very nifty tool preinstalled in its accessories folder. Its called ' Disk Cleanup Utility ' which become a peeping tom only when your HDD-drives have almost run out of physical space. However, you can manually launch this small application anytime you want and give your system drive a nice, safe, thorough cleanup. To do this, go to Start Menu> Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. Scroll down and make sure the box next to ' Compressed Old File' is checked. Its apparent from the screencap below that the majority of my physical HDD-space on the system drive was being taken up by unnecessary Compressed Old Files.

Tip-3: Use 'Portable' softwares

Portable softwares are the things of ~~yesterday~~ tomorrow. The software industry was jolted forward a few years when someone came up with the bright idea of solving external dynamic lib-dependencies and creating the first piece of portable code. The result was the slew of portable apps ( like those available here ) we see today. I use portable versions of popular desktop applications like VLC media player, utorrent etc all time. While, these softwares might not solve your disk-space problem in a jiffy, they'll certainly help you get organized and get a hold on your HDD-space. Portable apps rarely invade any external directories or files because they are independent of library packages. That is why, only deleting the folder with the software is enough to get rid of the software for good, you won't have to worry about the app installing junk files on a hidden system directory or anything.

Tip-3: Use a safe desktop cleaner

I ,like many other bloggers out there have been a die hard fan of Ccleaner for a long time. Ccleaner is simply the best out there with its simple architecture, safe sorting performance and frequent updates. So I recommend you to download this amazing piece of software and run it at least 3 times a week to get your pc squeaky clean on the inside :)

Tip-4: Buy a brand new Hard Disk Drive

If all else fails, and you really are running out of alternatives...use your tiffin-money to buy a bigger hard disk :) If you are a few bucks short, then start saving right now.

Technorati Tags: space,hdd,hard-disk,cpu,pc,windows,xp,system,hardware

LINA- Run Linux application natively on OSX and Windows

2008-04-22T08:08:00.002+06:00

Although it can arguable be claimed that there are some irresistible softwares out there which were natively built for running on Linux environment, an initiative to make them compatible for Windows or OSX has rarely been taken. Master coders and uber-software gurus have often taken the liberty to port the software on their own, manipulating a string of code here and a string there. However, there is an alternative for the ultimate noobs (like myself) too. Its called LINA, and as the developers claim,

With LINA, a single executable written and compiled for Linux can be run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems..LINA brings Linux everywhere, from the command line to GUI and web applications.

Those who have dug a little deeper into the world of Linux are pretty familiar with WINE, or Windows Emulator For Linux (the creators of WINE, however called it ' Wine Is Not an Emulator ', thus the peculiar name ). LINA does the exact same thing for Windows or OSX, it lets you run Linux applications natively on your OS of choice ( I'm not going to argue about which OS is better though). Its as simple as that. Interested to try out some of those elusive, 'still yet to be ported to windows'- linux apps (ex: amaroK) ? Then give LINA a whirl.

Download Lina

How to hide the taskbar (aka Gnome panel) completely in Ubuntu

2008-02-19T23:06:00.009+06:00

This tutorial is for those users who , like myself, incessantly cherish the habit of having a hidden taskbar and in term, a cleaner desktop. ' Why?', a few curious onlookers might ask. Lets just say, the rule of thumb is, the more the viewing area the more visually soothing our experience with the tech-infused world we live in, becomes.

As you can guess from my previous post, that my infatuation for Ubuntu has somewhat rekindled in the last couple of weeks. However, this time I'm a man on a mission; that of finding out what drove me off Ubuntu last time and how I can choose a safe detour this time. One of these "draw-backs" of Ubunu was its inability to minimize the taskbar (Gnomebar) completely. Even if you choose "Auto Hide" from the panel properties, the hidden panel would still show up as a tiny strip like eyesore.The solution? Why use the good ole' gconf-editor offcourse. Here's how to do that:

1) While in Ubuntu press Alt+F2. This would bring forth the "Run Application" dialogue.

2) Write ' gconf-editor ' (without the quotation marks) and press run.

3) What opens in the new window looks kinda like the registry editor from (gasp) Windows right? This is the Gnome equivalent of the registry-editor. Anyhow, once there navigate to apps/panel/toplevels/[your panel name]. Here the panel name corresponds to either the lower or upper Gnome-panels. You can however, edit both.

4) On the right pane, double click on the line that says auto_hide_size and write the new value as 1 (replacing the default, 6px). Presto! Now you have the whole screen-area of your monitor to exploit.

Productivity Tip:
For the medium to advanced users, I also recommend playing around with other panel options like autohide delay. That might improve your Ubuntu experience by a greater margin.

Tags: linux, ubuntu , debian , taskbar , hack , gnome , autohide

Linux Redux: Use your GPRS phone as modem in Ubuntu

2008-02-09T00:01:00.000+06:00

I had been living under a self-imposed hiatus from Linux (namely Ubuntu) for a couple of months. But last week, as I was painfully recovering from yet another crashed Windows installation, I did the unthinkable (gasp!). Got my hands dirty and myself knee deep in unix land, as I decided to install Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn once again :)

This time, however, I had figured out a key advantage of using Ubuntu. Unlike previous installations, I was able to setup my EDGE enable Nokia 6630 as a modem under the Linux environment. That removed one of the major annoyances I had with every Ubuntu installation, "Not being able to setup a smart phone as a modem".

Nokia and other GPRS enable sets that also double as modems have no convenient, intermediate interface in Linux. No one bother to create one either. As a result, on first impression, adding your phone as modem in Ubuntu might appear to be quite a pain in the a**.

Wrong! Let me try to ease that...err...pain a little bit. Here's a small step-by-step tutorial on "How to set up your GPRS mobile phone as modem in Ubuntu (for dummies & nOObs) " I'd try to be as straightforward as possible, so bear with me closely:

Step-1: Connect your phone with your PC/laptop via the data cable (DKU-2 in my case). For newer Nokia’s the phone will ask you for mode. Choose PC Suite

Step-2: Go to System > Administration > System Log (try to perform this step as quickly as possible after Step-1). This would open up a new window (the System Log window, to be precise).

Step-3: Scroll down to the very end of the window. You'll see a few lines like:


Jul 31 08:41:25 ubuntu-laptop kernel: [ 330.168000] cdc_acm 1-1:1.8: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
Jul 31 08:41:25 ubuntu-laptop kernel: [ 330.192000] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
Jul 31 08:41:25 ubuntu-laptop kernel: [ 330.192000] drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control
Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
Jul 31 08:41:25 ubuntu-laptop kernel: [ 330.220000] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether

See that word in red before "USB ACM device"? Note that down for the time being.

Step-4: Open up a shell window and type sudo pppconfig . This will open up the shell-PPP configuration window. Select "Create a connection" on the first options menu. Press enter.

Step-5: On the next window, you'll be asked to define a new name for you connection. Type down something small and convenient, something you can easily remember later on (that doesn't include your social security number). Lets call it "tt" (no obscene pun intended offcourse).Then select Dynamic IP and PAP as connection type.

Step-6: On the next two screens, you'll be asked to enter you user name and password. Much like other ISPs, my ISP didn't assign any user-name/pass for their unlimited GPRS connectivity. But, Ubuntu won't let you leave these fields empty either...what to do, what to do :( Solution: Just put a blank space (press the "Space" button once) in both user-name and password field for this time. We'll see what we can do later.

Step-7: Choose the port speed on the next window. The default is 115200. On the next screen choose "Tone" as a dialer type.

Step-8: On the next screen you'll be asked to enter the number to dial during establishing connection through your phone/modem. Generally, the number is set as *99# . Just to be sure, you can check with your service provider. Choose "Manually set port address" on the next screen.

Step-9: Remember the identity of the modem we identified earlier in the message log (marked in red) ? Its time to input that on the next screen. The format would be /dev/*** where " *** " should be replaced by the port-location. In our case that was ttyACM0. So type/dev/ttyACM0 and press enter. Choose "Finish" to complete the basics.

Step-10: Now its time to get a little geeky :) It shouldn't be too hard to recollect that we put a blank(_) space in the place of user-name/password while we were setting up the modem, right? Its time to fix that up. Open up another shell window and type sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/*** . Again, "***" here is to be replace with the connection name we define at the very beginning. In our case that was "tt" so the actual command would be sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/tt

Step-11: A new window will now open, with bunch of geek words and esoteric phrases. Nothing to be afraid though, you just need to edit a small section. Note where it says "User" and there is a blanks space inside the double quote like this " ". Delete that space inside the quotation mark and save the file.

Step-12: Finally, open up your trusty shell window once again (make sure your phone is connected to your pc during the whole time) and type pon ** , where ** should be replaced by the connection name like pon tt. You can also disconnect your connection any time using the command poff tt.

That was swell wasn't it? Now you can use GPRS-modem based internet on your Ubuntu installation too. No fancy Windows Magic required. Thats one more reason to cross-off the most buggist (yet, arguable, the most useful) OS in existence from your list.

Qtrax finally brings free, legally stained music download to your desktop...for, umm...?

2008-02-01T00:04:00.000+06:00

In simple words, Qtrax is a p2p platform/application for downloading free music off the internet. Whats new about that, right?

Wrong. This much anticipated service has been on development for some years (eight to be precise) and is now finally ready for launch. What makes its gears grind though? Why its allegiance from top-notch music groups and record labels like EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group off course (Don't you dare say OMG). After years of fighting legal battles concerning copyright issues, these record labels are finally feeling the fatigue and the becoming wiser by the moment. They are finally starting to realize the figure-of-speech in redux "If you can't win em' join em", meaning they will start providing free music...for, err..a small interference to your eyes. By interference I mean 3-rd party ads. That is not a big deal anyway..who wants to "WATCH" music tracks on their pc, I don't.

Things you have to do to listen to free music via Qtrax: Download their custom, gratis, based on the Mozilla powered "Songbird" media player (here we go, another multimedia player to add to our list). Now the real let down about this whole idea is that to stream music directly unto your desktop, you must, and I repeat, you "MUST" use their media player only . There is no alternative available for the time being (but I hope our Russian/Chinese brethrens would find one out soon). You are also prohibited from downloading any song and they still don't have some of those crazy artists like "The Beatles" on their list/archive because of ongoing legal restrictions. As for OS dependencies, Qtrax currently support PCs, no MAC love yet. Apple would have to wait.

What to do, what to do...My suggestion is, if you have a nifty connection at home which comfortable streams music/videos at your disposal, then go download Qtrax and try it out. After all, its a fruit that you, as an internet user and a soldier of "Free music on the WWW" movement, is obliged to taste every morsel.

Download : Qtrax Beta.

Annoyance-b-gone: Ignore all Facebook apps invites with one click

2008-01-25T17:07:00.001+06:00

How many time have you went over the thought of having yourself de-Facebooked (namely, deleted) just because your inbox was full of application invites like "Join the red baroness raccoons on a fight against nano scale deus ex machinas " ? I've been close to that edge a couple of times myself. There is no denying the fact that stupid, worthless invites are evil...down to their bones. As much as all these invites from ignorant Facebook contacts pissed you off, what is even more frustrating is that you have to "Ignore" each and every request manually. Unlike email services, Facebook invites window doesn't have any "Ignore All" button.

Enter Ignore All, your knight in shining, blue armor. Its basically a website hosting a bookmarklet that lets you do the unthinkable, cut your Facebook annoyance to a mere ghost of its former self, yes with this you can finally ignore all invites with one click. Now what do you have to do to receive its aid? Just go to the Ignore All homepage, save the Ignore All link as a bookmark, and next time when you have tons of useless invites piled up on your Facebook "Requests" window, just hit the magic button (by that I mean the bookmark you just saved). But make sure you have javascript enabled in the browser (which should be the default setup,btw), otherwise rest assure this bookmarklet won't work ever. For Firefox users, I'd also recommend disabling the "Ad Block/Ad Block+" extension while doing this.

There is also a video showing Ignore All in action. Check it out too.

[Via : DI]

Tags: myspace , social networking , web 2.0 , youtube , internet , technology , yahoo , social networks , privacy , google

Its Air-O-Rific..but will you/I/anyone be able to savor it?

