Meeran's blog

Google's Snowy Easter Egg

2011-12-18T10:49:00.000+04:00

If you search for [let it snow] using Google, you'll have a hard time checking the search results. Google uses a JavaScript animation that adds some snowflakes and covers the entire page with snow.

Fortunately, Google added a "defrost" button that makes the search results reappear. You can also click anywhere on the page and move your mouse to "defrost" the page or draw something. Click the "+" button and you can share the Easter egg with other Google+ users.

The History of Web Browsers

2011-10-11T17:36:00.000+04:00

From the dark ages to this day.

Via: WinBeta

Source: TechKing

Incredible strength

2011-10-11T17:30:00.000+04:00

From one finger pull-ups to weighted one-arm pull-ups, Magnus shows how he has become one of the best climbers in the world.

Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-09T16:37:00.000+04:00

At his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.

Simple and elegant tribute to the late Steve Jobs by Jonathan Mak.

(Image from NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Timer for your morning exercise

2011-07-07T00:19:00.000+04:00

http://e.ggtimer.com/morning

Google's Tilted Easter Egg

2011-04-07T16:30:00.000+04:00

If you search for [tilt], [tilted] or [askew] on a smartphone using Google, you might notice a strange special effect: Google's search results page is tilted to the right. It's an Easter Egg, just like the 'did you mean' link displayed when you search for [recursion].

{ via Search Engine Land }

360 Degree Holographic 3D Prints And No Glasses Required

2011-03-09T21:06:00.003+04:00

Here is something interesting made by an European company called Mindblowing, this is a three-dimensional model of a few buildings designed in AutoCAD and printed on special 2-dimensional surface, creating a 360 degree 3D-dimensional hologram like print that can be viewed without the need of any kind of 3D glasses. They utilize a technology called ZScape, developed by Zebra Imaging, and it sure looks really impressive, but is also quite expensive.

The price of a single large print can go pretty much at the level of a not so expensive autostereoscopic 3D display for example, so these prints, although looking very cool, are not something that is intended for normal users – they are meant for professionals like architects, designers etc. You will surely impress your customers by showing them such a print from a 3D model of a project you have designed for them, before actually starting to work on a building or whatever the project is about. What do you think about these 360 degree Holographic 3D prints?

Impressive Computer Shortcuts and tricks

2011-02-21T18:18:00.000+04:00

Speed Up Ur Shut down !!

Open task manager(Ctr+Alt+Del),

Select shut down tab. and press ‘ Ctrl ‘ key while select Turn Off from dis tab.

Count 5 4 3 2 1 Voila!!! U r window will rapidly shut down.

System Information

Go to the Command Prompt and then type ‘systeminfo’ to get useful info, including the uptime which can be redirected to a file as well.

type ‘systeminfo > info.txt’

to redirect the output to a file.

Speed up Opening Acrobat Reader

Do u get irritated when acrobat reader takes 5/10 seconds to load when you want to open a pdf document. There is a way to speed up the loading.

1. Go to the installation folder of acrobat reader

2. Move all the files and folders from the “plugins” directory to the “Optional” directory.

Now your acrobat reader will load very fast and almost as good as notepad.

Google Public Data Explorer - Adding search power to Public Data

2011-02-17T13:04:00.002+04:00

Google introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with their data provider partners, they've curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity(OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) topopulation density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

Explore data

DEFINITION: Electric power consumption measures the production of power plants and combined heat and power plants less transmission, distribution, and transformation losses and own use by heat and power plants. Per capita figures expressed per 1 population

The Girl Effect

2011-02-17T11:17:00.001+04:00

Watch this video, don't miss it.

for more info visit http://www.girleffect.org/

Google Rolls Out Two-Factor Authentication For Everyone. You Should Use It.

2011-02-11T22:59:00.002+04:00

Given how much data we’re trusting to online sites these days — email, search history, even voice calls — the repercussions to having our account passwords phished, hacked, or guessed are worse than ever. Unfortunately as far as consumers are concerned, account security has been stagnant for years: nearly every service requires a username and password, and that’s it. Cue the scary music and a Dateline special on having your identity stolen.

The feature is called two-factor authentication, and it’s been available to Google Apps customers since September. Now it’s rolling out to everyone. It’s a bit confusing and the set-up process will probably intimidate a lot of people, but it’s well worth looking into if you value your account data. You can activate it by hitting the ‘two-step verification’ link on this page. So what exactly does it do?

In short, it makes it so that when you go to login to your Google account, you need to enter both your existing password and a special new second passcode — one that you don’t have to write down or memorize because it’s always changing, so it’s nearly impossible to phish. You generate this second password by firing up a new mobile app available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry called ‘Google Authenticator’, or by having Google call or send you a text message to a phone number you entered when you set up the feature. That password will expire in just a few minutes though, so be quick (and yes, you will feel like a secret agent the first few times you use it).

CrunchBase Information

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

14 Proven Side Effects of Sitting All Day

2011-02-06T23:07:00.000+04:00

It should come as no surprise that sitting around and not moving all day isn't really good for your body, but many may not be aware of just how many problems can be caused by such a sedentary lifestyle. Whether you choose to sit all day or are required to by the logistics of your job, you may want to take a new approach to your workday after learning just what health effects sitting can have on the body. It could impact not only your health, but the lives of your loved ones and expenditures towards healthcare.

Deep Vein Thrombosis. Most are familiar with this condition through warnings urging people not to sit without getting up on long flights. The same goes for sitting for hours on end anywhere– at work or at home– without moving. If you don't get up and walk around occasionally, you could be putting yourself at risk of potentially deadly blood clots in your legs.
Obesity. Surprise, surprise, sitting all day rather than standing or moving around can play a contributing role in obesity. While not burning enough calories is part of the problem, studies have also shown that being overly sedentary can slow your metabolism and change how your body functions, further contributing to weight gain.
Increased Risk of Heart Disease. You think a workout after work is enough to make up for sitting still all day? Think again. New studies have shown that exercise once a day, even for an hour, isn't enough to make up for sitting all day at work. Those who work out and sit all day are just as likely to develop heart disease as those who don't work out and sit all day, something that should make any health conscious worker reevaluate their daily schedule.
Risk of Diabetes. Along with an increased risk of heart disease, sitting for prolonged periods of time can increase your chances of developing diabetes by as much as 7 percent. Why? Sitting all day actually causes your body to slow down considerably and can result in increased blood sugar (since your body doesn't need the sugar for energy it simply stays in your system), insulin resistance and a much less healthy you.
Raised Cholesterol. Those standing desks and treadmills desks won't sound so bad after you learn what other side effects sitting all day can have. Not only will it raise your blood sugar, but your cholesterol as well. Sitting causes enzyme activity in the body to drop by as much as 90%, preventing those helpful enzymes from grabbing that fat and using it for energy. In fact, after a few hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%.
Herniated Disk. Our bodies aren't really designed to sit all day long. Sitting puts a lot of pressure on your hips and spine, and can lead to some injuries in them over an extended period of time. One such injury may be a herniated disk. Continued pressure on your spine may cause a disk to come out of place, creating a painful condition that can require medication, physical therapy or even surgery.
Poor Posture. Do you always sit correctly when you're sitting down at work or at home? More than likely you're not, which can put undue pressure on certain parts of your body and lead to poor posture even when you're not sitting at a desk. Weakened muscles and tight joints caused by prolonged sitting take their toll over time, and can leave you feeling tired, cause extreme lower back and neck pain and harm your body as a whole.
Knee Pain. When you sit, your knees are generally at a ninety degree angle. At first, this doesn't seem so bad, but after sitting all day, for weeks on end, this can take its toll on your knees. Sitting in this position puts pressure on the kneecap and can lead to pain and swelling and may result in having to wear a knee brace while at work.
Muscle Weakness. It makes sense that moving less results in loss of muscle mass and muscle weakness. One of the hardest hit muscles is the gluteus maximums, or the buttocks. It is one of the largest muscles in the body and plays a big role in just about any movement you could want to do, so it's essential that it stays strong. Weak gluteus muscles can result in lower back pain and hip bursitis as well.
Increased Risk of Depression. Sitting at your desk all day may make you depressed through the sheer tedium of it all, but there's a scientific reason for it as well. Reduced movement means less blood flow. Less blood flow means fewer feel-good hormones are moving through your body, helping you keep depression at bay. The effects can be even worse for those who already struggle with or are more prone to depression.
Slowed Metabolism. When you sit for an extended period of time, your body starts to slow and shut down on a metabolic level. Since you're not moving around, your circulation slows and you're burning fewer calories and fewer fat burning enzymes are moving through your body. All of this can lead to an overall slowed metabolism that can affect your energy levels and cause you to gain weight.
Neck Problems. Many people who work at a computer extend their necks to see or bend them slightly when working. While over the short term this may not be a huge problem, but over long periods of time it can start to harm the muscles and joints in the neck and lead to pain even when you're not at work.
Back Aches and Pain. One of the hardest hit parts of the body when you're sitting all day is the lower back. It is under a large amount of pressure and can begin to ache while at work and for hours afterward. While stretching, working out the muscles and moving around can all help, many sitting all day just don't realize how much they're hurting their backs and could face long term problems trying to get them back into shape.
Shorter Life Span. Those who sit more than six hours a day are at an increased risk of early death from all causes, higher by an average 35% for women and 18% for men, for those who exercise. Those who don't exercise and sit all day are at a 94% higher risk of premature death for women, and a 48% higher risk for men. This is no joke for those who spend their days at a desk. Get up, get exercising and start reducing the effects of being sedentary before it's too late.

from Amazing Facts by amazingfacts

The Google Art Project Makes Masterpieces Accessible to All

2011-02-03T01:27:00.001+04:00

Google has announced its new Art Project, in collaboration with 17 international art museums, to bring a new world of art online. Featuring collections from the Tate Britain, Museo Reina Sofia and Van Gogh Museum, Google has used its Streetview technology to help bring the museums to life.

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Each image is 7-14 billion pixels in depth, enabling viewers to explore brushwork and intricate detail not before available online, and you can zoom, bookmark and comment on the picture.

How to Train Your Brain

2011-01-23T17:27:00.003+04:00

In our imaginations we fancy ourselves possessors of the wit and skill at repartee of a Robin Williams. Until we stand tongue-tied over cocktails. But it's not entirely a flight of fancy. It's entirely possible to think a little faster, a little smarter, a little wittier.

Think of it as cross-training your brain. It's not all that difficult, insists Joel Saltzman, author of Shake That Brain. Conventional wisdom holds that we use a mere 10 percent of our brain cells. Why not put the rest of your head into gear?

Saltzman offers some fun, simple techniques that will help flex your brain muscles.

Question your assumptions. Give conventional wisdom a nudge and re-think your environment. Consider an everyday product and list everything you know to be absolutely true about the product. Now go back and question every assumption. Tony Basche did just that when he stopped assuming locks had numbers and invented the Wordlock—he won $25,000 plus royalties in a Staples contest for his innovation.
Laugh. Watching Comedy Central may give your creative thinking a boost. Studies show that people are better at solving exercises designed to measure creative thinking immediately after exposure to comedy. Subjects said they felt more alert, active, interested and excited after watching comedy. But there's a caveat: Humor can be distracting and can decrease performance on non-creative tasks.
Limit TV. When you watch television, your brain goes into neutral. In one study, people watching television had increased alpha brain waves—their brains were in a passive state, as if they were just sitting in the dark. No wonder TV watching has been tied to low achievement.
Think beans for breakfast. Eating the right morning meal can have a big impact on brainpower. Kids who have fizzy drinks and sugary snacks for breakfast perform poorly on tests of memory and attention. You can get the biggest brain boost from—believe it or not—beans. High-protein beans up cognitive test scores by a wide margin.
Exercise. Physical activity is as much a workout for your brain as for your body. Exercise actually stimulates growth in brain cells. Schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam scores. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on memory tests than their sedentary peers. In fact, as they age, walkers show far less cognitive decline than that of non-walkers.
Master eloquence. Verbal charm is a powerful tool—it can get you that job you are seeking or that date you are after. Each day, prepare flashcards with a few new words and review them at least four times a day. Content yourself with fewer than eight new words per day; more than that could inhibit retention. At the end of the year, you will have increased your vocabulary by 2,000 words!
Get your nutrients. Unlike muscles, the brain cannot store energy; it must be constantly replenished with nutrients. Studies show that a diet rich in antioxidants and vitamins boosts memory and cognition. The best way to meet needs is by eating a variety of foods. In fact, healthy individuals who eat a balanced diet rarely need supplements. So load up on foods like nuts, whole grains, vegetables, fruits and fish.
Play with your brain. Learn a new language, master a new hobby or engage in friendly debate. Playing with your brain stimulates blood flow and strengthens the connections (synapses) between nerve cells in the brain. Read challenging books, do puzzles—and whatever you do, use your other hand to comb your hair or brush your teeth.

The Most Fun You Can Have With Boiling Water [Video]

2011-01-17T22:20:00.001+04:00

Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.

2011-01-17T22:15:00.000+04:00

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night, is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says.

At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.”

Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.

How the japanese multiply

2011-01-17T22:14:00.001+04:00

It may be an old one but I just found out at reaction [beta]

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Easy to remember strong passwords for all those on-line accounts - Tips from Mozilla

2011-01-17T22:13:00.000+04:00

One place to find everything new from Google

2010-09-26T17:32:00.000+04:00

If it seems to you like every day Google releases a new product or feature, well, it seems like that to us too. The central place we tell you about most of these is through the official Google Blog Network, where you’ll find more than 100 blogs covering all kinds of products, policy issues, technical projects and much more.

But if you want to keep up just with what’s new (or even just what Google does besides search), you’ll want to know about Google New. A few of us had a 20 percent project idea: create a single destination called Google New where people could find the latest product and feature launches from Google. It’s designed to pull in just those posts from various blogs. We hope it helps you find something useful you’ve never tried before.

Posted by Ji Lee, Google Creative Lab

60 Stunningly Beautiful Minimal Business Cards

2010-09-25T22:30:00.002+04:00

An effective business card is a great way to impress your clients. While there are many courses in Designing Business Cards, minimalism a hot trend in brand designing as well as in overall Design community because of its effectiveness and simplistic approach.

So today I have come up with really beautiful and creative minimal business cards which will make you say wow.

1. I Love Typography

As we all know this popular blog – no surprise they are creating their business card in minimalism and using light, beautiful typography.

2. Business Card: Moretz

In business cards widely used are letterpress and embossed effect, simple texture also here really make card unique.

3. Bhootan

4. My Card

5. Labs

6. Heterobrain

7. Stephen De Wolf

Beautiful simplicity – both sides are exactly opposite each other – black/white, but green line just connects both sides and makes them familiar and related.

8. Gregory J. Wills

Simple, but technically very well spaced business card. Notice how nothing is near the edges, all information is kept in center, image to the left – text to the right in way where is very easy to read it.

9. Fuse

Really black cards with bold,white text just cannot look bad – interesting texture in background just make card more unique.

10. Business card with wooden texture

Simple business card – but with embossed wooden texture really stand out.

11. Elizabeth Maybury

Beautiful typography is this case is really enough for great branding.

12. Business Card

13. B/&W/ONI

14. Personal business card

15. Stav Garts – Photographer

From business card you can tell right away with which profession it’s owner is working in without even reading text. Smart.

16. Flower Lantern

Did you notice different card size?

17. Design With Style

18. Roman Feria

19. Impressions

20. Cotton Business Card

21. Minimalistic

One more photographer business card – again standing out with great photo related associations.

22. Revolta Films

23. 19 Marks

Catchy – card sides are painted orange, little things matter!

24. Argement

Interesting light gradient effects added create professional look with ease.

25. Anatas

26. Sweat Breaker

Nice, big rounded corners grab attention – unique presentation as well.

27. Hoey Design

Letterpress effects are really popular trend lately – but there is a reason for it – great look.

28. Coma Minimal

29. Tower Co

30. Financial Risk Group

31. O2 Fitness

O2 letters have got here all the main attention with sketched like look, very minimal business card with main focus on great typography.

32. Brilliant Business Card

33. Michaelnagy

34. Kelly Kirlin

35. Rent to Own

36. Janelle Williamson

37. BËRTHAMA

38. Vinam

39. P2 Concept

40. GS Stirling

41. Also Know as

42. Amanda Front

43. Ventures

44. T&T

45. Dphotofolio

46. Montage BC

47. Tordai Law Office

48. Merkelbach

49. The Runway

50. The Secret Agent

51. Hero Film

52. T-White

53. Handmade Cafe

54. Steven Whitely

Unique approach – card related with email – measurethrice[at]gmail.com. Interesting.

55. Fundbreak Card

56. Wildorb

57. Visual Treat

58. Project Graphics

59. Yes

60. Vevia

Twitter API Calls Doubled Since April: Now Serving 70,000 Every Second

2010-09-25T22:30:00.001+04:00

Have you ever wondered how much traffic Twitter handles in a given day, or what software sits behind the curtain of the popular service? A recent presentation reveals some of the answers. Twitter’s incredible growth becomes obvious when you compare the recent numbers to those announced at Chirp.

On September 9th, Twitter’s university recruiting team stopped by UC Berkeley to talk about the company and what it does. The slides from platform engineer Raffi Krikorian’s talk, Twitter by the Numbers, are now online, and they disclose some fascinating technical details about the social media giant’s operations.

Twitter serves over 70 million tweets per day, totaling over 12GB of tweet text alone. Many of those messages are delivered to client apps and web sites through the Twitter API to the tune of six billion API calls per day (double what was announced at Chirp in April), or about 70,000 API calls per second. All told, the service generates 8TB of data every day, which is eight times more than the New York Stock Exchange.

Pop quiz, engineers: Your web service needs to deliver real-time message traffic to an asymmetric digraph of over 150 million users. What database do you use? WHAT DATABASE DO YOU USE?

Shoot the hostage
Oracle
MySQL
Write your own database

If you’re Twitter, the correct answer is #4: Create your own database software, call it FlockDB, and release it on github. (By the way, if you picked option 1, maybe software engineering isn’t the right career choice for you.)