2008-01-17T17:44:00.001+06:00

At $1799, chances are..you won't. Not everyone out there is prepared to make a deal with the devil just because they were tempted by a Persian magician, but damn I wish I could. Because this baby is might fine, at least as far as ergonomics is concerned. The new MacBook "AIR", is a thing of beauty all right, right down to those curvaceous, silvery edges. But is it almost as worthlessly bad in taste as soya-steaks? I for one, might never be able to come close enough to say "I jumped a lot of AIR last fall", but there are a few (if not a lot) apple fanboys out there who are already sniffing out its every bits. Can't wait for the reviews to come pouring in. The specs are impressive indeed. The 13.3-inch LED display might appear a little small for regular views, but this ultrathin ( 0.16 to 0.76 inch )notebook more than makes up for its demand by being so thin, its almost Bulimic. No wonder they are spelling "SleeK" with a capital "K" (They aren't? Well they should, I can tell that). I just hope "AIR" doesn't literally prove to be "Full of air" and no real material to drive its gears at all. With that much dough at stake, I doubt even apple fanboys would take mechanical/electrical repercussions solemnly.

Tags: apple , mac , macbook pro , intel , hardware , macintosh , ipod , laptops , laptop , software

Webify the art of screenshot taking with Kwout

2008-01-15T23:16:00.001+06:00

Bloggers and web-authors in general everywhere, rejoice :) Now you can take screenshot of webpages/sites/blogs/anything the WWW can provide without an external, desktop based software . Kwout takes the hassel out of screenshot taking by letting the users take a screencap of any given page through a handy bookmarklet. Further modifications/options like cropping,resizing, embed code/html etc are available as well. Try out the following quick, 3 step walkthrough

Here's how the editing window looks like

Scroll down on the Kwout homepage to go to the section where the bookmarklets are provided. Now was that lightning fast or what?

[Via: DI]

Tags: screenshot , webapp , service , bookmarklet , bookmark , browser

Happy New year to all my readers

2008-01-01T14:36:00.001+06:00

I have become a lot less frequent in recent times, haven't I? Oh, well the explainations will come in a few days. For the time being, A VERY MERRY NEW YEAR, 2008 to all my readers. Lets hope a few good people perish this year and a few bad ones are born anew...like they always do ;)

Spiff up your calendar watch with "Thumb Calendar"

2007-12-22T22:27:00.001+06:00

The year 2007 is almost over. After December the 31 st , we would enter into 2008, a new year of..err..possibly better things and happenings. Time to schedule your new-years greetings and what not. In order to do that you might need the simplest/oldest form of scheduler (no, not a cheap blackberry) known to man, a "Calendar". But why don't make things interesting for the coming year? Try out a whole new approach. That is where Thumb Calendar comes in.

Developed by Adam Sporka for the Eliazar's Infodesign Challenge, thumb calendar takes all the hassle out of the art (!) of calendar viewing. You might get a bit confused at first sight, but read along the on-page instructions (barely 3 lines) or even better the illustrated instructions and things would become clearer than ever. This concept is all worth the look for bring some zest back into scanning dates and events on your calendar.
The idea behind Thumb Calendar is to print out the whole year's timeline in a single, thumb-esque (not quite, but close) page. With a few basic thumb-movements, you can figure out for example ,what day is 16th of January and so on. The concept is pretty neat with the first half (first 6 months) of the year on one side of the page and the rest on the other. The dates and months are typed in large, distinguishable font-faces; so there is no need to squint your eyes over minuscule letter/numbers. Thumb Calendar is downloadble in PDF format ( for the year 2008, btw ) for easy print-outs. You can print the calender on a nice, wallet sized paper and tuck it inside your pocket, wallet, purse and what not. It would feel pretty nice to escape from the monotone of our software controlled life for a while and get back to the scruffling pen n' paper days. DIY scheduling at its best.

[ Via: Fortysomething ]

PS: As you can notice, I'm back from my recent hiatus. See where I've been in the first few entries on my flickr gallery.

Tags: calendar , thumb , 2008 , year , new year , scheduling

The day's Faves

2007-12-07T22:41:00.001+06:00

Here's Potter Puppet Pals in "Wizard Swears". Just to be clear, Potter Puppet Pals is one of my most favorite sketches, back from the days it first appeared in Newgrounds. Neil Cicierega is a master of amateurish, crude, puppet humor. Hats off to him.

Also in the news, Flickr bands with Picnik, possibly the best (and the slowest), online editor of photos ; Lifehacker blogs about Gonein60 seconds, the "Recently Closed Application relauncher" and FamFamFam silk icons, an ubiquitous icon provider for open-source/freeware apps just got better with Silk Companion # 1 , a package containing much needed additional goodies.

Tags: icons , design , blog , mac , art , wallpaper , meme , tutorial , tampa , harry potter , books , jkrowling , potter , harry , movies , film , gobletoffire , hogwarts , book

Is it just me? Or did Tech Blogging just got hotter :)

2007-12-06T18:41:00.001+06:00

Blogging has been both a passion and a profession (kinda, if adsense earnings count as actual "revenue") for me over the last two years. Unfortunately, I rarely adhere to any of my so called "facades" and go on exploiting another once its introduced. I thought my urge for so called "Tech blogging" would be short lived too. But, it seems I was wrong. In fact, these days posting on "Bunch of Me" is almost like a second habit (the first being a variable proportionate to time). Meh, its getting a bit emotional, so its time to announce the good news .

Some of you may have heard of Download Squad, and if you have been reading my blog, you must've. For the sake of the generally oblivious folks though, Download Squad or "DLS" as abbreviated, is one of the premier Technology and Web-culture related blogs on tEh web. They are part of an extremely popular blog syndicate propelled by AOL (sounds mischievous?). Recently (on Oct4, 2007 to be precise) they announced the "Writer Recruitment" opportunity for freelance bloggers like myself with a cliche title that says "Looking for a few good geeks". I , being my usual nosey self, had to peck around this "once in a full moon" opportunity for pro-blogging. I didn't have much of an expectation though, because lady luck usually shuns me with her harsh ~~whip~~ lashes. It had been almost 2.5 months, so I basically forgot about the whole thing. Because I had other important stuff to do? Naw! Its because I had a month long Engineering Term Final exam and advanced engineering math is just plain evil.

Then last night, as I was checking my largely monotonous stockpile of emails, something struck me, a line that said "Download Squad wants you". A faint static shock woke some of my 3 months old neurons up and I was like "OMG WTF OMFG".

Yes, thats right. As per the email sent to me, I might just become an official blogger at DLS. Me..thats ME! The scrawny, "Knows too little to please the paranthesis", Naser I Hossain. This is so extremely cool, I'm thinking about posting a LOLcats picture at the end of this post just so some of you can grasp my level of surprise. Here's some excerpts from the actual email:

I just hope this doesn't turn out to be a bizarre twist of fate. That instead of sending someone else their emails, the DLS squad sent me an offer letter. Hoping for the best.

But wait, I also need good wishes from my readers. Wish me "Happy blogging 2008" dammit. Infatuate me with your slithery chants. Nah, heh heh, a simple "virtual pat" would be awesome though. I also pray that my ludicrous , 3-rd World ISP stays put throughout my journey. Their service so far has been crappy, but fluid nonetheless.

Update: Its official. I got the contract papers emailed to me this evening by the Weblog INC folks. This bird is going pro in 2008

Now, as promised, the obligatory LOLcats picture (courtesy of Kevin Steele @ Flickr):

I (actually Google) give you.. "GPS"..on your puny mobile

2007-11-29T18:45:00.001+06:00

I didn't belive this when I first saw it on Google Operating System blog, but the big "G" is actually bringing GPS (thats Global Positioning System for you) to regular mobile phones.How is it possible you say? Frankly, I'm a little confused too. As per Google's official press-release, the new "MY LOCATION" technology (spiffy name, a bit cliche though) works like this:

Location information makes mobile mapping and search faster and more convenient, but the most common source of location information to date -- GPS technology -- is supported on fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones expected to be sold in 2007. With Google's new My Location technology, users who don't have GPS-enabled mobile phones will now be able to take advantage of the added speed and convenience afforded by location information. The My Location technology also complements GPS-enabled devices, as it delivers a location estimate faster than GPS, provides coverage inside buildings (where GPS signals can be unreliable), and doesn't drain phone batteries as quickly as GPS. Whether users are trying to locate a restaurant in an unfamiliar neighborhood, get directions to the nearest hotel while traveling, or just find a place to grab some coffee while shopping for the holidays, Google Maps for mobile with My Location can help them get what they need quickly and easily.

The My Location technology takes information broadcast from cell towers and sifts it through Google-developed algorithms to approximate a user's current location on the map. This approximation is anonymous, as Google does not gather any personally identifiable information or associate any location data with personally identifiable information as part of the My Location feature. The feature can also be easily disabled by anyone who prefers not to use it. The My Location technology is available on most smartphones, including all color BlackBerry devices, all Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition devices, most Windows Mobile devices, newer Sony Ericsson devices, and some Motorola devices.

Damn, I don't know if this actually works or not as the new release is still in beta, and I don't have an unlimited GPRS plan right now to test out the costly Google Maps Mobile, but it would be mighty fine to have GPS for next to nothing. Here's a nice video from the Google staff explaining the process:

So, if you own a compatible device and a lucrative data plan, go download the new version this instant and try it out for yourself. Don't forget to leave your reviews/thoughts afterwards in the comments section.

Links:

Download new Google Maps Mobile with "My Location" (BETA)

[ Via : Google Operation System ]

Make a cute Corner Ribbon for your site

2007-11-25T13:36:00.001+06:00

You've seen them appear out of no where in ritzy blogs on special occasions like "World Hunger Day" or " Cancer Awareness Week" etc. Now, you can make one of your own, without any knowledge of JavaScript or html. Quick Ribbon, makes the process of generating Corner Badges for your site a breeze. There are several options to customize the badge like including a hyperlink that points to your URL of choice and choosing your custom colors with a color picker. So if you have some spare time to buff up your webpage, give Quick Ribbon a whirl.

Link:

Quick Ribbon

Instructions for WP and Blogger users

[Via : FourtySomething]

Tags: flickr , blogging , blog , fun , photos , creativity , portrait , self , kk , photography , design , css , web , internet , graphics , wordpress , web design , software , xhtml

You know Cable News Network sucks when

2007-11-22T21:09:00.001+06:00

CNN sucks indeed. It sucks big time. Space Shuttle Columbia traveling nearly 18 times the speed of light! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that ~~the astronauts would be feeling 8 times their weight times INFINITY and turn into microbes because of devolution~~ there is certainly something wrong with that . I mean who writes their materials? Courtney Love?

Via Reddit

Tags: cable news , news , humor , military , poll , ap , fema , corruption , mississippi , dhs , physics , relativity , mass , heisenberg , einstein

Flickr has a new sleek uploader, yes they do

2007-11-22T19:20:00.001+06:00

Flickr, the posterchild for online photography and general purpose image hosting, has updated their mangy little desktop uploader (* called "uploadr" by the flickr staff btw) to a thing of beauty. The new uploader, rightly called Flickr Uploadr 3.0 (duh) is available for both Windows and MAC. From first impressions, I'd say the new app looks quite promising. Its got that "Unngh I see white spaces" feel to it coupled with Flickr's usual pink n' blue swatches. Here are a few first looks at the new Flickr Uploadr [Screencaps by D/L Squad and Ajaxian ]. Click the thumbnails for bigger view.

As you can see, there are a lot of changes on the board. A revamped look (sweet), new options like batch-tagging, editing descriptions, titles, privacy setting, including extra informations and many such features, unavailable in the previous uploader have been made available in this on. So, hurry and download the new uploadr now. Its definitely got the looks, and from what I'm hearing, it might just have the kicks too :)

Links:

Download For Windows

Download for MAC

When calamities strike

2007-11-17T11:27:00.001+06:00

Bangladesh is still recovering from the aftermath of the uber cyclone
S.I.D.R that struck on the night of the 15th. Many have died, many
more injured, thousands of people rendered homeless in a matter of
hours,comm lines are down as well as most broadcasting systems due to
acute power shortage. Your favourite blogger (guess who ?), being one
of the lucky folks living in the capital Dhaka , is now blogging via
blogger's moblogging features with much difficulties. Here ends
today's broadcast :) with much hope that everything would be back to
normal in a couple of days and the authorities, both ex and current,
would stick to their " Post Disaster Promises " instead of proving
once again that such things are merely an official way of saying "We
are gravely mourned on these terrible days, but in actuality we don't
give a shit".

Update: Looks like PDB (Power Development Board!), an otherwise corrupt, slow and tarnished govt institution, have been working hard...and late through the night :) Power is now back up and so is rudimentary internet connectivity. Dhaka has started to get back its mechanized charm too. Lets wait and see the scenes unfold.