FlockDB is just one of the home-grown, high-performance software systems Twitter uses to support its tremendous growth. Others include:

hosebird, a “near real-time” streaming API back-end (instead of REST, which is only “pseudo real-time”); and
snowflake (also on github), a network service to generate unique IDs at high scale (MySQL couldn’t keep up, and was a single point of failure).

With a stated goal of supporting “half the world and all its devices,” Twitter faces many engineering challenges. This peek under the hood (full slides are embedded below) shows that they’re aware of the potential problems, and are working hard to steer clear of the fail whale.

Via Delyn Simons

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API Profile, 459 mashups

The Most Powerful Colors in the World

2010-09-25T22:11:00.000+04:00

When we released our report on the colors of the social web, based on data analyzed by our Twitter theme tool, we were surprised that blue was such a dominant color in people's profile designs. Was Twitter's default color influencing their design decisions? Or is blue really THE most popular and dominant color online? ...We decided to look at the colors in the brands from the top 100 sites in the world to see if we could paint a more colorful picture.

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[click to view in full size]

Turns out the blue-berry doesn't fall far from the bush. The web landscape is dominated by a large number of blue brands... but Red occupies a large amount of space as well. What's driving this? You might want to say that carefully organized branding research and market tests were done to choose the perfect colors to make you spend your money, but a lot of the brands that have grown to be global web powerhouses, started as small web startups... and while large corporate giants with branding departments spend quite a lot on market research, user testing, branding, etc. Lots of the sites listed above got started with brands created by the founders themselves with little to no research into the impact their color choice would have. I once asked Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook why he chose blue for his site design... 'I'm color blind, it's the only color I can see.' ...and now 500 Million people around the world stare at a mostly blue website for hours each week.

While the initial reasoning for the colors chosen may be trivial, the impact that these dominant players now have in the web world will surely influence the smaller startups that want to share in the positive color associations created by their bigger siblings... Once a rocketship of a web startup takes flight, there are a number of Jr. internet astronauts hoping to emulate their success... and are inspired by their brands. And so Blue and Red will probably continue to dominate, but we can have hope for the GoWalla's, DailyBooth's and other more adventurous brands out there.

Would A Corporation By Any Other Color, Still Profit As Well?

Color is an important part of any brand, but along with the actual name of a company... Is it a great brand that builds a great company, or the other way around? Would Google, Google just as well with another name? My guess is yes.

And almost 10 years ago, Wired Magazine looked at the Colors of the corporate America... Blue & Red dominate again.

Companies spend millions trying to differentiate from others. Yet a quick look at the logos of major corporations reveals that in color as in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. The result is an ever more frantic competition for the best neighborhood. Here's a look at the new blue bloods. [Wired Magazine]

The Colors of 1 Million Brand Icons

And a brand can extend further than just your logo... On the web it reaches into the address bar in the form of a Favicon. It's quite amazing to explore, but the top 1,000,000 website Favicons can be browsed here at Icons of the Web:

See if you can find the COLOURlovers icon!

Uh-oh! But Will We Run Out of Color on the Web?

Last year Francisco Inchauste posted a very interesting article on SixRevisions about the limited resource of color... not in physical form, but in mind share. (Even linking to a post we did a while back about T-Mobile and it's trademark of 'Magenta')

As a designer, it is important to be aware of the trending colors, and how they are being applied in products and work produced today. What really isn’t being discussed by the design world at large though are the limitations being set on color. Color is as free for us to use as the air we breathe… or is it? [SixRevisions]

The Next Big Color Trend

You are the next great founder, designer, influencer or creative mind that may build the next Facebook. You have the power to influence future color trends... What colors will you choose?
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Google Scribe - get suggestion as you type

2010-09-08T13:59:00.000+04:00

Google launched a very interesting tool that offers suggestions as you type: Google Scribe. It's not exactly the service I anticipated 3 years ago, but Google Scribe works surprisingly well. For example, I started to type 'This works sur' and Google suggested 'This works surprisingly well', which is exactly what I wanted to type. Instead of typing 14 characters, I could only type '1' or press Enter to select the first suggestion.

'Google Scribe provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe's suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use,' explains Google.

The nice thing about this service is that you don't need to use Google's editor. You can add a bookmarklet to your browser and use Google Scribe in Gmail, Blogger,
Google Docs
or on any web page that includes text fields.

Google Scribe only works for English right now, but I'm sure that Google will add many other languages in the future. If you don't like to see suggestions for all the words you type, enable the on-demand mode (Ctrl+Shift+J) and you'll only see suggestions when you press Tab.

Since Google uses data extracted from web pages, you'll see a lot of strange suggestions like this pattern from Google's navigation bar:

or this text, which is frequently used on IngentaConnect's site:

{ Thanks, Robert. }

from Google Operating System by Alex Chitu

moodturn.com [Relay & Enjoy] - Natural sounds for you to feel relaxed

2010-09-07T05:27:00.004+04:00

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it."

Sydney J. Harris

It is a free web service, developed by Ramunas Geciauskas, that provides ambient music and soothing landscapes to help you relax and avoid stress in your daily life.

The site loops music and visuals if you'd prefer to let it play in the background while you work in another window. MoodTurn might be the best way to block out your noisy cubicle neighbour.

visit the link to relax http://www.moodturn.com

IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube

2010-09-06T05:59:00.000+04:00

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and IITs, the premier engineering colleges of India, have earlier joined hands to produce the world’s largest repository of technical video lectures and web-based courses geared towards science and engineering students.

The IIT and IISc faculty have recorded around 4,750 videos for this project till date and anyone, anywhere can watch the lectures online through YouTube at youtube.com/iit.

The project – NPTEL - is funded by the Indian Government and content of the courses is based on the curriculum that’s suggested by AICTE. It should therefore benefit all science and engineering students of India especially those studying in institutes where the local teaching faculty is not at par.

Unlike similar initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare or Stanford Engineering Everywhere, the course material offered by NPTEL on YouTube is currently not available under a Creative Commons license but that may change in the near future. Also, if you are on a slow Internet connection, you can order DVDs of these videos courses for offline viewing.

Thanks @Krishnan for the tip.

This article, titled IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Education, India.
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Let Google Docs convert your files [JPG, PDF etc] to Google Docs format using OCR

2010-08-14T04:52:00.001+04:00

This addition includes converting image and PDF files to text using recently added Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The full list of files that can be converted include:

For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tsb
For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf
For presentations: .ppt, .pps
For OCR: .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf

To convert your file, right-click on it while in the document list and select Make a Google Docs copy. This option leaves your original file in place and adds a new Google Docs copy to your docs list.

Now you convert your old files and collaborate on them in cloud.

Originally posted by: Jim McMaster, Software Engineer

Google Wave to Be Discontinued

2010-08-06T15:28:00.000+04:00

Google's blog announced that Google Wave, the innovative communication platform released last year, will be discontinued.

'Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began.'

Google Wave has a lot of interesting features, but the interface is confusing and difficult to use. While many thought that Google Wave will reinvent email, Google's service combined an online document editor with an instant messenger. Google Wave allows you to create 'live' documents that are edited collaboratively in real-time, but it's more than a conversational version of Google Docs. It's based on an open protocol, so you can edit a wave using multiple services. It's extensible, so you can build gadgets and robots that add new functionality.

Google Wave had a lot of potential, but Google didn't manage to build a compelling user experience and define some use cases for the application. Instead of building a general-purpose interface for Google Wave, Google could've used the platform to create multiple applications with clearly-defined goals: a new version of Google Chat, a new version of Google Docs, a brainstorming app etc.

Now that Google Wave is discontinued, some of its feature will be added to other Google services (Gmail, Google Docs), but the platform will vanish. It's clear that Google doesn't want to invest in niche services, which is a big opportunity for startups. 'We want to do things that matter to a large number of people at scale,' said Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in an interview.

Give your Eyes a Break with the 20-20-20 Rule

2010-07-29T17:54:00.000+04:00

If you spend a good part of your day using the computer, the 20-20-20 rule, that I recently learned recently from my doctor, might also help you relax your tired eyes.

The rule goes something like this.

The screen is bright and therefore, if you don’t blink your eyes as often as you should while working at the computer for long hours, you can have dry eyes sometimes even followed by redness.

To help you deal with this problem, the 20-20-20 rule suggest that after every 20 minutes, you (the computer user) should take a break for at least 20 seconds and look at objects that are 20 feet away from you.

Since it is nearly impossible for any computer users to remember that they have to take a break every 20 minutes, there are free software programs that can help you in your mission.

For instance, there’s a Windows utility called Eye Defender that sits in the system tray and, after a fixed interval, it will auto-run a visual training (see video below in full screen) for the eyes on your screen.

You are supposed to follow the pointer on the screen and this in turn should help relax your eyes.

WorkRave is another handy app that reminds you to take breaks at regular intervals to prevent computer related stress (including eyestrain).

It offers two kinds of breaks – micro-breaks, these are short and are mean to relax your eyes, and then there are rest-breaks where you are supposed to walk or stretch a little. Workrave also has a built-in wizard that demonstrates the various types of stretching exercises that you can do during these breaks.