The Jetfighter that broke the "Cuteness" barrier

2007-11-15T17:39:00.001+06:00

No, I'm man enough to call something "Cute". That's right, what are you gonna do about it?

Ahem, anyway..as I was saying, the "Jetfighter that broke the Cuteness barrier" is none other than the tiny McDonnell XF-85 Goblin. This turbojet fighter was so small that it could fit inside the belly of a B-29 Superfortress mothership and deployed in air! No wonder this baby (or should I call a small midget, LOL) was nicknamed "The Parasite". It was mainly designed to escort and double as defensive wingman of long range strategic bombers. The XF-85 Goblin flew for the first time on August 23, 1948, on a test mission. Despite being moderately easy to control and easy to maneuver, the Goblin faces increasing difficulties from air drafts and kinetic turbulence; mostly because of its oddly small dimensions. It also had low fuel capacity, retrieving the fighter after its escort mission posed numerous difficulties, it was also quite slow and damage prone in contrast to contemporary jet-interceptors.In the summer of 1949, the XF-85 Goblin parasite jet fighter program was canceled by the USAF because of its many shortcomings.

Still the Goblin is considered a pinnacle in human engineering. Its amazing to see how the urge for strife and malice can cause beautiful blunders like these. Powered by a 3000 lbf Westinghouse J34-WE-7 turbojet, the Goblin had foldable swept wings that spanned only 21 feet ( 6.4 meters ). It supported a crew of 1 and looked something like the cousin of Fat albert, a jet-propelled, hot-let firing cousin offcourse.

Links:

Wikipedia Article on the XF-85 Goblin

[ Via Military-Heat ]

Tags: plane , aircraft , flight , airlines , usa , flying , aviation , us , pilot , america , goblin.propulsion , propulsive efficincy , thrust

Break the Firefox Tab boundary with "Taboo"

2007-11-13T22:39:00.001+06:00

Taboo is a small Firefox addon that makes your browsing a little more organized. Those users who fancy opening a lot of tabs at once to (and I quote) "Read them later", might find this tool to be quite useful in sprucing up their otherwise boring browsing experience. Basically what Taboo does is that it lest you save a thumbnail of the tab currently active on the press of a button and organizes all the tabs you've thus "thumbnailed" on its archive. Later, if you want to visit any of the numerous tabs you've thubnailed before, you can idly brows through Taboo's visually rich thumbnail archive and click any thumbnail you wish to restore that web-page in full view. There is also a nifty option to search the archived tabs/thumbnails too.

Taboo uses the inbuilt session saver option in Firefox. It has two very nice looking alternative views, " Grid " and "Calendar". The extension is currently in beta, so you might just come across a few bugs. Also, the developer warns that Taboo might not work if you are using the " Tab Mix Plus Firefox " extension. However, I haven't have any problem what so ever with Taboo.

Links:

Install Taboo [Direct]

Tags: Firefox , browser , IE , Opera , addon , extension , mozilla , thunderbird , taboo , tab , browsing , symantics , install

Brainy, Eco-wise advertising

2007-11-10T18:03:00.001+06:00

Eskom, South Africa's state owned electricity distributor and provider knows how to play the games right. Especially when it comes to "Follow what you preach" as it is illustrated above.

Unless offcourse its just a freak accident of nature where all the other lights burned out for satanic reasons or something.

I think its "Brilliant" as far as advertising values are concerned. But it looks like there is a ongoing power outage in the background. Talk about irony . I wish, our govt had a share of their eco-worthy wisdom :)

Tags: ecology , eco , environment , energy , electricity , electrons , utilities , south africa , eskom , area , saving , friendly

Javascript Jabs:" FormTextResizer " bookmarklet

2007-10-25T13:19:00.001+06:00

How many times have you come across situations when the form-field (you know, those white spaces in a web-page where you are usually asked to put down your name/address/comment etc) you are using in a web-site is grotesquely small? Situations like these are quite uncomfortable when, lets say , you want to scan through a comment you've just written but the small comment box make you scroll all the way up and down. Here's a smart solution to that problem. Its a Javascript Bookmarklet that lets you resize any form field currently in use.

Drag this Bookmarklet to your Firefox/Opera toolbar or bookmark it on IE

FormTextResizer [For IE, use this link instead ]

Now use the form below to test it out. Select any field you want to edit, click the link and then resize the box. As easy as ~~pot~~ pie.

Here's an example form for you to try it out on:

Name

E-mail

Via: The Man In Blue

Tags: javascript , bookmarklet , browser , IE , Firefox , Opera , tool , mozilla , safari , bookmark , website , productivity

Create a cool photo collage of your Facebook friends

2007-10-18T00:27:00.001+06:00

.....and without help from any of those pesky 3-rd Party apps or an external site too :) The folks at DI tells us that there is a smart hack available for every Facebook user built right into the default Facebook options. Apparently you can generate a collage of all your Facebook contact/friends in a ziffy, just follow these steps:

Step 1: Login into your Facebook account and click the Friends tab.

Step 2: Select the drop-down box and click the list separator (---) in that drop down that’s also highlighted in the screenshot below.

Thats it...and no I'm not high.

This small tutorial is a direct steal ;) But the screenshots are mine btw.

Via: Digital Inspiration

Tags: myspace , social networking , web 2.0 , youtube , internet , technology , yahoo , social networks , privacy , google

Qipit : Document Digitalization on steroids

2007-10-15T14:35:00.001+06:00

This the first time I've seriously tried online image-to-doc/pdf converter like Qipit. That's because, my first experience with a similar service(s) provide by ScanR wasn't so good. Basically what both of these services/websites do is that they will take any digital pictures and convert them online to scalable documents (pdf). Considering that we are currently living in an age populated by cell phones with integrated digital cameras, both Qipit and ScanR have devoted their service to analyze and scan considerably low quality images taken with cell phone cameras. Qipit's output was quite amazing. See the results below (click the images for bigger view):

The document on the left is a page of a Vector Mechanics class lecture I took with my cell phone, the one on the right is the Qipit scanned version. All I had to do was to send an email to copy[at]qipit.com with the image as an attachment and in a return email I got the scanned document in pdf format. You can also try out Qipit by sending an email to copy[at]qipit.com . I've signed up as a free user so that I can also get scanned outputs in full color. Free users get a quota of 100 pages of scanning for free . Offcourse,after you receive your scanned copy in your email, you can delete some documents from your Qipit folder to increase the depleted quota. You can upload/send images to Qipit online and also via email. Here's the official features list

* Turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs)
* Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone
* Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing
* Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting
* Publish and share your documents on the web

Qipit provides quite a bargain for the best price there is "Free" ! ...so students and busy document handlers, what are you waiting for?

Links: Qipit Homepage

Tags: images , documents , office , doc , odt , open , free , online , colloboration , digital , camera , cell phone , mobile , nokia , sony-erriksson

"Adios" to Megaupload naggings

2007-10-12T21:29:00.001+06:00

Like its evil (or is it?) twin, Rapidshare, Megaupload hast fast become one of the largest file hosts on the world wide web. Back when file hosts didn't pop up every three seconds in the web, Megaupload and Rapidshare were still service us with their dedicated (!) servers. But unlike now, in the beginning these filehosts were humbler, generous, offering a lot of nice features for its users without much of a nag. These days,however both file sharing/hosting sites have upgraded their file hosting/sharing features, bringing into action terrible terrible oddities like download-wait, country limit, ip limit and what not. Thanks to the rebellious nature of the netizens, bypassing most of these "restrictions" have now become an art that is both useful and sweeeet as hell (take that MU/RS). Here are two especially irritating Megaupload restrictions you can easily bypass with some cheap web-fodder . I've taken out the geeky stuff, so it should be pretty easy to understand:-

NAG No-1 : Megaupload asks you to install their toolbar , or "THEY" won't let you download files from that pesky country of yours.

What do you say ? : HECK NO!

What do you do ?: Install the Megaupload SX 3.2 Firefox extension offcourse. After installing go to Tools> Megaupload 3 > Select "Enabled". Now visit a Megaupload link you've been previously denied the existence of , and "Presto". Instant Download Joy.

Requirements : Firefox (dOh, even Homer Simpson owns a copy of Firefox these days, and he is a property of FOX! )

NAG No-2: Megaupload suddenly declares that "All the download slots for your country has been filled, please try after a gazzilion seconds and we might still say the same shit"

What do you say ?: This time use the same sentence used before, but replace the first and second letter with something more fitting. Something that rhymes with "Nu"

What do you do ?: What you need is a list of free SSL supported proxy servers. Now you can either Google for "Free SSL Proxy List" or obtain a free, fresh list from one of your favorite sites, like Proxy-List. Now after you get the list of proxies, note down the ones with SSL support (in Proxy-List.org its designated by a "Y" under the " SSL" tabular field). Ok , assuming you've got your free SSL proxy noted down, go to Tools>Options>Advanced>Network>Settings> Select "Manual Proxy Configuration" and then put your new Proxy address and port address (for nOObs, 202.92.48.45 : 80 = Proxy address :Port No ). Refer to the following screenshot to further clarify this step

Now save changes. Afterwards, you can go back to that Megaupload link and use it again. If MU says "Download Slots filled" after sometimes again, use the same process, but this time use another proxy address. Those who think this is too much of a manual hassle, there is news for your fat-self too, chubby :) You can use the Firefox extension called Switch Proxy to automate the process

Requirements: Firefox, Opera or any other browser. But obviously you won't be able to use the extension this time. The proxy-changing trick is still viable though. What is even more fun is that you can even use Download Managers to pause and resume downloads if MU cancels it after a short disruption. Just change the proxy in your D/L manager options.

Now go on, have fun exploiting Megaupload riches :D

PS: For Firefox users, you might want to disable "Adblock Plus" extension while doing so. It has been known to interfere with the tricks discussed above.

Tags: rapidshare , software , download , ebooks , google , internet , hack , ebook , upload , downloads

Say hello to the new "NVU" aka "KompoZer"

2007-10-05T21:37:00.001+06:00

NVU was my first and possibly the only love when it comes to basic web-authoring/designing. It was the most simple, yet one of the most powerful web-editors in its days. Heck, it was even platform independent. So, obviously I was in great pains to see its development slowly coming to stasis. Fortunately, recently I discovered another open-source web-authoring tool that looks ~~and smells~~ a lot like NVU. Its called KompoZer (I wish they would stop using all these "K"s and "Z"s. Seriously, its not cool anymore). KompoZer is built on the same Gecko engine that powers a plethora of application(s) like Firefox, Songbird, Flock,Thunderbird, Sunbird etc. Some of its key features are:

* A WYSIWYG editor, much like DreamWeaver
* Built on Gecko, Mozilla's layout engine
* Integrated FTP file management
* Jump between WYSIWYG editor and HTML tabs
* Support for forms, tables, and templates
* Linux, Windows, and Mac support.

So, go on TRY KompoZer today. I bet you won't regret it. Especially if you miss NVU like I do, you'd love KompoZer.

LINK : Homepage | Download KompoZer | Screens

Via: Download Squad

Tags: design , css , web , internet , graphics , wordpress , web design , software , xhtml , blog

A living afloat?

2007-10-05T01:38:00.000+06:00

The Jelly-fish 45 Habitat designed by Giancarlo Zema looks like something out of an 80's B-movie, simply "retrolicious". Its a floating habitat/home that can support the living standards of upto 6 people. As quoted by the makers:

The Jelly-fish 45 would be ideally situated in sea parks, atolls, bays and seas rich in flora and fauna. The Jelly-fish 45 allows the sea dwelling owners to live either above or below sea level in perfect harmony with the ocean environment.

Now, at a special discount rate ( just kidding), the Jellyfish can be yours for $USD 2,500,000 (2.5 Mil). I'd surely buy it if I was born an Arab sheikh because this looks swweet. :) Too bad I have to remain satisfied with my land-loving self. Also, I'm not a pro swimmer, and I have doubts if this thing will, in actuality, ~~out of the fiction of Philip.K.Dick~~ remain afloat or now.

VIA: Net-O-Rama

Create gorgious "Wet-Floor" effect ONLINE!

2007-10-05T01:05:00.000+06:00

You've seen them online, on flamboyant Web 2.0 propaganda pages. Now you can create them too, and without the Graphics Geekery involved :) I'm talking about the stereotypically "Web 2.0"-ish "Wetfloor effect". Thanks to the invention of yet another "Online Generator", you can now upload your favourite LOLCat picture and have some harmless eye soothing fun . So head on over to the Wet Floor Generator to apply the wetfloor effect to your photos, pronto....and then perhaps upload them to your blog/website/your(my)space/whatever.

Oh, BTW..these images look much better against a Dark background.

LINK: Wet Floor Generator for the masses

Photo Credit Project 365 Day 33 by sugar-bliss gnome

Weekly Favourite Photograph : " Roy "

2007-09-28T23:14:00.001+06:00

The original photographer, Afzal Bhai didn't specify a title for this amazing piece of camera work, so I shamelessly titled it "Roy", because this shot reminds me of those old, scarcely budget Satyajit Roy movies. The curious yet vacant looks in the eyes of the subjects is so much in unison with Roy's signature filming methods that it almost made me feel like Satyajit himself took this shot. The photographer in question here has to be given a whole lotta credit to create such a warm feeling in his work. Afzal bhai also has some extra nice shots in his Flickr gallery. Make sure you check them out too :)

Tags: travel , art , photos , flickr , life , photo , news , music , personal , film , satyajit , roy , bangladesh , bangla , oscar

Carl Sagan - The Pale Blue Dot

2007-09-20T19:24:00.001+06:00

In love for the "Pale Blue Dot"

This is a clip that almost makes you wanna rethink about ethnicity, religion,science,social boundaries,history,war, peace and politics. Carl Sagan is was so awesome . Can't stop loving his voice. This video just strengthens his amazing persona. Its a damn shame that dude had to die in '96.

Come to think of...what will we do after the tiny blue dot we call earth is engulfed in total,ambient darkness? Hell, I'd be long dead by then...but still, what will we do?

[cross posted on my new Jottit]

Tags: google, science, environment, maps, space, news, global warming, energy, google earth, nasa

Want to see something really scary?

2007-09-19T23:13:00.001+06:00

Stepper Motor Madness

Now that is what I call a Mechanical Midget Monstrosity. Say hello to "Zeno" , a robot modeled after the Japanese character Astro Boy which is just plain creepy. Zeno looks much like one of those irritating otaku anime characters, but wait..that's not it. This thing can (gasp!) move its facial muscles and has the ability to make automated eye contact. That just gave me the hibbi-jibbies. I think I might have nightmares of this robot ~~defecating on me~~ choking me when I'm asleep.

Tags: robot, mechanical, engineering, anime, robotics, mechatronics, movement, AI, intelligence, weird, errie

Make a heatmap of your mouse activities

2007-09-13T18:32:00.001+06:00

Everyone likes to spoil their time with something visual and "not so thought provoking" from time to time :) Enter "Mouse Heat Map", a super-small Windows utility (14.5 kb) that sits on your taskbar and monitors your mouse activity.

Now for the fun part, as you can see in the screencap above, MHM also generates a sweet heatmap (aka the more you click on a place on your desktop, the more hot/reddened it becomes). So you can easily see after an hour of activity, where have your mouse cursor been most of the time. Even strange is the fact that this also conforms to the " Users Use F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content " theory to some extent. How oddly exciting human behavior is

Mouse Heat Map is an application developed by the guys at An-app-a-day. But I couldn't find the Download Link I had used long ago, so I hosted the file myself.

Download Mouse Heat Map [Windows Only]

Tags: mouse, computer, heat, heatmap, thermal, imaging, infrared, activity, productivity, app, windows

Holy mother of merciful heavens...this is treacherous

2007-09-08T18:54:00.001+06:00

Yeah, it seems apparently I missed a very important news a few months ago which is why my downloading performance has been in an all time low for the last 1 month. The news is ominous, a proof that the copyrighting authority would go to extreme length in order to suppress the hugely popular web-fad we call "Torrent(s)/p2p downloads" .

So what's the big deal, right? The folks at TorrentFreak put the news in context by citing:

BitTorrent users are facing a new enemy. A BitTorrent client named ZipTorrent, allegedly created by our friends from the anti-piracy organization Media Defender, leeches bandwidth and spreads useless data chunks

By the time I heard about the news (that is about 2.5 months after the torrentfreak post went online), I was facing quite a number of odd download difficulties that went unexplained. Well, this explains it now. Companies like Media Defender (to link or not to link, that is the question) have created mutated version of popular bt-clients like Azurus and is flooding the peers with useless junk. Here, let me quote a few lines from the Devil's Advocate itself:

Decoying and Spoofing are the most commonly known techniques that we employ. We send blank files and data noise that look exactly like a real response to an initiated search requests for a particular title

This means, unless and until you find a solution to block off these pesky, fake ips that the "GOOD FOLKS " (!) of the media-industry are using, you will, one day or another stop having virtually any speed at all in your (scoff) "Legal Torrent Downloads"

Solution:

There is a way to stop at least some of those "Fake Tobs" (as opposed to Bots) with the help of our good friends at Sourceforge. Although, the efficiency of this method is questionable at times. What you need to do, is to install a small,open-source application called Peer Guardian (~900 kb in size) that..well..guards your peers (not in school or college though) and denies the access of a range of ips known for their AHEM! "Ideal Behavior". After installing, you just need to occasionally check for updates with the built in update checker to keep your ip-ban list efficient. You can also create custom banning list, like I've created here. You can download this list of ips and add the list in your list manager (see the screencap below)

Now there is no guarantee that Peer Guardian would work wonders for you, but it did so for me at least :) Just look at the first screenshot, PG2 was catching malicious ips like wildfires. I also noticed a considerable boost in the torrents downloading speed too. So, why don't you give it a try and see if "TeH Authority" is trying to flood you with useless chunks too?

Links:

Peer Guardian 2

Zip-Torrent Ban List

Article on Torrent-Freak that made my day :)

Tags: bittorrent, download, p2p, movie, software, legendas, dvdrip, series, music, internet

LifeStraw®: Just "Suck" it clean

2007-09-07T18:08:00.001+06:00

Yeah that's right, you can now simple "Suck" water in to purify it :) There are literally millions of people living around the world without access to pure,safe drinking water. Hell, I think I digest at least a zillion anaerobic, water-borne spores of who knows what every morning when I have that first glass of water. Good thing I have one of those tough, "3-rd World Adaptable" stomach that easily burns through their membranes with organic acid-secretion. But still, there are about a zillion other equally nasty germs that just refuse to die and increase the possibility of the occasional breakout of fatal diseases in epidemic proportion.

This is where LifeStraw® comes in. LifeStraw® is a portable water purification tool, which filters up to 700 liters of water, making it safe for human consumption. The device, just 25cm long and 29mm in diameter, requires no electrical power or spare parts. Now this might not save humanity in case of a meteor strike, but it sure can save quite a lot of life in ways that doesn't require a cataclysm to occur.

Also, the design is oddly simple...it sure beats all those heavy,expensive water purifiers in dimension and cost. It might lack in efficiency though, but the guy/girl who designed it must've been pretty damn smart to make the thing so handy.

Learn More about LifeStraw®

Tags: treatment, softener, environment, photos, nature, energy, love, shopping, reviews, science

Simpsonize yourself..TODAY!

2007-09-03T20:18:00.001+06:00

Who doesn't love those Simpson's characters, huh? After running for so many years.."The Simpsons", although waning these days, have managed to remain funny without using R-rated jokes and booty-shaking.

Now here's a chance to Simpsonize yourself . Just like one of those cool Southpark character generators, a new Simpson's Character Generator have sprouted up. Only this time thanks to advanced (I wonder!) facial recognition technology, they have stepped up the fun a notch more. You can now upload your own picture, select your facial hair, dressing habits (casual, funky, nerdy etc) and press the "Simpsonize" button to see how you'd look in the yellowish, bizarre city of Springfield. Further modification to your generated character is also possible. The folks at Read-Write-Web are even running a nice "Show off your Simpson Self " exhibition

So, what are you waiting for...?? Go Simpsonize yourself TODAY!

PS: Recognize the brown-bastard above? That's me in my Simpson glory staring back right at you. The "All U'r Base R Belong 2 US" t-shirt is custom photoshop material though.

"Clicky"- the web analytics service you just got to love

2007-08-29T02:14:00.001+06:00

Clicky is just one of those web 2.0 sites that doesn't suck like countless others ( damn,I'm getting good at using oxymorons ). It reminds me of "Drift Away" by The King (of rock and role btw). Meaning Clicky is everything you need in a well-formed analytics/statistics service. Previously I've been using Google Analytics, and most of the time my expression has been "WTF do I need a data on XYZ for?". I mean seriously, I'm no hardcore SEO entrepreneur or some hip tech-enthusiast who has to track thousands of link love (and what not) everyday. Even so, why would anyone ever need so much complexity in a simple site-tracking service? That is why I was in dire need of a new one. I needed something simpler, shinier..something more communicative, illustrated and easily digestible. Then I came across this article by the awesome guys from Read-Write web , which by a miraculous turn of fate, introduced me to Clicky.

Well, what is Clicky? Its in their words "Web analytics, 2.0 style", and I have to agree whole heartedly :) To be truthful, I was expecting something shabby like most other Ajax oriented websites; slow,teeming with awkwardly bright colors that hurt my eyes and ridiculously huge typefaces. That is what web 2.0 has become these days, a geocentric lump of boring flesh that only knows show business. But Clicky was different, infact utterly delicious at first (and 2nd and 3rd..) look. It wasn't only pleasing to the eyes, but also a surprisingly powerful analytics service. Some of its most useful features includes

* Full dynamic referrer tracking

* Visitor filtering

* Real time Visitor Activities (aka "Spy" as they call it)

* FeedBurner RSS stat integration and feed stats tracking.

* Geolocation of visitors

* Tag cloud for popular contents

* Search engine queries and many more.

and offcourse, all other basic tracking features like number of pageviews, unique visitors etc. All this done under a nicely design Ajax powered environment. The benchmarking of the different sections was also quite impressive. Even with my crappy modem-esque-broadband connection the pages were extremely quick to load. I for one is impressed ( and that is a delicacy, impressing me that is..why what did you think of?).

So what are you waiting for? Go sign-up for a basic *free account today. Or perhaps you would like to try out their DEMO. They also provide an affordable premier service. For some extra dough, you can get even more analytical goodies. Now, I'm poor as hell and broke ~~as brokeback mountain (oh, no I didn't say that)~~ too. So, there is little chance that I'll get a premier account anytime soon. But why not dare to dream right?

Tags: google, marketing, web analytics, web, google analytics, internet, blogging, seo, blog, stats

What have I been doing?

2007-08-26T16:21:00.001+06:00

After getting this piece of advice from Lifehack , I've started wikipedizing some of the things that clutter my weekly schedule. Here's a short look at my recent To-Do things

Not much to be awed about is it? You might've noticed some small changes in the blog's design (please don't tell me you haven't..heh heh) like that blue, rounded blob around the comment box? Or perhaps the "Save As PDF" button, just below the post title? Those two were quite troublesome to put forth, you know..so its obligatory that my visitors know about their presence. I'll be discussing my valiant journey in the unknown realms of CSS-geekery in future posts, so stay tuned. Who knows, after reading those you can put these cute looking rounded boxes/save-as-pdf features on your sits/blogs too !

Heh, I know I'm just being a jerk...oh well, as you can see there are a few more things left to do..which is gonna take quite a time, until I master the "Preface" of this huge ~~ass~~ book on JavaScript I downloaded off the Internet.

Toodles :)

How to teach an old Fox new tricks: Firefox Hack

2007-08-22T01:37:00.001+06:00

Firefox, unlike IE has never had its share of good luck from the beginning. For example, the small element blazing Fox coiling around the world that idly sits on your desktop does nothing but to link to the actual executable. Here's a small trick to pimp up your otherwise insignificant Firefox shortcut icon.

The hack involved merging a small .reg (windows registry file) file to your windows registry. This would create a Firefox icon on your desktop with some handy option under the right click menu (featured on the screenshot above).

Download : Firefox Desktop Icon Registry Hack Pack

There are two registry files inside the zip archive.Simply run Firefox-On.reg and refresh the desktop to enable the icon, and run Firefox-Off.reg to remove it.

Points of note: If you've installed Firefox in a drive other than C:\ , you must edit the Firefox-On.reg file. Just replace every " C: " with the drive letter which holds your Firefox installation.

Thanks to Collin Grady for the original idea.