If you are an active computer user, these tools need to be on your desktop.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

A Guide to Getting Started with Google drawings

2010-07-29T17:53:00.000+04:00

Last year Google published Getting Started Guides for spreadsheets, documents, and presentations -- because using a product for the first time can sometimes be challenging. People have found these very helpful, so Google has created a Getting Started Guide for drawings.
This guide covers the basics about Google drawings and gives you all the information you need to start creating, editing, formatting, and sharing your drawings. It also includes some tips and tricks about features you may not know too much about. If you already use Google presentations, but aren't so familiar with drawings, you can read this guide to learn, for example, how to embed your drawing into a presentation.

Don't forget to share this link with your family, friends, and coworkers who may want to get started with Google drawings.

After you're finished reviewing the guide, check our Help Center for more information. And if you have questions or want to share your suggestions and comments, visit product ideas page.

Posted by: Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist

Use Google as a Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

2010-07-04T23:55:00.000+04:00

Here’s another undocumented feature of Google that most of us are probably unaware of.

You can use Google web search to quickly find the time of sunrise and sunset for nearly every city in the world using the syntax “sunrise <city name>” and “sunset <city name>” respectively.

For instance, a query like sunrise Delhi will show you an approximate time when the sun will appear next in the Indian capital while sunset London will display the time when the sun is likely to disappear from London – all times are mentioned in the local time zone.

Other than Google, you can also find detailed information about the sunrise and sunset times of various cities using Wolfram Alpha.

Thanks Angus Kidman.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Very Cool Ads - Awareness Advertisements

2010-06-30T00:28:00.000+04:00

Very Cool Ads - Awareness Advertisements

Drills Through Anything

New Currency Symbol for Indian Rupee

2010-06-27T23:25:00.001+04:00

Like the US Dollar ($) and the Japanese Yen (¥), the Indian Rupee too will soon have a unique sign that will be recognized worldwide.

The Government of India has shortlisted five designs following an all-India contest and one of these will be chosen as the official symbol. The babus will make the final decision though I wish they had gone for an online poll or something similar.

For more, watch this video report from NDTV.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Use the Phonetic Alphabet

2010-06-27T23:22:00.000+04:00

Every once in a while I get frustrated trying to figure out whether someone said “t” or “d” or “p” while spelling out a word. So as a public service, I urge people to learn the phonetic alphabet. It makes life easier — and on top of that it is very very cool to spell words quickly. My name for instance is spelled as “mike echo echo romeo alpha”

Letter Word Pronunciation
A ALPHA AL fah

B BRAVO BRAH voh

C CHARLIE CHAR lee

D DELTA DELL tah

E ECHO ECk oh

F FOXTROT FOKS trot

G GOLF GOLF

H HOTEL HOH tell

I INDIA IN dee AH

J JULIETT JEW lee ETT

K KILO KEY loh

L LIMA LEE mah

M MIKE MIKE

N NOVEMBER NO vem BER

O OSCAR OSS car

P PAPA PAH pah

Q QUEBEC KWEE beck

R ROMEO ROW me OH

S SIERRA SEE air RAH

T TANGO TANG go

U UNIFORM YOU nee FORM

V VICTOR VIK tah

W WHISKEY WISS kee

X X-RAY ECKS ray

Y YANKEY YANG kee

Z ZULU ZOO loo

How to Use Notepad to Create a Log File

2010-06-20T18:00:00.001+04:00

Microsoft Notepad is a word processing tool included with Windows and is installed by default under the Accessories program group. You can use it to create a log-type file that adds the current date and time each time the Notepad file is opened. This article describes how to create a log file with Notepad.

MORE INFORMATION
To create a log file in Notepad: Click Start, point to Programs, point to Access...To create a log file in Notepad:

Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Notepad.
Type .LOG on the first line, and then press ENTER to move to the next line.
On the File menu, click Save As, type a descriptive name for your file in the File name box, and then click OK. When you next open the file, note that the date and time have been appended to the end of the log, immediately preceding the place where new text can be added. You can use this functionality to automatically add the current date and time to each log entry.

from Microsoft knowledge base,
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=260563

Take a test drive into the cloud

2010-06-06T06:46:00.001+04:00

We’ve talked about the power of cloud computing and how millions of businesses have already gone Google by switching to Apps. But sometimes it’s hard to imagine what working in the cloud would really mean, and frequently, people ask us how they can better understand the benefits of Google Apps specifically for their business. How would online collaboration really affect your workplace? And how could increased email storage or integrated IM and video chat actually impact your company’s productivity?

To answer some of these questions, we’ve created the Go Google cloud calculator to let you take a test drive into the cloud. Whether your company is big or small, brand new or been around for a while, this tool will give you a sense of the benefits of going Google in an easy-to-understand way. Here’s a quick demo:

Once you take a spin and learn about the potential cost and time savings, the tool will create a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet or even a poster that you can share with other decision makers within your business as you discuss going Google.

To show you a real-life example, we asked one our customers, Smart Furniture (you may remember them from their recent guest post), to test-drive the tool for us. And here’s their poster:

So if you’ve been thinking about moving your business to the cloud, take a couple minutes and see what it would be like to go Google. Be sure to tweet and share your results. The Go Google cloud calculator can be found at http://www.gonegoogle.com/#utm_campaign=gogoogle&utm_source=en-na-us-ogblog-gogoogle_060110&utm_medium=blog.

Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise team

Try Google Docs Without a Google Account

2010-06-06T06:40:00.002+04:00

Now you can try Google Docs even when you don't have a Google account. It's not difficult to create a Google account, but sometimes you want to show someone how Google Docs works without revealing sensitive information from your Google account.

If you go to https://docs.google.com/demo/, you can start editing a document, a spreadsheet or a drawing and share the links with other people, so you can collaborate in real-time. Google says that the documents are only available for 24 hours from the time they are created.

It would be nice to create documents in Google Docs or upload files to Google Docs without associating them to a Google account. Maybe they aren't very important or maybe they include important information that you aren't allowed to post.

Google Wave, Available Without Invitation

2010-05-24T22:49:00.000+04:00

At the Google I/O developer conference, Lars Rasmussen announced that Google Wave no longer requires invitation. If you have a Google account, go to wave.google.com and you can use Google's real-time communication service.

Google Wave is now available in Google Apps, so that businesses, universities and other organizations can improve communication flow.

'Anyone on a wave can edit or reply to any section, keeping discussion in context with relevant content. Everyone's typing shows up instantly, and Google Wave lets new participants get up to speed quickly with organized discussions and playback to see how a wave evolved.'

Google Wave really shines at Google I/O, where it's used to view live notes, ask questions and discuss sessions. Here's a wave for today's keynote.

3D Pavement Art by Julian Beever

2010-05-24T22:48:00.000+04:00

3D Pavement Art by Julian Beever

More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers

2010-05-10T22:33:00.000+04:00

9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. While these additional applications won’t initially be covered by the core suite’s support and service level agreement, this change will open up the spectrum of Google’s functionality to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps and we’ll evaluate future support options.

We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer.

This will be a significant overhaul to our underlying systems and we want to make this transition as seamless as possible for customers. We’ll be sharing information in advance so Google Apps admins can plan ahead which additional Google services users can access with their accounts and other aspects of this roll-out. Stay tuned here for further updates in the coming weeks and months, and visit our Help Center for more details.

Paper cuts

2010-05-10T22:32:00.000+04:00

Who knew the humble toilet roll can be a work of art? Anastassia Elias cuts out people and objects (with paper the same color scheme as the roll) and sticks them inside, so that they look as if they’re part of the toilet roll itself! See more at her portfolio site. The juxtaposition of light and shadow makes it a whimsical display of 3D art!

Google Buys BumpTop, 3D Desktop

2010-05-10T22:31:00.000+04:00

Google bought BumpTop, an interesting software that replaces your computer's desktop with an intuitive 3D environment where you can quickly organize your files.

BumpTop is a fresh, innovative 3D desktop user interface that lets you stay organized and share your files and photos from your desktop naturally and easily. BumpTop has the look and feel of a real desktop, so it's natural and intuitive. But unlike a real desk where stacks can become unruly, BumpTop lets you pile files intelligently -- by project, by file type or any way you choose.

People organize their real-world desks in any number of different ways, to suit their own style. Research shows that everyone stacks and piles their documents, and almost a third of people indicate stacking and piling is their preferred way of organizing their desks. However, people have had to conform to the rigid, conventional desktop organization which is grid and folder based. BumpTop allows users to create a digital desktop that is intuitive and easy to use, just like their physical one but with the power and intelligence of the underlying computer to increase productivity in a fun and playful way.

You can still download BumpTop for Windows and Mac until the end of the week. The application doesn't use a lot of resources and it completely replaces your desktop. Even if it doesn't support multi-touch or Linux, BumpTop seems like the perfect addition to Android.

{ via CNet }

Founders of Two Successful Internet Startups Share Their Secrets

2010-05-10T22:30:00.000+04:00

Adam Smith and Drew Houston, founders of two successful Internet startups – Xobni and Dropbox – share secrets that helped their products win two million users in two years with mostly word-of-mouth marketing and no advertising spend.