Tags: mozilla, software, internet, browser, google, web, extension, internet explorer, microsoft, extensions, linux, vista, mac, security, apple, freeware, cpu

Smart Gmail trick to keep spammer/scammers at bay

2007-08-14T22:26:00.001+06:00

How many times have you been tricked into giving your email address to an online service, only to later find yourself at the mercy of their spam-bots? Quite a few times, right? (unless you are a self proclaimed AHEM "web-guru" like myself) . Some of you have also used disposable email services like ipoo or pookmail. But why resort to other services when you can use your uncanny Gmail account? I've been using this trick for some time now, and so far it has worked wonders :) Basically the idea is to supply a potential spamming site (like a website that asks for your email address to send a news letter or something like that) with a Gmail alias that is safe to use since you can later define a filter to sort out the incoming spams sent to that address. So here's what you should do.

Phase 1

Lets say your actual gmail address is " xyz@gmail.com " . Now when ever you are in doubt about a website thinking if they are gonna spam the hell out of your email address or not, just append a " + " (plus) sign followed by a recognizable alias like "spam" to your actual Gmail ID. Like, this xyz+spam@gmail.com . The thing with Gmail is that they automatically ignore anything written after the plus (+) sign in an email address-field. Meaning something like " xyz+spam@gmail.com " would actually mean " xyz@gmail.com " in Gmail's terminology and sent to this address. I'd recommend making an alias that would later help you find which site spammed you with your fake alias, like this xyz+site-abc@gmail.com

Phase 2

Now that you've set up the trap, its time to initiate phase 2. Assuming that you've started receiving spams sent to xyz+site-abc@gmail.com in your inbox. You now know which site (site-abc) is spamming you and at what address (xyz+site-abc@gmail.com) . All you need to do is setup a custom filter like the one above in your Gmail options, select "Delete it " (or you can also apply an suitable lebel like "spam", what ever you wish) on the next step, and "Voila" , no more annoyance.

Thanks to Amit for the original idea. Dunno why he republished the same post twice though.

Tags: google, email, internet, firefox, yahoo, web, technology, spam, software, mail, gmail, blog, tech, marketing

Bring "Flickr" to your desktop with the sleek "Slick(e)r"

2007-08-10T19:18:00.001+06:00

Slickr is a free (as in beer) and open source application ~~that meddles with your brain~~ brings the ever so awesome "Flickr" galleries to, yes..your desktop! Now some obtrusive nerds may say "OMG like wtf is new about that?" My reply is "Nothing. Slickr is just fun to use...and it doesn't involve complex desktop hacks or hour of registry forging." Slickr uses OpenGl (dOh!) and can show images sorted according to Tags, User Name, Favorites, Set,Contacts, Interestingness etc. The only hard part in setting up slickr must be getting the application key. But if you've used any other external services with Flickr (like Flickr uploadr or and 3-rd Party apps that uses the Flickr API) previously then you must already be familiar with the application key. Here how to do all that:

Install Slickr
After installing, to use Slickr, you must obtain an application key here. Then go to the Control Panel > Display > Slickr > Settings > Key tab and paste the key and the secret into the specified fields.

Download Slickr [ 1.98mb | V 1.0.3] [Via: etc]

Application Homepage

Tags: photography, photos, photo, blog, yahoo, internet, art, web 2.0, google, photoblog, travel, flickr, life, news, music, personal, film

A poor man's Gmail - A gratis production

2007-08-09T11:01:00.001+06:00

When I wanted to post a video response to " Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video " I didn't have enough moolah (or toner) to print me one of those G M-velope, so I did what I could...used my Laptop's LCD screen instead. This is what poor people do, they compromise.

The song playing in the background is E.L.O's "Mr Blue Sky". I think Google should really consider this as the official "G-M-velope song" : ) Anyhow, points of note:

* I know the quality sucks..I took that with my Digital Still camera (with its poor video function). Again poverty kicks in.

* The video was made in my room, with the lights turned off..and the only light source being the LCD.

* Cheers on any +ve/-ve comments :)

* All part of the " Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video " project [INFO]

Finally, please vote/rate/comment on the video. That would mean a lot to me :)

Tags: google, email, internet, firefox, yahoo, web, technology, spam, software, mail, video, videos, music, funny, humor, tv, blog, myspace

Downloading Bit-torrent files without a BT-client

2007-08-02T00:08:00.001+06:00

Lets say you are stranded in a place where its almost impossible to download a bit-torrent file due to benevolent animosity from your local ISP. That is where the new web based service BitLet comes in rescue. It utilizes the power of a simple Java Applet to download the file you want via the bit-torrent protocol. All the dirty dancing is done on the server side and in the finale you are left with a nicely downloaded file. You just have to copy-paste the url of the .torrent file on the homepage of BitLet and you'll be able to download the file.

Whats more? Well there's another particularly useful feature that BitLet is providing. It lets you link directly to a torrent file download so that when you click on that link the download will start instantly via BitLet, no more waiting in line sort of stuff. For example, here's a direct link to Silent Hill 4 soundtrack : SL4:OST . This feature might prove to be pretty useful to bloggers and publishers.

So, do you have another new hip-service in the making? Or is this just fresh web 2.0 meat for slaughter? You decide.

Links: BitLet | Publisher(s) Direct Linking [ VIA: UNEASYSilence ]

Tags: programming, j2ee, technology, software, ruby, eclipse, ajax, open source, linux, sun, p2p, download, music, video, gpc, satellite, torrent, pspcatching, news

The circle is complete

2007-07-31T23:21:00.001+06:00

I wonder when he will speak up saying "Harry, I'm your father"..harr harr. Now that would be a worthy twist.

This is an exceptional work of noir and pop culture, the photographer have done his homework well. I just had to post it.

Original Flickr Page

Tags: darth, star wars, wars, star, funny, video, humor, youtube, starwars, movies, harry potter, books, jkrowling, potter, harry, film, gobletoffire, hogwarts, book

Rainlendar, The Multiplatform GTD app that doesn't suck

2007-07-18T20:50:00.000+06:00

Its sleek,it has an unbelievably low memory signature and it works! On both Windows and Linux. Most desktop GTD apps I've used before were memory hogs, with too much junk in their veins (or in this case, in their sfx-packaging), but Rainlendar has proved to be fast and highly efficient. The application itself is easily skinnable and there are numerous plugins available too; including the default "iCal sync" plugin. All this for the best cost in the market, "Gratis". Best of all is that you get 3 GTD apps mashed into one with Rainlendar. It has a beautiful calender, a to do list and an events list, all with changable opacity and deep customization options.

You can download Rainlendar(lite) from here (v 2.1):

Win | Linux

Now, installing Rainlendar on Windows is a breeze, as for Linux (more like debian based Ubuntu 7.04) its not so difficult either ;) . To do so, follow these steps:

1. Download Rainlendar from the link give above. Or go to the download page.

2. After the download finishes, assuming you've saved the file on your desktop, right click the .tar.gz file and extract it to desktop. This will create a folder called rainlendar 2 .

3. Fire up a shell window and type the following

cd Desktop

sudo mv rainlendar2 /etc/opt/

Note that, I have used this command to move the rainlendar 2 folder from the desktop to a folder with the path /etc/opt. You can use any other folder, just remember its path carefully.

4. Right click anywhere on your desktop and select "Create Launcher". This will open another window where you can create a desktop launcher for Rainlendar. Type "Rainlendar" in the Name field and type " /etc/opt/rainlendar2/rainlendar2 " in the command field. Note that, your path to the rainlander2 folder can be different. Use, your own path in this field. Finally select a suitable icon for the launcher.

5. Clicking the new launcher would open up Rainlendar in all its glory :) You can mess around with the setting now if you wish to.

Productivity Tip: If you want Rainlendar to start automatically at system startup on your Ubuntu installation, go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions. Click on the Startup Programs tab and then +Add button. Again type " /etc/opt/rainlendar2/rainlendar2 " This will now launch your new calendar program each time your system starts up.

Thanks to ArsGeek for the pointers

Tags: tv, windows, GTD, productivity, desktop, application, ubuntu, free, open-source, Operating system

Twitter has the potential to be A-wesome, but is it?

2007-07-11T01:02:00.000+06:00

I've been saving up some "time" to try out Twitter, the hip new, know-it-all, heteroplatform social networking site/tool/app from the creators of the (now desist) Odeo. After playing for about half and hour with it, I must say, I can see quite a potential for this service..hell, this might become an entirely new form of communication like Instant Messaging. Twitter can become extremely useful as a scheduling tool. Plus, with an open API, twitter has introduced a malleable platform that can be easily manipulated to develop all sorts of applications, mobile and desktop based (stationary ones) alike. Twitter is also undoubtedly the simplest social-networking +moblogging site I've come across. The greatest thing about its modding options is the fact that there are none (or not enough) . So no more eye soring designs with errie looking ponies and dancing angels like those on Myspace.

Then there is the mobility of the whole idea. I can update my status on the fly, and I've got a variety of option to do just that. For example, right now I'm using this sweet Java Application for my Nokia 6630 called TinyTwitter to get the twitting groove on. Twitter is causing quite a ruckus all around, maybe because it is truly a unique idea..not another Myspace or Facebook clone. Anita from the Times Magazine online had this to say:

But I'm betting that Twitter will get a lot noisier before netizens move on to the next new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs MySpace and, frankly, that site is getting stale. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what better than a service that combines social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other companies are trying to do the same thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google's Dodgeball. But only Twitter has figured out how to make it easy.

This RoR powered service is still in infancy, but growing strong every moment (if you have been keeping your eye on the latest Web Buzz, you'll know how popular twitter has become). Even U.S presidents, movie stars, soap-opera actors and musicians are on the twitting flock. So, join today if it grinds your gear.

PS: After joining Twitter, you can add me from my twitter page.

Tags: social, twitter, networking, myspace, facebook, Google, odeo, moblogging

Fun with Futurama

2007-07-07T22:13:00.001+06:00

I don't know why on Earth (or Omicron Persei 7) did FOX cancel Futurama, the geeky version of the Space Simpsons and the humorously altered cousin of StarTrek. But thanks to the marvel of the World Wide Web, I have all the episodes and all the Futurama Comics in existence (well, sort of). Futurama comic strips are usually littered with pop-culture references, sleek IT/Tech terms and gigormous mechanical humor (courtesy of Bender Rodriguez, your friendly neighborhood pickpocket bending unit), but the other day I came across a page that was especially worth memorizing for every tech-enthusiasts and Open Source loyalist :) So here goes -

This is from Futurama # 25 : Robot Robin Hood. Now if that doesn't grind the gear of a techno-crat..then what will?

Tags: tv, simpsons, bender, television, animation, comedy, family guy, matt groening, billy west, fox

Arr..get me some software serials, pronto.

2007-06-26T23:27:00.001+06:00

Are you desperately looking forward to try out a new hip commercial software? But not enough moolah in pocket to buy a genuine license/registration key ? Well, guess who is here to help..yup, its none other than your friendly neighborhood G-man aka the big G..aka "GOOGLE". You just have to type in the right "Open Sesame" and the entrance to free commercial software evaluation (or exploitation?) will open up. Here's how to do it -

The basic trick is to take advantage of Google's infamous indexing algorithm. Like many other restricted sites, Google is also known to index a site called Belarc Advisor which is actually a real and somewhat popular tool often used to backup software licenses. Many oblivious users have placed their keys in public Belarc servers thus paving the way for Google web-spiders to crawl all over them. Now onto the actual hack. What you need to do is to use a common searching phrase in Google web search to find the serial/registration-key you are after. To do so, just take this search phrase as a base

"Product name" "Belarc Advisor Current Profile" key:

Replace the Product name with the name of the software of your choice. Note that both with and without quotation search results have been found to be valid. For example, here's a link to prove the point..(*ssshhh..don't tell anyone)

Amit at DI writes:

Though most new Adobe and Microsoft software will require additional web or phone activation, that is not mandatory if the Belarc reports have Volume License keys. Scary.

Scary indeed. Too bad I'm already making a move towards Linux (which AHEM! isn't anywhere close to become complete).