Besides building a great product, some key tips mentioned in the deck include:

Go where your early adopters hang out
Simple landing page: capture interest/email address
Focus: do a few things really well instead of a lot of things poorly
Hook the user first, educate over time (tours, tip emails, etc.)
Meet journalists in person (they’re very busy people)
Niche first, world later (Facebook was initially restricted to Harvard students)

If you run an online startup or are planning to launch one, this is one presentation that you should definitely have in your bookmarks.
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Google Dictionary Shows Usage Examples

2010-05-01T13:09:00.000+04:00

"Google Dictionary has a lot of useful information about English words and expressions. Besides showing synonyms, antonyms, definitions from the dictionary and from the web, related phrases, Google Dictionary added usage examples from Google News.

Google extracts the quotes from news articles and attributes the quotes to their authors. You can find quotes in Google News if you search for the name of a popular person and click on the 'Quotes' section (e.g.: Gordon Brown, Steve Jobs). Unfortunately, you can't restrict Google News results to quotes.

The Seven Notes—Dhanashree Pandit Rai at TEDx Mumbai

2010-05-01T13:00:00.000+04:00

This content is from The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.

While liveblogging TEDx Mumbai few days ago, I’d raved about Dhanashree Pandit Rai’s talk demystifying Hindustani Classical Music. Well, here’s the video:

(This post is written in Raga Bhairavi.)

HP Slate Vs. Apple iPad

2010-05-01T12:28:00.000+04:00

Pencil vs. Camera

2010-04-29T09:23:00.000+04:00

These awesome photos were done by Ben Heine. More pictures after the break.

[via LikeCool]
"

Google Reader Play - And now for something completely different

2010-03-27T14:39:00.000+04:00

Since I've been using Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to share with you an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, it automatically enlarges images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the 'like' button, and google'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and google'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don't even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, you need to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where google finds all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn't intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It's designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you've read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking 'View in Reader Play' from the feed settings menu.

FindIcons: Free Icons Search Engine

2010-03-21T00:38:00.000+04:00

FindIcons is an icon search engine with a large database of free icons. It is powered by a sophisticated search filtering and result matching system, enabling you to easily find what you need.

All icon packs on the site are free-to-use, at least for personal usage. Some icon packs are not allowed for commercial usage while some owners require a link to their website.

Features

Large database of over 300,000 icons (more than 2000 icon packs)
Support Tagging by all users
Allows you to create your own sets with your favorite or frequently used icons from the database
Integrated icon converter enabling you to convert icons into BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PSD, SVG, TGA, or TIFF formats
Allows you to upload your icons and share with rest of the community

Visit FindIcons at http://findicons.com/
content from,
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/w3avenue/~3/tNauaaHCkdM/

50 Most Creative Anti-Smoking Advertisements

2010-03-21T00:29:00.001+04:00

Many anti-smoking ads in the past are rather gruesome with rotten body parts that terrified people. Those messages are straight forward in showing the final consequences if continue to smoke. Now these ads have gone into a different approach where they are creative and inspiring to look at. In your opinion, which is a more effective method?

Download / View Source

content from,

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/10Steps/~3/afBLYIrhkvw/

30 Habits that Will Change your Life

2010-03-21T00:15:00.000+04:00

Developing good habits is the basic of personal development and growth. Everything we do is the result of a habit that was previously taught to us. Unfortunately, not all the habits that we have are good, that’s why we are constantly trying to improve.

The following is a list of 30 practical habits that can make a huge difference in your life.

You should treat this list as a reference, and implement just one habit per month. This way you will have the time to fully absorb each of them, while still seeing significant improvements each month.

Health habits

Exercise 30 minutes every day. Especially if you don’t do much movement while working, it’s essential that you get some daily exercise. 30 minutes every day are the minimum recommended for optimal health.
Eat breakfast every day. Breakfast is the more important meal of the day, yet so many people skip it. Personally, I like to eat a couple of toasts in the morning along with a fruit beverage.
Sleep 8 hours. Sleep deprivation is never a good idea. You may think that you are gaining time by sleeping less, when in reality you are only gaining stress and tiredness. 8 hours are a good number of hours for most people, along with an optional 20 minutes nap after lunch.
Avoid snacking between meals. Snacking between meals is the best way to gain weight. If you are hungry, eat something concrete. Otherwise don’t.
Eat five portions of fruits and vegetables every day. Our body and brain loves getting vegetables and fruit, so I highly recommend eating as much of them as possible. Five portions is the dose that’s usually recommended by many health associations.
Eat fish. Fish is rich of omega 3 and other healthy elements. At least one meal per week of fish should be enough for getting all these nutrients.
Drink one glass of water when you wake up. When you wake up, your body is dehydrated and needs liquid. Make the habit of drinking one glass of water after you wake up in the morning. Also, drink more during the day.
Avoid soda. Soda is often one of the most unhealthy beverage you can find. Limit your consumption of soda as much as possible and you’re body will be grateful for that.
Keep your body clean. I don’t advise spending your day in front of the mirror, but a minimum of personal care does never hurt.
If you smoke, stop it. There’s no reason to smoke anymore, and quitting is easy.
If you drink, stop it. Same as above. Don’t think that alcohol will solve your problems. It never does. The only exception is one glass of wine per day during meals.
Take the stairs. This is just a hack that forces you to do a minimum of exercise. Instead of taking the elevator, take the stairs.

Productivity habits

Use an inbox system. Make the habit of keeping track of all the ideas and things that comes to mind. You can use a notebook to do this, and then sync everything on your computer.
Prioritize. If you have a list of things to do, where do you start? One way is to prioritize your list. If you are in doubt, ask yourself: “If I could only accomplish one thing today, what would it be?”
Plan, but not too much. Planning is important, and you should decide in advance what you are going to do today or this week. However, planning for more than a few weeks is usually inefficient, so I would not worry too much about that.
Wake up early. Waking up early in the morning is a great way to gain extra time. I personally like to wake up at 5 am, so that by 9 am I have already accomplished what otherwise would have taken me many days..
Check your email only twice per day. Email can easily become an addiction, but it’s usually unnecessary to check it every 10 minutes. Make an effort and check your email only once or twice per day, see if the world will still rotate as before after you try this.
Eliminate unimportant tasks. Being busy all day does not mean you are doing important stuff. Eliminate every activity that’s not important, and focus on what really matters.
Clean off your desk and room. Having a clear room and desk is important to maintain focus and creativity.
Automate. There are a lot of tasks that you need to perform every day or every week. Try to automate them as much as possible.
Set strict deadlines. When you do something, decide in advance when you’re going to stop. There’s a rule that states that you will fulfill all the time you have available for completing a task, so make an habit of setting strict deadlines for maximizing your productivity.
Take one day off per week. Instead of working every day, take one day off per week (for example sunday) where you are not going to turn on your computer. Use that time for doing recreational activities like going for a walk.

Personal Development habits

Read 1 book per week. Reading is a good way to keep your brain active. With just 30 minutes per day you should be able to read one book per week, or more than 50 books per year.
Solve puzzles. Quizzes, word games, etc. are all good ways to exercise your brain.
Think positively. You are what you think, all the time.
Make fast decisions. Instead of thinking for one hour wherever you are going to do something, make your decisions as fast as possible (usually less than 1 minute).
Wait before buying. Waiting 48 hours before buying anything is a tremendous money saver, try it.
Meditate 30 minutes per day. A great way to gain clearness and peace is through meditation. 30 minutes are not a lot, but enough to get you started with meditation.

Career habits

Start a blog. Blogging is one of the best way to put your word out. It doesn’t have to be around a specific topic, even a personal blog will do.
Build a portfolio. If your job is creating stuff, building a portfolio is a great way to show what you are capable of. You can also contribute stuff for free if that applies to your work.

What do you think? What are the habits that changed your life?

Image credits (homepage)
from Freestyle Mind by Oscar
http://www.freestylemind.com/30-habits-that-will-change-your-life

Want to Know the Sleeping Time of your Friends or Celebrities

2010-03-19T18:54:00.003+04:00

When do they sleep?

Actors, singers, journalists, sportsmen, musicians, writers, politicians, bloggers and your friends – they are all active on Twitter now. The only time when they are not posting messages on Twitter is probably when they are sleeping.

Introducing Sleeping Time – a mashup that will help to determine the approximate sleeping cycle of any Twitter user with a click.

Here are 1-page sleeping reports of Tech & Bollywood.
The algorithm uses the timestamp of the last 500 or so updates of a Twitter user to calculate his or her sleeping time. Consider this app in the early pre-alpha stages so please let me know if you encounter any bugs or if your sleeping report is way off the actual pattern.

The icons are courtesy Nuvola.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Breathtaking Sculptures Made Out of A Single Paper Sheet!

2010-03-16T12:32:00.001+04:00

Beauty of Photography !!

2010-03-15T19:20:00.003+04:00

Beauty of Photography !!

Apps Script Gallery for Google spreadsheets

2010-03-13T16:56:00.000+04:00

Every week, the Google Apps gang here in New York organizes a movie night. It’s always a lot of fun, but organizing it is chaotic! Naturally, we use a spreadsheet to keep a list of movies we’d like to see (that’s the easy part!), and then on Tuesday evening there’s a storm of email as we try to pick a winner.

Always fans of logic and the democratic process, the team wrote a script — to first collate a list of movie showtimes, then invite everyone to vote. The script automates the process, eliminating the drudgery and leaving us more time to canvas and cajole support for our favorite films.

Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to all Google spreadsheets, along with a new Apps Script Gallery that let’s everyone — not just those who are JavaScript-savvy — reap the benefits of Apps Script. You can see just how easy it is to make use of a script in the video below:

To kick things off in the gallery, we put together some wacky demos showing what’s possible with a script: you’ll find games of hangman and sudoku, some fractal art and a very practical unit conversion script.

You can find these scripts, and more, in the Apps Script gallery by going to Insert and then selecting Script... in any Google spreadsheet.

For more details on the Movie Night script, and to get started writing your own scripts, be sure to check out today’s Google Apps Script announcement on the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by: Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

Manymoon, an Online Project Management Software for Google Users

2010-03-01T18:30:00.001+04:00

When you create a Google Account, you automatically get access to web-based office apps, email, calendar, file storage, tasks list and instant messaging but one piece that’s still missing from the Google cloud is “project management.”

Even Google Apps, a service that is so popular among businesses, doesn’t have any project management related features to help teams plan and coordinate better. Some people use spreadsheets in Google Docs and Gmail for co-ordinating tasks but isn’t that complicated.

If you are a Gmail or Google Apps user and are looking for an online project management app that can integrate with your other Google services (mainly Google Docs and Google Calendar), Manymoon could be a good choice.

Getting started is easy. You can sign-up using your standard Gmail Account or Google Apps account. Then create a project and add users to the project by manually entering their email addresses or you can even import contacts directly from your Google Apps, Outlook, LinkedIn, or Yahoo accounts.

Once your project is setup, you can add tasks and assign them to yourself or other team members. You can attach existing Google documents to individual tasks or upload new files from your desktop into Manymoon and the service will automatically save a copy of these files into your Google Docs account.

Similarly, once you associate your Google Calendar with your project, all events, pending tasks and project milestones that you create inside Manymoon will automatically show up in your Google Calendar.

You can then view your project calendar from within the Manymoon project or the regular Google Calendar interface.

Manymoon also offers time-sheets to help project teams track the time team members spent on tasks and other project items.

The basic version of Manymoon is free and still offers unlimited users and projects but you only get 5MB space for storing files and one project calendar. If you are a Google Apps Premier user, you can get up to 1 GB of storage space for free.

Though the programs lacks some advanced features (Gantt Charts and Invoicing for example), what I really liked about Manymoon is the uncluttered interface and every feature that’s there just works as you would expect.

Zoho Projects is another useful web-based project management software that, like Manymoon, also integrates well with Google Apps.

Manymoon, an Online Project Management Software for Google Users
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

"

websites to learn english

2010-02-19T09:58:00.000+04:00

What to Do When You Cannot Open a Particular Website

2010-01-25T12:46:00.002+04:00

Your computer is connected to the Internet but you are unable to open a particular website though all the other sites are loading without issues.

For instance, you can open yahoo.com and bing.com but it takes forever to load www.google.com even though the site is up for everyone else in the world.

How to Troubleshoot your Internet Connection

Step 0: Like with everything else, switch off the modem, restart the computer, and turn on the modem again. Also clear the Internet cookies and browser cache. Problem gone? No, proceed to the next step.

Step 1: Temporarily disable your computer’s firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background. If you are now able to access the websites that were previously not loading, your security program is causing the problem. As as workaround, you can add that site to the “trusted” zone in Internet Explorer and see if it works.

Step 2: Open your hosts file and see if there are any entries for sites that are currently unreachable from your computer. The hosts file is located in the following folder:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Step 3: Try a remote screen capture using Aviary. For instance, if the URL of the error site is abc.com, try opening aviary.com/http://abc.com in your browser. This will help you make sure that the site you are trying to access is not down at the source.

Step 4: Clear your DNS cache and run the ping and traceroute commands against the problematic site to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue.

ipconfig /flushdns
tracert www.error-website.com
ping www.error-website.com

If the DNS server is an issue, you can easily switch to Google DNS or OpenDNS without having to call the ISP’s support. However, if the ping and traceroute connections are successful but the sites remain unreachable, proceed to the next step.

Step 5. Reset the modem to factory defaults and re-configure it with the same username and password that was provided by the ISP. You can reset the modem by pressing a pin inside the hole located at the back of the modem for about 10 seconds. Or you can call your ISP support and let them guide you through the steps over phone.

The last step is very likely to fix your internet connectivity problem.
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

GlideOS now offers 30GB of free storage on their gDrive

2010-01-17T15:41:00.002+04:00

from Download Squad by Lee Mathews

If Google's not going to come right out and release a product called gDrive, someone else might as well. That someone else appears to be GlideOS.

The service recently bumped their free offering to a whopping 30GB -- 30 times more than what Google is offering. You can also upgrade to a premium account which gets you 250GB for $50US per year -- the same price gets you 200GB from Google.

There is a downside, of course. Glide doesn't allow just any old file - their storage is earmarked for media and documents, so you won't be uploading things like installers and archives.

To make it easier for us to get our files synced up with the cloud, Glide provides a desktop client for Windows, Mac, Linux (RPM), and Solaris/OpenSolaris (yes, really!). There's also a mobile portal which you can access from just about any smartphone.

Glide's free storage is a nice complement for netbooks with smaller SSD drives - and a solid option for sync-powered backup of your important files.

Project Natal - Interact with your Xbox 360 using natural gestures and voice commands

2010-01-08T21:27:00.001+04:00

Project Natal will enable you to interact with your Xbox 360 using natural gestures and voice commands with no physical controller. It is Controller Free Entertainment.

Watch this video to get surprised.

Seasonal changes over a year in 60 seconds

2010-01-08T21:11:00.000+04:00

Time-Lapse Video – One Year in One Minute

Activities of human beings in the year 3000

2010-01-08T11:01:00.002+04:00

Activities of human beings in the year 3000

Predictions for Google's 2010

2010-01-07T09:18:00.001+04:00

from Google Operating System by Alex Chitu

1. Google Chrome's bookmark sync will be extended to sync the documents stored in Google Docs.

2. Google will launch a service that indexes and ranks web applications.

3. Google will use different interfaces for displaying search results, depending on your query.

4. Google's search engine will group related results.

5. Google Image Search will let you upload an image and will show related images from the web.

6. Google Street View's images will become searchable and Google will start to show information about different places in Street View.

7. Google will release an online development environment optimized for building web applications.

8. An open platform for search experiments: tweak Google's ranking factors, customize the interface and create a better search engine.

9. Android will have more users than Windows Mobile.

10. Many browsers will copy Google Chrome's features: the simplified interface, the rapid development model, the lightweight extensions, sandboxing, compiling JavaScript code.

11. Google Drive will finally launch, but it will only be an extended version of Google Docs. Instead of sending attachments, you'll be able to upload files to Google Drive from Gmail.

12. Google Wave won't become successful, but its features will be used in other Google products.

13. Google will buy True Knowledge and will launch a fact search engine.

14. Gmail's spam filtering algorithms will be more transparent and you'll be able to define custom rules for flagging messages as spam.

15. Google Trends will show popular web sites from different categories.

16. Google Desktop will be discontinued and replaced by Google Quick Search Box.

17. If you use Google Chrome, you'll be able to use the most important features of Chrome OS.

18. Google users will be able to add comments and start conversations if they want to find some information about a hot topic.

19. Google Toolbar will be available for Chrome and Google will start to bundle Chrome with Google Toolbar for IE.

20. Google will buy Spotify and make it available for free.

Watch your favourite movie in Microsoft Paint

2009-12-28T19:19:00.000+04:00

Here are the steps to watch your favourite movie in MS Paint,

1.Open your favourite movie player and play any movie.
2.Hit "PrintScreen" Key, keep playing the movie in the player, dont stop it.

3.Open MsPaint.

4.Select "Edit>Paste" Or Hit "CTRL+V"

Don't expect more than just playing the movie from MS Paint, after all it is just for basic drawing.

Combination Of Plants And Animals - Amazing Photos

2009-11-21T18:20:00.003+04:00

Combination Of Plants And Animals - Amazing Photos:

Combination Of Plants And Animals - Creativity by Photoshop Expert

Google Fast Flip - Read news as you flip through the newspapers

2009-11-21T17:52:00.006+04:00

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.

As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, Google provides aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like.

In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

4Shared provides 10GB of free online storage

2009-11-20T18:03:00.002+04:00

4shared provides 10GB of free online storage to Upload, access and share your music, video and photos.
Signup can be done using your OpenID to easy signin.

visit this page to have online tour to know how effectively we can use 4Shared features.

Alternatively, you can try Microsoft SkyDrive or StoreWith, which claim that they provide 25 GB and Unlimited free online storage respectively.

Automatic captions in YouTube videos

2009-11-20T15:12:00.001+04:00

YouTube added a feature that generates video captions. They've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

The feature only works for English and it's been enabled for a small number of channels that usually feature talks and interviews.

Automatic captions make YouTube videos more accessible: you can watch videos with the sound off and you can translate the captions into another language using Google Translate.

Web based googletalk gadget for group chatting without using gtalk client

2009-11-17T11:29:00.004+04:00

This web based googletalk gadget is somewhat handy when we compared to gmail chat sidebar and no client side application is necessary to use this gardget. All you have to do is just bookmark below link from your browser and click the bookmark when you want to initiate chatting session, surprisingly you can do group chatting with your friends.

googletalk gadget link http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout

Rightclick above link and add to your favorites, and moreover, if you use FireFox browser you can set to open it in sidebar while bookmarking above link.

Would you like to get your chatting translated to your friends while chatting?, answer is just add google translation or translitertaion bot in your group chatting, whatever you type will be translated and can be viewed by all those in the group.

There are also third-party sites like Meebo that let you chat with your friends from other IM networks as well.

Mind boggling high speed video of water drops falling

2009-11-10T00:24:00.003+04:00

Do you imagine how it could be if we capture video of water drops falling with the speed of 2000 frames per second ?

Watch it here!, don't miss it!!

ESLPod - Podcasts to improve your English knowledge

2009-11-07T16:41:00.016+04:00

Be it a part of your Continuous Learning Program.

ESLPod stands for English as a Second Language Podcast, Podcasting website http://www.eslpod.com/ having audio resources to listen directly from PC, MP3 player or iPhone to improve your English vocabulary, coversational and listening skills. Though audio resources are free to download from their website or from iTune, you can register to become a paid member to access addition learning guides.

Listen this sample podcast English Café 211 to understand the usage of words & phrases mentioned below,

Topics: U.S. government reparations; TV home shopping networks/shows; neither do I versus so do I versus either I; to talk with versus to talk to; to put the cart before the horse (to put the horse before the cart)

Visit the website http://www.eslpod.com/ to listen & download more podcasts.

Secret feature of Google Reader - RSS Feed & Google Reader explained in Plain English

2009-11-06T01:20:00.005+04:00

Though there are many feed readers available for reading feeds, I use Google Reader and I am impressed with it's simple user friendly interface. Watch below video to find some of the cool & interesting features in Google Reader.

Go to the Google Reader, sign in to your account, Hit the following keys in the below given order.

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A

You will get a ninja feature in the sidebar of the Google Reader, and smiley picture for Like icon might change to heart, when you click it, multiple hearts will start flying, do it yourself to know what you may see when you click UnLike icon.

To cancel this ninja feature, again use the same code given above.

I hope that you enjoyed this feature, I also hope that you may find below videos useful to understand the importance of RSS feed & Feed Reader [Google Reader].

A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web
Google Reader in Plain English
Google Reader Help by Google

MyLifeOrganized® - More than personal task outliner and to-do list manager based on GTD® Concept

2009-11-02T22:42:00.004+04:00

MyLife Organized is a dedicated task- management outliner for Windows and PocketPC, with syncing to Microsoft Outlook and PocketPC, iPhone version is on the way.

It is MUST have software for everyone to manage your goals, projects and tasks and set next actions based on contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.

MyLife Organized especially fits the GTD - Getting Things Done - methodology as advocated by David Allen (highest recommendations).

1. Organize your tasks, projects & routine tasks based on Context [ Office, Calls or Computer and so on] and view the list of tasks based on the priority, context & many other properties.

2. View the tasks based on context & apply filter to narrow down the to do list.

3. Rapid Task Entry Screen to create multiple tasks at once and entries will get automically parsed and can confirm to create the tasks with few clicks.

I have been using this software for the last 1 year and getting my productivity increased after started using it. I recommend this software for those who would like really to keep themselves organized. My sincere thanks to Navdeep & Sreechith, who introduced it to me. Visit the website http://www.mylifeorganized.net/ to try & buy.

Bookmarklets - Add extra functionalities to your browser using simple scripts

2009-10-31T02:26:00.018+04:00

Bookmarklet is nothing but few lines of Javascript code that you can place in your browser favorites or bookmarks.

You store a bookmarklet exactly as you would store any normal bookmark or favorite. The main difference is that clicking a bookmarklet may perform some useful function other than just opening a webpage.

To make it more clear, regular bookmarks (or favorites) are just locations to visit, like “http://www.gmail.com”. Bookmarklets are javascript code that the browser runs on the current page, and they’re marked by “javascript:” instead of “http://”.

Steps to add bookmarkets to your browser,

1. Right click any one of the below links

2. Select "Add to Favorites"

3. Click "Yes" when you see the Security Alert

4. Select a Folder in the "Create In" dropdown menu

5. Click "Add"

6. To use the bookmarklet, access it from sidebar to avoid few additional clicks.

Here are few sample bookmarklets.

To type in tamil in any webpage, [அ Type in Tamil] [ For other languages, visit this link ]
InstaCalc Bookmarklet to access online calculator.
Readability Bookmarklet to make webpages printable, pasteable and uncluttered.
Hilite selected text in current webpage
Search Dictionary to view the meaning for selected word in current webpage.
Unusual bookmarklets to get Mirror effect, Blur effect or Wave effect of current webpage.

More Bookmarklets collection from http://subsimple.com/bookmarklets/collection.asp

Google stops new development of Notebook, one of my favorites

2009-10-28T22:32:00.002+04:00

Google is going to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means they will no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users, no more new sign ups. But will continue to maintain service for those already signed up. Users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

I am one of those active users who are using Google Notebook to collect code snippets & web clippings.

Google suggests that SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail and Google Bookmarks are few example Google products that offer Notebook-like functionality and moreover all these products are being actively improved and should meet user needs.

Apart from Google Notebook, following products are already in the list, which are going to be slashed.

Google Video
Google Catalog Search
Dodgeball
Google Mashup
Jaiku
Knol [ Knol may be getting the ax, but not now ]

Google Talk Bots - A [Virtual] friend in need is a friend indeed

2009-10-26T01:07:00.008+04:00

1. Translation – Use translation bots to translate words & sentences from one language into another, to do so, you need to add the relevant bot (e.g. hi2en@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi to English or en2hi@bot.talk.google.com for English to Hindi) as your contact in google talk, send him a message and it will get translated instantly. These bots never go offline, as long as you are available online ;-)

few sample translation bots,

en2hi@bot.talk.google.com - English to Hindi translation
en2ar@bot.talk.google.com - English to Arabic translation
en2fr@bot.talk.google.com - English to French translation

Find here all available translation bots

2. Transliteration - Transliteration lets you type Indic words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Please note that this is not the same as translation. The sound of the words are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. To use a bot, add it to your contact list and send it the message you want transliterated. For example,
if you send "Namaste" to en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com (English to Hindi), it will respond with "नमस्ते"
if you send "ithu eppudeei?" to en2ta.translit@bot.talk.google.com (English to Tamil), it will respond with " இது எப்புடீய்?"

few sample transliteration bots,
en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com - English to Hindi transliteration
en2ta.translit@bot.talk.google.com - English to Tamil transliteration
en2ma.translit@bot.talk.google.com - English to Malayalam transliteration

Find here all available transliteration bots

3. Xpenser – You can record your expenses via email, SMS, twitter and GTalk. Add xpenserbot@gmail.com as your contact and send a message like "taxi 25 to chennai" and that will be added as an expense to your online spreadsheet accessible from http://www.xpenser.com/, read more...

Get SMS from Google as Reminder for your events in Google Calander

2009-10-24T00:21:00.007+04:00

Here are the instructions on how you can setup SMS reminders for your tasks.

1. Setup Google Calendar

Visit the URL http://calander.google.com/ sign in to your gmail account if not already done.
Click Settings -> General tab.
Change Country & Your current time zone.

2. Setup your Mobile in Google Calendar

In order for you to receive a SMS message from Google Calendar you will first have to setup a mobile phone in the settings.

Click Settings -> Mobile Setup
Enter your mobile number [ex: +971501234567] and then click Send Verification Code button to get verificaiton code from Google. Enter the verification Code and Click Finish Setup button to complete the setup.

3. Set Default notification options for each calander

Click Settings -> Calanders and Click notifications link of each canlander to set default notification options.

4. Finally start creating events to set & get SMS notification

Click Create Event, provide event details, verify Options, Save the event and wait for the SMS from Google to your mobile.

Gmail Easter eggs - Use dot [.] and plus [+] wisely to have multiple gmail ids from one gmail id

2009-10-23T17:19:00.005+04:00

1. Gmail does not recognize dots or periods in email addresses or in the user names, for example an address like dog.cat@gmail.com is the same as d.o.g.c.a.t@gmail.com or dogcat@gmail.com

2. Gmail does not recognize characters after the PLUS symbol, all below mail ids are yours if you own dogcat@gmail.com, and you can add any string after PLUS sign.

dogcat+magazines@gmail.com
dogcat+college@gmail.com
dogcat+uselesssubscriptions@gmail.com

3. dogcat@gmail & dogcat@googlemail.com are same!!!

Yes, you can use googlemail.com instead of gmail.com with your gmail id, both are considered as same.

What you can do using these features?

Though all these above kind of mails are delivered to mail box of dogcat@gmail.com, gmail search filter can distinguish between these different addresses.You can apply filter for these mails to redirect to separate gmail folders or apply different labels or redirect to Archive or to Trash folder.

TeamViewer - Free Tool for Remote Access and Support over the Internet

2009-10-20T23:43:00.011+04:00

TeamViewer is free for private use.

Remote support without installation
With TeamViewer you can remotely control any PC anywhere on the Internet. No installation is required, just run the application on both sides and connect - even through tight firewalls.