Tags: internet, technology, windows, hardware, apple, web, microsoft, linux, tech, news

Customizing "Customize Google"

2007-06-15T19:59:00.000+06:00

The title sounds quite catchy, doesn’t it? Well, it should at least..because "Customize Google" (lets call it CG from now on. Why? Well, maybe because its sounds cool, r-tard.) just happens to be one of those Firefox extensions without which web-browsing would just be, browsing the web instead of utilizing what it has to offer in the shortest of times. Luckily, CG is a very popular Firefox extension and many Firefox users already have it installed. But, (un)luckily many of them just install CG and then forget to customize the options in order to use CG to its greatest extent. Now, here’s the felony of CG, it doesn’t have most of its best options ENABLED by default...why, I don’t know. Maybe they are trying to be cute Anyhow, here’s what I found lurking behind its list of options

Looks confusing?AHEM! Let me elaborate then. How many time have you wished that there was a way to save custom Google search options, so that the next time you want to search a page in Russian, or want about 100 search results per page rather than the default 10? I know I have wasted countless pennies behind such a wish, but alas...no one was there to console me

Introducing, Sticky Google Preferences. Enable this by going to Tools > Addons > Customize Google > Options > Preferences in your Firefox windows. Afterwards, select the settings you want to "STAY" , like eternal "Unsafe Search" (kids beware... malicious search results can make you go blind, heh heh).

There are countless other "Disable by default" options on CG that you might want to enable, just for the heck of it at least.

So if you don’t already have Customize Google installed, go do it this instant.

Tags: Firefox, Google, Customizegoogle, Customize, Search, Addons, Extensions, Results, SEO, Optimization, Hack, Mod

The great Shadow Shuttle that pointed to the moon

2007-06-10T00:44:00.001+06:00

While browsing through the boring boroughs of the net, I came across this amazing Astronomical picture depicting a very rare spectacle that shows the space shuttle "Atlantis" plume shadow pointing to the moon. This was selected as one of the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" over at NASA's website and this is what they had to say:

Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon? In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle's plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Next, just at sunset, the shadow is the longest and extends all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset, for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon, and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon. Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset, its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon, where the Full Moon just happened to be.

Neat huh?

Tags: space, science, astronomy, shuttle, news, technology, mars, space shuttle, discovery, moon

Download Nokia N-90 Music player for S60 devices

2007-06-04T18:33:00.001+06:00

I have one of those Jack-of-all trade symbian smart phones from Nokia. My 6630 has served me well (although it has been what...like a week or two since I bought it). But the default softwares and applications that came with the phone were mostly week and incompetent. That is why I was always on the hunt for s60 applications that would be able to replace some of these default installation on the phone. The other day I hit JACKPOT! Some intelligent bastard has ported the awesome music player in N-90 devices for s60 symbian phones! This is so rare to obtain, so hurry now before crude Nokia lawyers ask me to pull it down. The new media player has far more features than the crappy default media player available in most s60 devices, like:

Album Arts
Better ram/memory management (meaning your phone won't shudder any more if you want to do something else while listening to Dio)
Better assorting interface, with lotsa features.
Better UI
Faster Navigation

Check out the screenshots I took of this media player below:

[ Download N-90 Media player for S60 devices ]

Tags: mobile, symbian, motorola, news, s60, cellphones, samsung, mobile phones, cellulari, series 60

Tune XP: Find me a better tweaker under 1mb

2007-05-27T20:59:00.001+06:00

I still do worship CCleaner for being one of the best freeware applications that I ever downloaded, but on a different note yet at the same scale of appreciation comes yet another application. Its a nifty little auto-tweaking tool released by the guys at Driverheaven called "TuneXP". Unfortunately, they discontinued the developement and support for this amazing tool after the release of version 1.5 . Its a damn shame indeed. TuneXP is just under 1mb (* 0.94 to be precise) and its packed with useful features that includes bypassing some of Windows XP's most hideous restrictions like decreased NTFS perfomance, I/O lock limit, lack of prefetch optimization, disabled UDMA-66 mode etc. TuneXP lets you undo all these in a matter of minutes through one of the simplest interfaces I've ever seen, I mean why confuse the user with too much info on a certain tweak when all it does is improve your pc's performance? Here are some screenshots of TuneXP (courtesy of Softpedia) .* Click the thumbnails to zoom in.

Download TuneXP v 1.5 from the link below

Tags: guide, firefox, windows, software, squeak, speed, technology, blog, performance, hack, usic, mp3, song, guitar, video, tuning, tuner, theme, download, news, 2000, windows nt, microsoft, vista, mac, apple, linux, 2003

Speed up your torrent downloads with Protocol Encryption

2007-05-25T20:36:00.001+06:00

We all know how pesky our no-good isps can get. These days they would do anything and everything to restrict the amount of download a user is allowed to consume/Mo. That is where network/application hacks come in. One such rarely used option is called "Protocol Encryption". Available in most modern (modern as in alpha,beta,gamma and any other radioactive nomenclature, heh heh) torrent downloaders such as (me)utorrent, azureus and my personal favorite Flashget (** Flashget used to be great all around D/L manager. But these days, anything but bit-torrents suck from Flashget's context), "Protocol Encryption" allows and I quote from the awesome Torrentfreak page:

Header and message stream encryption in order to take out these traffic shapers.

Now why would you want Protocol Encryption? Its because ISP’s like Rogers are using bit-shaping applications to throttle the traffic that is generated by BitTorrent. That means? That means Miss Nancy Drew that they are restricting the most popular download medium of today from your thirsty clutches :) Its time to teach em' a lesson right?

Protocol Encryption A La Extraordinaire :

Unlike other random torrent hacks, Protocol Encryption really works! I noticed an increase of 20% in my torrent download speed as soon as I enabled it. Here's how to do it on utorrent in three simple steps:

Fire up Utorrent
Go to Options> Speed Guide (* Or press Ctrl+G)
Select "Enable Encryption" at the end of the newly created pop-up window (* refer to the screenshot) and then select "Use selected settings"

Thats it!

Yeah, pretty much. Now you can kiss Torrent restrictions goodbye (or can you?..*Ominous Mwahhaahaa)

Tags: bittorrent, download, p2p, movie, software, legendas, dvdrip, series, music, internet, mp3, video, freeware, windows, news, firefox

Ooh La la..Muchos Gracias Google (analytics)

2007-05-19T17:27:00.001+06:00

Google analytics got a major makeover..and its trippin :) There's colour and beauty everywhere. Plenty of whitespaces and cute mini-icons. Plus, the old analytics was a resource/bandwidth hog. The interface was confusing and it was hard to find vital stats like unique referrers, last 100 visitors, geographical stats etc. This time Google made no mistakes (or at least it apperas so for the time being). The new design takes less time to load, is much more soothing to the human eye and sports a new, elegant look. Way to go ! Here are some screen-caps I took, click for a bigger view:

Tags: internet, yahoo, seo, adsense, search, technology, microsoft, web, online marketing, blog, google, marketing, web analytics, google analytics, blogging, stats

Cut your web-surfing time to 1/2 x original time

2007-05-18T09:31:00.001+06:00

Surfing the ~~wave~~ web these days has almost become a mandatory part of our daily dose of tech, entertainment, fashion and other general information. However very few actually know how to speed-up their surfing experience, which would give them vital spare time to spend on real world stuff; because you know Virtual Reality ain't everything, right?

Only now do I realize how much time I used to waste in my early days of acquaintance with the web. The reasons behind that was simple, there was no one there to teach me the dirty (or are they?) tricks of trade. So I did the best thing I can, I "SELF-TUTORED" myself :) Anywho, here are some tips to help those regular web-surfers/web-junkies out there who have made the WWW their second life. Remember, these are not tweaking tips that would vitalize your network; rather these are simply hacks you should employ to your surfing behavior to get the best results out of them:

Tip 1: Use Quick Search

Most modern browsers, Like Firefox (v 2+) or Opera (v 9+) have the little known "Quick Search" feature ( I can't say if IE has the same feature or not, because I haven't used IE for a loooong time ). "Quick Search" allows you to define a keyword for any search box on any site. Later on, a user can use this keyword to search that site from the address bar only, terminating the need to visit the site everytime he want to search for something on the website.

To set up a "Quick Search" for one of your frequently searched sites (for example, flickr, google images or imdb), right click the search box (like I've done on the screenshot above which shows the main search-box on imdb) and select "Add a keyword for this search" (or "Create Search" in Opera). A small pop-up window will appear (screenshot below) that allows you to further modify the quick search option you just created.

Just define an appropriate keyword (like I've defined " f " to search flickr). Now you are all set. Next time you need to search a site, lets say flickr.com, you just prepend your search term with ' f ', put a blank space after that and press enter. This will work just as fine as going to flickr.com and using their native search box.

Tip 2: Use Smart Bookmarking, or be smart while bookmarking :)

Once again, this is an extremely useful yet rarely used feature of modern browsers. All of us use bookmarks to save the address(es) of the sites we like, right? But how many of us have used this smartly? I know what you are gonna say, " Why do I have to be smart to do the simple task of bookmarking, huh ?" Well, I'm not saying you have to be smart, its just that you can..and this would great aid you in later days, possibly saving dozens of hours from your surfing time.

Now onto smart bookmarking. To do this, bookmark a page just like you would do normally. Then go to your bookmark manager (Bookmarks> Oranize bookmarks on Firefox or Bookmarks>Manage bookmarks on Opera) and right click the bookmark you created moments earlier. Select properties and then define a Keyword (" Nickname " in Opera) for the bookmark.

Now lets see what did smarness help us accomplish, shall we? Lets say you want to visit the site your bookmarked earlier, you would generally type the whole address in the address bar and then press enter, right? WRONG. Now after defining a keyword for the bookmark (this is different from the keyword for search, btw) all you have to do is type that keyword in the address-bar (its " n " for news.google.com in the above screenshot) and then press enter; "VOILA" instant time saver. This will cut short a majority of your daily surfing quota just because you didn't have to type that humongous URL your favorite site had.

Hope these tips helped ;)

Tags: hack, gaming, diy, mods, pc, modding, music, news, video, case, firefox, software, internet, web, mozilla, flock, opera, microsoft, internet explorer, ie, surfing, beach, hawaii, sports, waves, travel, photos, surfers, ch, weblogs, technology, blog, design, google, business

Yahoo ad placement..Oops

2007-05-01T01:08:00.001+06:00

Serendipity does cause wonders sometimes :) I found this on reddit the other day. Apparently someone was brilliant enough to take a snap at this odd yet not so vaguely meaningful ad placement. The ad shows Yahoo! with the error message "404" (aka Page Not Found) written on the lower right. Only, this "404" is not part of the actually yahoo ad,but only a random number designating that section of the baseball stadium wall.

Thank you lord..it seems you too enjoy meddling with the web ^_-

Tags: google, seo, adsense, online marketing, msn, internet, microsoft, search, yahoo!, web, god, jesus, bible, christian, christianity, faith, religion, education, preach, of, muhammad, allah

Unbeatable network tweaks to supercharge your web-experience.

2007-04-26T23:06:00.001+06:00

How many times have you felt your ISP wasn't allowing you to use the full potential of your network connection? I know I have felt that strange tingle quite often, as if I was being violated of one of my basic rights (ok, it wasn't that excruciating). On the process of getting a cure of this twitch, I have come across quite a few TCP/IP tweaking tips. Here are two of my most favorite ones. I'd try to be as non technical as possible because to be totally honest, I myself can be considered a total n3wb when it comes to Greek-words like "TELNET" or "SSH" :)

Totally awesome networking tweak no 1:

aka " Increasing Half Open Connection is Rad !"

Platform: Win XP/Vista (Win 98 is..umm..already patched, & there are better hacks for Unix/Linux)

Tools of trade: A patch by LVLord . Download Link 1 | Link 2

How and Why:

If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This seriously hurts your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to a high amount of ip numbers. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it also cripples your downloads.
A nice way to fix this is to download this patch, it allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok (more is NOT always better). - From Torrent Freak (cause I couldn't have said it better )

Once you've downloaded the patch, do these:

Run the patch and select a decent number of Half Open Connections (I chose 50)
Windows will prompt you "OMFG someone is trying to get jiggy with your system files, would you allow it?" select (hell) "Yes"
Restart
Increase the amount of active connections in your download managers, like Utorrent or Flashget.