Remote administration of unattended servers
TeamViewer can also be used to control unattended computers and servers. Installation as a system service even allows remote reboot and reconnect.

File transfer
TeamViewer comes with integrated file transfer that allows you to copy files and folders from and to a remote partner - which also works behind firewalls

Google docs - limitations

2009-10-20T23:15:00.005+04:00

Google Docs users get a lot of storage space with their accounts, but it's not unlimited.

Docs: Each doc can have a maximum size of 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image. You have a combined limit of 5000 documents and presentations and 5000 images.
Spreadsheets: Each can be up to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, or 100 sheets--whichever is reached first. There's no limit on rows. You have a limit of 1000 spreadsheets. The spreadsheets that are shared with you do not count against 1000 limit.

Presentations: Files in .ppt and .pps formats can have a maximum size of 10MB or 200 slides; files uploaded from the Web can be up to 2MB; emailed files can be up to 500K.
PDFs: You can store up to 10MB per PDF from your computer and 2MB from the Web in your Docs list, up to 100 PDFs.

How many people can edit a Google Docs file simultaneously?
Well, with documents and presentations, up to 10 people can work on the file at the same time. Up to 50 people can edit a Google Docs spreadsheet together. And Google Docs allows up to 200 simultaneous viewers of any type of Google Docs file.

Xpenser - Record expenses via whatever means are available to you quickly and painlessly

2009-10-18T23:59:00.008+04:00

What is Xpenser?

http://xpenser.com/

Record expenses via whatever means are available to you quickly and painlessly. Send them in via Email, SMS, Twitter, IM, or voice (call a number and say your expense). From your Blackberry, email "Lunch 78.50 with BigClient" and it's recorded. From your phone, SMS "exp groceries 27.13". From your computer, IM "Equipment 889.19 backup server". From your phone, call and say "taxi 39 office to airport". Use the Web interface to edit and finalize them or export them to your favorite financial management software(Quicken). No more forgetting your cash expenses, no more half-day expense entry sessions.

gtalk messsage to record expenses
1. register with Xpenser
2. add your gmail id
3. add xpenserbot@gmail.com as your gmail contact, this virtual buddy is online always
4. send IM to record your expenses

5. Expense already recorded

Tweeting to record expenses

1. add your twitter account name in Xpenser account setup
2. Submit expenses by twittering "d xpn" (for "direct message to Xpenser) followed by your expense. For example, "d xpn lunch 35.4 with my friends"

Google Apps Standard Edition for your domain is FREE with 50 user licenses

2009-10-17T13:28:00.014+04:00

Yes you read it right. If you own a domain, you can register to have Google Apps standard Edition for FREE with 50 user licenses.

Here's how it works. Say you own a web site domain name like abcd.com. With a Google Apps account associated with this domain, you can create up to 50 users (in the free plan) in Google Apps, like name1@abcd.com, name2@abcd.com, name3@abcd.com and so on. Each person gets his or her own email account, calendar (for sharing amongst the group), instant messenger account on Google Talk, and Google Docs account for sharing and collaborating on office documents like spreadsheets, Word documents, and slide shows.

Steps to get it done.

1. Complete Google Apps standard Edition registration

2. Verify your domain ownership

3. Change MX records by Signing in to your domain account website, and go to the MX record maintenance page. MX records may be located in DNS Management, Mail Server Configuration, or Name Server Man

3.1. Delete all existing MX entries. By default, MX records may already be present.
3.2. Enter the following MX records.

Priority--> Mail Server
1 --> ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 --> ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 --> ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10 --> ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10 --> ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

4. Once verification is completed, you can access your Google Apps dashboard
https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com

5. you can change this lengthy URL to http://mail.yourdomain.com, all you need to do is create a sub domain 'mail' from your domain provider site and change the CNAME address to point to google.com/a/yourdomain.com. That's it.

6. Now you can login to your Google Apps dashboard to start creating users & utilize almost all the gmail features [ mail, docs, sites, gtalk, contacts and so on ].

Rich Dad Poor Dad

2009-10-16T21:56:00.008+04:00

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a book by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. It advocates financial independence through investing, real estate, owning businesses, and the use of finance protection tactics.

Extract of this book as ppt slideshow from scribd Rich Dad Poor Dad

Watch full length video by this author from here

The parable of pipeline

2009-10-15T18:19:00.006+04:00

Story about PABLO and BRUNO

Who are you? A bucket carrier .... or pipeline builder? would you like to read more about this story? read little more about this book from scribd The Parable Of The Pipeline

Google Latitude - a way to keep track of your friends' current whereabouts

2009-10-14T17:22:00.007+04:00

Google Latitude enables you to track friends, family, employees and others — and vice versa — in real time

Google Latitude is a free application that brings location tracking to your mobile phone even without GPS. That means if you are travelling with a mobile phone that has Google Latitude installed, your family members and friends can track your exact location on Google Maps through any Internet connected computer.

Google Latitude determines your current location using the nearby cell phone towers. If, for some reason, Latitude is unable to detect your exact location, you can set it manually on your phone.

How do I get it?
Mobile users need to first have Google Maps 3.0 or above installed. After that, you can install Latitude, Download it from your mobile browser at google.com/latitude. PC users can install the iGoogle gadget by starting from the Google Latitude site, wwww.google.com/latitude

Here is my location,

How to add a Google Map to your website or blog

2009-10-14T00:56:00.007+04:00

1. Go to WikiMapia.org site and find a part of the map that you need.
2. Click The Menu Login -> Map on your page link.
3. Move and resize frame you see to desired view, adjust view setting if needed and copy given html code [iframe] to your page or blog.

Here is the map of Burj Dubai, Dubai.

Share your feedback with Google using product Ideas

2009-10-12T15:00:00.005+04:00

share your ideas with Google and see what others are saying about your idea.
http://productideas.appspot.com/

Forms in Google Docs as free online survey tool

2009-10-12T13:57:00.008+04:00

Interesting features like pre-populated form fields & logic branching can be utilized to create professional online surveys using Google Forms.

With Google Docs, you can pre-populate form fields via URL parameters. This is pretty handy in case you want to pre-fill some fields of the form with default choices or if you are planning to integrated a Google Docs form with another system like the comment section of your site – if someone has filled their name and email in the comment section, they need not fill that data again in Google Docs form.

Google Docs is probably the only free polling software that supports logic branching. This is like serving a different set of questions to a user based on their previous responses.

OpenID - decentralized single sign-on authentication system

2009-10-10T01:11:00.008+04:00

Can't remember your passwords? Tired of filling out registration forms?
OpenID is a safe, faster, and easier way to log in to web sites. more websites started accepting openID to login to their websites.

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on authentication system for the Internet. The goal of the OpenID initiative is to allow users to log in at websites around the Internet with one ID, instead of having to create multiple unique accounts.

companies getting behind OpenID

You can find more details from below links
http://openid.net/add-openid
http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/OpenID_for_Dummies
http://openidexplained.com/

Websites accepting OpenID
http://www.zoho.com/
http://www.wordpress.com/
http://www.blogger.com/

To find all versions mentioned in RMS/WMS forms

2009-03-19T12:20:00.001+04:00

strings -a hh_nsc_receiving_s.fmb awk '(/^\*/ && /[0-9]\.[0-9]+/) /Name/'

Note: only for Oracle Forms used in Oracle Retail.

Ways to get sql query output inside UNIX Shell Script

2009-03-19T09:32:00.002+04:00

Below are different ways to get SQL query output inside unix shell script.

Method 1:
{
/bin/echo "set pause off"
/bin/echo "set pagesize 0"
/bin/echo "set linesize 300"
/bin/echo "set feedback off"
/bin/echo "set echo off"
/bin/echo "set term off"
/bin/echo "SELECT location_id
FROM location
WHERE facility_id = 'W1';"
} | sqlplus -s dbuser/dbpwd

Method 2:

Please note that ENDSQL is not a key word, you can use any word.

sqlplus -s dbuser/dbpwd << ENDSQLset pause offset pagesize 0set linesize 300set feedback offset echo offset term offselect location_id from location where facility_id='W1' and rownum < 2;EXIT;ENDSQLMethod 3:

sqlplus -s dbuser/dbpwd << ENDSQL
set pause off
set pagesize 0
set linesize 300
set feedback off
set echo off
set term off
@filename.sql
EXIT;
ENDSQL

The UNIX CD Bookshelf

2007-04-15T16:50:00.000+04:00

UNIX Power Tools
UNIX in a Nutshell: System V Edition
Learning the vi Editor
sed & awk
Learning the Korn Shell
Learning the UNIX Operating System

above online books are available at http://doc.novsu.ac.ru/oreilly/unix/index.htm

Unix Vi Commands

2007-04-15T14:12:00.000+04:00

list of vi commands at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pekeaZVmTcB2YJBisxgDnHw

Breif about RSS, ATOM, OPML and BlogRoll

2005-03-13T18:18:00.000+04:00

part1: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/rssandblogs.asp

part 2: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/rssandblogs2.asp#xx1037410xx

MCAD test preparation links from codeclinic

2005-03-12T10:35:00.000+04:00

Great link that has collection of links pointing to all the MCAD learning topics
http://www.codeclinic.com/70-315skills.htm