Totally awesome networking tweak no 2:

aka "Open DNS is your best bud"

Platform: Windows/Linux/Mac (this hack is all over the shiznit)

Tools of trade: Your ole' noodle and a little help from Open-DNS

How and Why:

You use DNS every time you use the Internet. The speed of your DNS service determines how quickly websites load for you. That's why you want your DNS service to be blazing. OpenDNS is so fast because we run some of the largest DNS caches around and do it on our own high-performance network, and purists say "The higher your DNS is on cached dope, the faster you'll dissolve in acid (woodstock hippies rejoice)"

To enjoy the benefits provided by Open-DNS...do these:

Select "Control Panel" from the Start menu.
Click "Network Connections" from the "Control Panel" choices..
Choose your connection from the "Network Connections" window..
Click "Properties" button.
Select "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" and click "Properties."
Click the radio button "Use the following DNS server addresses" and type in OpenDNS addresses (shown in the screenshot above) in the "Preferred DNS .server" and "Alternate DNS server" fields, then click "OK".
Restart your computer.
Visit http://welcome.opendns.com/ to see if your setup was successful. It it is, the you'll see the welcoming message.

These are the instructions for a machine running Windows XP. A detailed instruction page on platform specific settings is available here. I also recommend opening an account with Open-dns as they are introducing some really cool features recently..for free, as in beer.

Tags: networking, tcp-ip, ip, internet explorer, internet, google, hack, dns, domain, tweak, web, browsing, speed, ISP, provider, windows, linux, mac

Cuteness overload: Circa 1908, New York

2007-04-18T01:02:00.001+06:00

Usually, my masochist, testosterone driven psyche doesn't allow me to say "Aweee..that cute", but in this case I had to make an exception

Its a picture taken way back in the year 1908 that shows a small chick (thats "little" for chicken, mind it pervs) trying to pull a small cart full of flowers :) Its was taken by Rotograph Company of New York, 1908. View full size

Thanks for the refreshment Shorpy

Tags: funny, cat, animals, sexy, kitten, video, photos, kitty, love, weblog, chick, chicken

R.I.P Kurt..you were the truly Twain's occult twin

2007-04-12T22:44:00.001+06:00

Kurt Vonnegutt, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Excerpt taken from NY Times. For more info on Kurt, visit the article here.

Tags: cobain, nirvana, todd, movies, microsoftusic, pictures, pets, vonnegut, nightcrawler, books, book, writing, blog, authors, new, shopping, writer, buy, bestselling

IE is everywhere...yet no where close to being sane

2007-04-10T00:53:00.001+06:00

I came across this amazing shot by Peter Kaminski the other day that shows one of IE's most ominous error messages "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings" .

What is strange humorous is that this was being displayed on a Gigantic Electronic Billboard meant to show occasional adverts for a IKEA store. Peter said that :

The brightness of this image or something made the display jumpy, which is why it's hard to read. Other ads (the ones that actually loaded :-) displayed fine......My favorite part: the scroll bar at the bottom.

Which makes the situation even more awkward yet one that makes you say "I knew this would happen". I must mention though, the scroll bar is my favorite part as well ;P

Tags: firefox, microsoft, internet explorer, browser, internet, web, ie7, css, software, mozilla

Damn you Gmail

2007-04-01T14:09:00.000+06:00

This just had to happen, doesn't it? Its early in the morning, you've just opened up your browser window to check your Gmail account and *poof* . There's this Huge announcement from Google saying that they have just introduced a new feature called "Gmail Paper" (which,offcourse is/was still in beta) which would allow Gmail account holders to send a paper/physical copy of any of their emails/photos/attachments/mp3s belonging to their own Gmail account to their home address. I was like "Holy *******".The follow-up link saying "Learn More" leads to a page describing the whole process. At first I though this to be a brilliant, legit venture from Google after reading the first few lines which said:

Is it free?
Yes. The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium

But then I noticed something funny. The pictures of the so called "beta" testers weren't professional enough to be featured in the higher echilions of Google; and when one of those beta testers a Mr Bill K was declared as an " Armchair Futurist ", I knew there was something wrong with this almost fairytale esque offer.

Turns out this was another one of Google's infamous "April Fools" joke. Damn you, G-man (no, not the G-Man from half-life cause he's pretty cool). You should've stuck with the regular "Expose Google CEO's personal space on Google Earth" jokes, not something that would shatter my heart into a thousand pieces.

Although, I must say...the steps illustrated were pretty awesome

Tags: internet yahoo seo adsense search technology microsoft web online marketing blog

More Linux loving: Fixing GRUB

2007-03-27T15:25:00.000+06:00

A majority of those reading my post might say "Eeeww..WTF is that thing?" But those who have precariously noticed the title of the post and know the basics of Linux/GNU would be able to realize what I am trying to grab here :) That thing in the picture, coiling itself in self-disgust my friend is actually a "North American White Grub". But I'm not going to babble about this gastropod in my tech-blog, instead I'd discuss a procedure that involves a GNU project that shares the same name with this creepy-crawler. Yup, its "GRand Unified Bootloader" the almost ubiquitous Multiboot boot loader for Linux. Recently, after the upsurge in Debian based Linux distributions like Ubuntu/Kubuntu etc, many folks, rookies and pros alike who were once infatuated with Microsoft Windows have been drawn into the world of Linux. But after installing these new OS(s), they often find their boot phenomenon oddly disfigured. That is because something lurking inside their Ubuntu package has modified what is called the "Master Boot Record" of their precious Windows systems.

This is the bidding of GRUB. But, most of the time GRUB is virtually harmless. Often with a new Ubuntu installation, GRUB would always leave an option to select the OS of your choice, let it be Windows or Linux. But if once in a blue moon your GRUB records get screwed, so shall your system. On bootup you'll be presented with the menacing, "Error 15:GRUB bootloader corrupted" message .There is no way left but to restore the old mbr through the fixmbr command. This way everything related to your Ubuntu installations, all those tedious updates and applications would be lost forever. But thanks to my friend Zaher (who is an uber linux nerd , btw), I found a way to restore the GRUB menu to the way it looked before the screw-up. This tutorial would seem a bit odd, because most of the time general pc users would post ways to restore Windows MBR in their blogs, but in my case I'm doing the exact opposite.

Anyhow, here are the steps you need to follow to fix your screwed up GRUB menu:

Login with your Ubuntu Live CD.
Open a shell window
type the following

~$ sudo passwd //creates a new password because the live cd doesn't have a pre-define one

~$ su //creates a new user called "su" for use

~$ sudo grub //enters the grub control

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

1.(hd0,x) // '0' means primary HDD (slave=1) and x defines the partition number (eg:1,2)

2.(hd1,x) etc

grub> root (hd0,x) // select the linux installation here



grub> setup(hd0,x) //this rebuilds the grub menu.

After doing so you'll see a confirmation message. Note that the text in gray are just the explanations, you need not to type them. Just to be clear, here's a screen-cap (click to enlarge):

PS: Just so you don't miss out, here are two unofficial logos (stolen from the GNU of GRUB site) that look far better than the previous one.

Tags:computers ,gnu ,linux ,ubuntu ,kubuntu ,debian ,GRUB ,boot ,loader ,mbr ,fix ,
windows ,open-source ,unix ,software ,technology

Do the PDF with me

2007-03-09T20:34:00.001+06:00

No, I haven't invented a new form of dancing, instead I've found something worth its hexadecimal signature in gold (gold I tell ya). I'm talking about the free PDF converter called "do PDF". Do PDF installs itself as a printer so that you can convert any document(s), let it be txt,html,doc,ppt or anything else into the shiny new "Hip" format of the new-world which goes by the extension - "pdf". Sure there are a lot of pdf converter out there, but doPDF has some advantages:

Extremely lightweight (<3mb).
Very simple interface and unbeatable ease of use.
Integrates flawlessly into any application, MS Word, MS Power Point, Notepad..you name it.
and finally, its totally free.. Free as in beer.

You just have to download the app, install it and select the printer named "doPDF" when you want to make a pdf out of a currently opened document. Here, this might help a bit:

This makes the circle complete, with its rightful brethren "Foxit Reader" by its side, doPDF will reign supreme on my pc atleast.

Via [D/L Squad]

Tags: adobe, software, microsoft, download, acrobat, internet, google, ebook, windows, linux

All your bass are belong to Radio.Blog.Club

2007-02-23T17:41:00.001+06:00

If you are wondering why my post has such a weird title, please stop at once! Its high time to start learning about internet fads that once sweeped the WWW. Anywho, my client today is Radio.Blog.Club (nice domain hack isn't it) which is basically like youtube for music lovers (although, not equally popular) where you are allowed to upload your mp3s and share them with the world. So what makes this site legal you say? Well it would've been legal if users uploaded only non-copyrighted indie songs (which they don't) and like youtube, Radio.Blog.Club too is(~~not~~) legal. But in a way it is...no it isn't..dammit, leave this confusing fiasco and lets taste the caramel. What I'll be discussing today is a rare hack that can be employed to download any user uploaded songs from Radio.Blog.Club.

Radio.Blog.Club has tons and tons of user uploaded songs categorized in different genres. One cool thing about Radio.blog.club is that when you search for a song it comes pre-situated in a playlist of other songs. Although I am not sure about this, I am guessing that there must be an algorithm in place that makes sure all of the other songs in the playlist similar in genre or style to the song that was searched for, at least this is what it seems like. It is truly a great way to experience and learn about music you haven’t heard before. Now onto the download hack, there are actually two ways to accomplish this:

The nOOb way

The easy way is to go to Radioblogdownload and simply paste the URL from Radio.blog.club into the form. You'll be instantly rewarded with a scaled down url to the actual music file. But what is this! The file is in .rbs format. Don't worry, you just need to rename the file to .mp3 and it will work fine.

But heed my words, this is not recommended for nerd geniuses.

The N3RD way

Use URL Snooper to identify the URLs for the songs you want and download these with Flashget. Here’s how to do this:

Run URL Snooper and start sniffing the network, then play all the songs you are interested in on Radio.blog.club
Go back to URL Snooper to find the URLs. Filter by ’show all’, not media files. The URLs should be very easy to identify, but note that the extension is rbs not mp3 (you could filter by .RBS to make your job easier).
Copy the URLs and download in Flashget (or any other download manager). Make sure you are not playing the song you are downloading, as that seems not to work. After downloading rename the file extension from .RBS to .MP3 and you’re done.

Hack credit goes to Freewaregenius

Tags: music, podcast, tv, media, podcasting, news, sports, weblog, talk, politics, lyrics, film, poems, love, mp3, poetry, life, foto, games, diy, hacks, software, video, zedomax, mod, cheat, security, gunbound

The "Why use Gmail" subterfuge just got better

2007-02-23T09:00:00.001+06:00

The team of talented Google folks behind gmail just launched a video (also available through a link at the bottom of gmail.com, btw) that describes the main 4 reasons for using Gmail. They've out done their own ingenuity this time, and with artsy PUPPETS!

What is even more interesting is that they didn't hire a bunch of professional puppet-artists to make this clip, instead their own engineers acted out as different characters. This might've made the clip a bit shaky and non-fluent, but this amateur-ish effort also made this clip look so original (which Google is quite good at being). I only had one objections about the chines "Kyle" guy though. He looked quite smart, but he need to work on his pronunciation; he still has that Chinese accent rooted onto his punctuation.

So, now that Gmail has opened sign up for everyone, isn't it high time for you to become a convert?

Tags: google, email, internet, firefox, technology, web, yahoo, spam, software, blog

Amazing Architectural Marvel:Wind shaped Pavilion

2007-02-11T23:54:00.001+06:00

This is absolutely unbelievable. The Wind Shaped Pavilion is a design proposal for a large fabric structure that can be used as a public or private pavilion. As a lightweight fabric structure, the wind slowly and randomly rotates each of the six segments around a central open support frame. This continually alters the shape of the pavilion, while at the same time generating electrical power for its nighttime illumination.

and the results, well see for yourself (click the pics for a bigger view):

Now are they beyond belief or what? I haven't seen such brilliant piece of architecture in a long time.

Thanks to my friend Asif for the link and also props to Michael Jantzen who was originally responsible for this beauty to flourish

Tags: ganzheitliches, lebensgemeinschaft, community, oeko, resorts, news, portugal, berge, immobilien, tierschutz, design, art, photography, travel, culture, technology, urbanism, photos, history, web, css, business, internet, fashion, blog, marketing

Video games biotch

2007-02-07T21:15:00.001+06:00

Niceee. This animator is my hero for the day. Just because I don't have a Mac doesn't mean its uber cool. This goes to show the one cool thing (*actually, there are a couple) that Macs don't have and PCs do. F U goatee wearing faux cool guy. Let me quote one of the youtube commenters (with whom I totally concur):

LOL ! At least its a decent revenge unlike some strange geek who still lives with mum and dad ..

FYI, all these doesn't mean I won't try a mac out if given the chances that is.

Tags: mac, apple, windows, vista, ipod, steve, jobs, bill, gates, pc, computers, unix

Linux..umm the "Wow starts now"?

2007-02-07T18:47:00.001+06:00

You would be inclined to say, "What the? Isn't that like the tagline of the new and hip "Vista" OS from Microsoft?" Well certainly it is. But on his way through the toronto subway station J. Carlos Navea discovered that for once in a blue moon, the tables had turned thanks to a daredevil graffiti artist who also shares the same passion for Linux as the eclectic minority of the IT community . Carlos saw that on top of a new Vista ad, someone had spray painted the letters "L I N U X" in bright yellow, instantly bringing a smile to all those linux lovers out there. Heck, this is what he really saw (and he also apologizes for the picture quality which I think is pretty much ok). Click on the pics for a bigger view.

But, I'm sorry to inform you that as per Carlos's reconnoiter report, these ads have been removed from Finch station where they had to literally cut through the linux barrier to reach the morsel inside. This did leave a large square wound on top of Windows though ;)

Now onto criticism..muhaaahaa. I have none (and D/L squad says street art can be beautiful too) . Although, I've used what the cool kids call "Kiddy Linux" in the form of Ubuntu, Fedora Core or Kubuntu and at times they have entertained me quite a lot. But none them have been able to cause total awe. Don't get me wrong, I am an Open-source enthusiast with almost 90% of my daily software usage going through clean, open-sourced softwares, but I'm still looking for that extra "Oomph" in Linux. As a result I still prefer to use Windows XP despite the gazzilion of bugs and curses that it packs within. Wait..wait.. I can at least promise that I'd never fully convert to Vista though, because I really don't need to. That is why this public stunt entertained me quite a lot . Because this goes to harbor support for something (i.e., Linux) that needs a lot of development and can cause total wonders if visionaries kick in. Perhaps, this short lived visual would encourage that subway girl/guy to wonder "Hey, what is this Linux thing? Should I try it out?" and etc, who knows?

Via [ Downloadsquad and Loconet ]

Tags: gnu, ubuntu, windows, software, open source, unix, technology, debian, news, computers, art, link, street art, video, videos, street, richieste, punk, dark

Amazing Vista sidebar lookalike for Win XP

2007-02-05T20:18:00.001+06:00

Now that the initial buzz about Vista has started to die out, little by little..those Windows users out there (like myself) who are still reluctant to make a switch can at least savor the lush "Aero" goodies of Vista right within Windows XP. For example, Vista sports a sleek ans stylish sidebar that integrates nicely with the desktop environment and performs useful tasks now and then. Now you can have an identical application running on your Windows XP desktop too. Its called " Thoosje Vista sidebar " and its far better than most other Vista addons which generally come bundles with buggish Transformation packs. Here are some more screencaps

So, what are you waiting for?

Thoosje Vista sidebar D/L | Homepage

Via [DI]

Tags: microsoft, windows, software, windows vista, apple, longhorn, technology, linux, security, news, wordpress, blog, theme, widget, google, widgets, themes, blogging, vista, plugin

When it comes to photography...

2007-01-22T19:04:00.001+06:00

Transforming ordinary, day-to-day utensils into works of art is something I try to do at times but fail miserably to accomplish in the end. But that doesn't mean there aren't awespiring photographers out there who's works are so incredibly unorthodox and yet strangely meticulous that I stand still with a gaping mouth. Just like that..when it comes to creative photography, Chema Madoz rocks! Here's "Incendio"

And the paradoxical "Cubo"

Check out more weird and fascinating photographs by Chema Modoz - LINK

Tags: photography, weird, nikon, canon, camera, flickr, motif, sepia, tone, old, latin, artist

The secret KDE application launcher

2007-01-15T23:17:00.000+06:00

I don't know exactly why I've always preferred the warmth of KDE over Gnome, it happens just like "that". Today while browsing through a plethora of tutorials and hacks on Ubuntu/Kubuntu, I came across something which made me realize why I've loved KDE all along, one word "SLEEK". So, here's the deal (no, Alex..you haven't copyrighted this quote yet), have you ever wished that there was a key combination in Kubuntu (lets revert to the K-word, shall we) that would let you launch any application promptly? Well, that is where 'Katapult' or as I call it, "The Mega K-Thing launcher" comes in; and let me tell you it is one of the sleek-est features I've seen in KDE/Kubuntu since I started using it over a year ago. Here's what to do,

From anywhere in the current KDE/Kubuntu window press "Alt+Space" and 'presto' out pops a rounded box with 'useful' written all over it. Without delay, start typing the name of the application you want to open (in my case it was Gwenview, so I started with 'G' ), and instantly you'll see application icon appear inside the previously opened rounded box with the letters you just typed being highlighted (see screencap below)

Now all you have to do is press "Enter" and the application will start instantly. Now thats innovative!

Thanks How to Geek

Tags: ubuntu, kubuntu, kde, gnome, environment, shorcut, hack, mods, geek, linux, open-source, open, code, gui, ui

How geeks really spell "I care"

2007-01-04T19:05:00.001+06:00

When it comes to greeting cards and end of the year seasonal cuddly words, I really do find myself stranded upon loads and loads of net-based apperals. But, finally I've found something to my absolute liking. I wish everyone would send me seasonal greetings in ways such as this (actually, no I don't. I was just being melodramatic). Its called "Geo Greetings" and it has "Geek" written all over it. Basically, its a "Web-Generator"..but with some vibe intended for the geek kind. This is what it does, it gives an output based on words you enter..how is that unique right? Well, what if I say, it gives you a text output made of friggin buildings? Thats right, this generator is also a mashup of google-maps and seeks buildings that look like those particular letters you just wrote on the input box. It also gives you the location of the actual buildings via the Google Maps API when you hover over them. Afterwards , you can send your loves ones a link to this interactive "Greetings Message"

So, give it a nudge yourself: Geogreetings [Via: Net-O-Rama ]

Tags: generators, tools, web2.0, online, fun, blog, search, internet, funny, google

Bizarre X-ray photography of Bert Myers

2006-12-31T15:55:00.001+06:00

Now only if Wilhelm Röntgen was a bit more articulate, we would have seen similar art-forms arise far earlier in the 19th century than expected. However, a doctor seem to have done the impossible, that is to use an everyday medical apparatus to create mesmerizing art-works. I'm talking about the retired physician Bert Myers (Professor of Surgery at LSUMC) offcourse. Working with X-ray machines was a part of Bert's research work, and soon enough he started taking photographs. But instead of the obviously used visual spectrum of light, he decided to use the high-frequency X-rays; the results that followed were bizarre..almost alien looking. Before becoming pro, Bert had taken some photography courses under Ansel Adams. His X-ray art works come in both black&white and color. Most of the subjects of these photos are animals,minerals,vegetables etc. You've already seen the hypnotizing "Shell Photograph" on the left side, here are three colorful lilies under X-ray:

Some words from Bert:

In 1972 I studied with Ansel Adams at one of the last workshops the master himself taught. In the 1980's as part of my medical research I obtained a precision X-ray machine, and used it to make images of the very small blood vessels growing into healing wounds (microangiography).All Xray images are B+W, but in the late 80's I began making them in color, using filters in the enlarger and Cibachrome paper.

Go, take a look at Bert's work: Bert Myer's Fine Art Photography [Via: Net-O-Rama]

Tags: music, design, photography, culture, technology, news, books, events, film, travel, x-ray, cxr, images, unbounded medicine, fast-facts, kermit, fast facts, : travel, art, photos, flickr, life, photo, personal

The epic software war chronology

2006-12-28T21:04:00.001+06:00

I came across this messy illustration (click the pic for a bigger view) the other day while searching for stuff to read on open-source movement and yada yada. At a first glance, all I noticed was that it had slashdot's "Borg-Bill" at the very center. Afterwards I started noticing numerous scribbles and arrows, menacingly facing each other as if they were ensembles to join in on an epic battle. It turned out that indeed, this was a snap-shot of the long-running battle between the forces of Mount Redmont and the tiny gremlins and zillas from the Open Source shire called "FOSS" ( how much geeky can this post apparently get?). The source of the image held an enchanting tale, that goes forth like this:

The original Software Wars began in 1998 when Netscape first announced it was going to open source the browser code. It was updated a couple times a year after that for a while. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since August of 2003

Apparently, this graphical representation is the work of Li-Cheng Tai created using Inkscape and GIMP on Ubuntu. This battle-map is still under process as newer and newer Microsoft threats are released everyday. But, fortunately or not I don't know..Microsoft has been loosing a lot of ground lately. Which, offcourse might usher in a new era of either

1 ) IT freedom or

2) Total destruction of the general pc users and overall domination of geeks who only accept mails that match their pgp keys

Is this map a thing of archeological metastasis or something vibrant, that is upto you to decide :)

Tags: internet, technology, windows, hardware, apple, web, microsoft, linux, tech, news, open-source, software, blog, web 2.0, personal, FOSS, redmont

Embedding binary data in an inline URL

2006-12-20T23:34:00.001+06:00

It just so happens that there has been an awesome RFC encoding HACK since 1998 that nobody quite knew about. I myself was bewildered to realize that something so obvious can turn into a thing of coded mass. Basically, this hack allows someone to copy/put a string of data, lets say an image file or an mp3 file right into the html/txt document which can then be retrieved to materialize the actual file ! How cool is that? Let me clarify the things a bit:

You have a jpeg image file which has a special code associated with it
You can put that whole image file inside a pre-authored document just by copy-pasting that associated code inline with the documents
With this done, a whole image (or any file) can be embedded in an online document without worrying about where to host it. For example "foo.jpg" becomes "data:image/jpeg;base64,base_64_encoded_jpeg_goes_here"

This hack can be put to special uses like:

javascript based image editor
storage of attachments within a web page or blog entry (simplify file hosting)
post images or files to forums that allow url posting
sneak attachments past grumpy email filters

You can see a pre-encoded data-image here (btw, thats Jason Striegel from hackzine) or there (the happy moose :D)

Go encode yourself some data-swag right now, in here (might be down due to digg effect) or there

[Hack VIA: Hackzine]

Tags: hacks, software, technology, web, blog, google, apple, tech, security, internet, news, information, design, internett, video, storage

Save thy system drive space

2006-12-19T21:26:00.000+06:00

If you've run into situations where your system drive is running out of space fast, and yet you need to free as many bytes as possible but can't spare to uninstall any previous programs/softwares, then this simple hack might be a lifesaver. You only need some instant wit and one small (yet nifty, I tell ya) tool released by Microsoft called "Tweak UI". With this tool, you can transfer (or relocate) so called special system folders like "My Documents", "CD burning cache folder", "My Music/Pictures" and many others to another drive on your HDD that has plenty of space to spare. Follow these stpes then:

1) Download Tweak UI v 2.1.0.0 from here or here (direct link)

2) Fire up Tweak UI. Go to My computer> Special Folders (as highlighted in the screenshot above)

3) Select the Special Folder you want to change the location of in the drop down menu

4) Change the location to some other place with plenty of empty spaces. You can see in the screenshot above that I've changed mine to "G:\My Documents" which used to be "D:\.......\My Documents" before (D:\ being my system drive)

5) Reboot (*Important)

Thats it. Now that was short and sweet, wasn't it? You didn't even have to mess with the registry settings either

What would God's inbox look like

2006-12-12T22:38:00.000+06:00

Seriously...what would it really look like? Times magazine has some inside scoop on gods inbox. Apperantly, according to times online, God's inbox has the following peculiarities:

God uses a Mac
God's favourite colour is blue
He does read his emails, despite most of them looking like spams :)
God is one, and its this one god who receives all the request from a multi-cultural band of faithfuls from around the world that involves manical muslims/christians/jews, cheerleaders, cancer patients, rwandan refugees and atheish geeks from oxford who have no anus.
* ~~Update:~~ He also receives mails from random daities like Zeus or buddha and from some movie stars like Mel Gibson too

My favourites are the following ones, in sequential order..the first one from an Al-queda insurgent:

Next comes, Zeus, the ruler of Olympus, the king of gods

Here is a tiny peak at the inbox, click the picture to see the full view

You can also download the full pdf file [ Via: Times ONLINE ]

Tags: yahweh, jesus, sex, gods, hera, mythology, hephaestus, aphrodite, greek, poseidon, religion, christianity, faith, christian, life, spirituality, bible, church, christ