You can use PowerPoint to make this.

1. Download a paper background or texture.

You can use something from this link: 200-high-quality-free-paper-textures-to-grab

2. Download a handwritten font and install it. (Drag and drop the downloaded file into the Fonts folder in your Control Panel) 

You can choose a font from this page: 50-free-handwritten-fonts-for-web-designers-and-logo-artists

3. Open Powerpoint and insert the paper texture as a picture.

4. Insert a text box and select your handwritten font.

5. Type your message.

6. You can add other elements from the following links:
Peachie’s Collection of Cute Stuff

Digital Scrapbooking Embellishments

You can also add autoshapes, photos, and other details such as word art or seasonal elements.

7. After completing your design, press CTRL+A to select all the elements, right-click and select Save As Picture.

8. Save your image and send it to your friend by email or print it out and give it to them.

Try making one for your grandma… she will love it!

Download
1. First of all, you must download the Gingerbreak installation file from the XDA forums. Here’s the link: gingerbreak-v1.20.apk
(Ignore the message that says it’s incompatible)

Install
2. Open OI File Manager and go to mnt/sdcard/download.

3. Open gingerbreak-v1.20.apk from your list of downloaded files to install the application.

Enable USB Debugging
4. Go to Settings and then select Applications. Click Development and select the USB debugging checkbox.

Root
5. Open the Gingerbreak app and click Root Device. Your phone will reboot automatically when the rooting is complete. This will take a little longer than your usual boot up time but don’t panic!

Finally, check for a new app named Superuser in your phone to confirm that your phone has been rooted.

Note:

Don’t worry if your SD Card has other stuff on it. Mine did too but nothing happened to them.

Ensure that your phone has enough battery charge to go through with this. Interruptions during rooting can cause problems.

If for some reason the procedure does not work, then turn your phone off and turn it back on before retrying.

If the app does not work,check if you have installed the app on the Phone memory and not in the SD card. Move the app to Phone if it’s on the SD Card.

You can now kick some serious ass with your rooted device!

via InformationIsBeautiful

1. Open the Google book in your Google Chrome browser and go to the page you wish to download.

2. Right-click on the page and select Inspect Element

3. Under Inspect Element, go to Resources and select Images.

4. Browse all the images and find the image of the page you wish to download. Sometimes it will be available in more than one size. In such cases, select the image with the best size.

5. Double-click the image name to open the image in a new tab. Right-click the image and select Save Image As.

6. Save the file to your local machine and enjoy!

Enjoy!

To do this, you should first save your tweets as an XML file.
Go to http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userid.xml?count=x

In the above link, replace “userid” with your user name and “x” with the number of tweets you want to download. (You can view your total number of updates on your twitter page.)

When the page opens, click Save As in your browser and save the XML file to your computer.

Open MS-Excel(2007) and click Data -> From Other Sources -> From XML Data Import

In other versions of MS-Excel, you would click Data -> XML -> Import

Browse your computer and select the Twitter XML file you downloaded.

Ta daaaa!!!!!!!!

You have all your tweets in a neat Excel sheet. Enjoy!

When you run this macro, it opens an Output File dialog box asking for a path to store the text. Remember to enter a name for the file when you specify the path in the ‘Output file’ dialog. Example: C:\Documents and Settings\User1\Desktop\comments.txt

Sub ExportComments()

    Dim oSl As Slide
    Dim oSlides As Slides
    Dim oCom As Comment
    Dim sText As String
    Dim sFilename As String

    Set oSlides = ActivePresentation.Slides
    For Each oSl In oSlides
    sText = sText & "Slide: " & oSl.SlideIndex & vbCrLf
    sText = sText & "======================================" & vbCrLf
        For Each oCom In oSl.Comments

            sText = sText & oCom.Author & vbCrLf
            sText = sText & oCom.DateTime & vbCrLf
            sText = sText & oCom.Text & vbCrLf
            sText = sText & "--------------" & vbCrLf

        Next oCom
    Next oSl

    sFilename = InputBox("Full path to output file:", "Output file")
    If Len(sFilename) > 0 Then
        WriteStringToFile sFilename, sText
        SendFileToNotePad sFilename
    End If

End Sub

Sub WriteStringToFile(pFileName As String, pString As String)
' This writes the text out to a file

    Dim intFileNum As Integer

    intFileNum = FreeFile
    Open pFileName For Output As intFileNum
    Print #intFileNum, pString
    Close intFileNum

End Sub

Sub SendFileToNotePad(pFileName As String)
' This opens the file in notepad

    Dim lngReturn As Long
    lngReturn = Shell("NOTEPAD.EXE " & pFileName, vbNormalFocus)

End Sub

Macro courtesy: pptfaq.com

If you have objects (tables, drawings, paragraphs, pictures) that you need to repeatedly paste into a document, you can also use the following method. I have demonstrated with a table as an example:

1. Open a new word document.

2. Copy and paste the template table for ST1 into the new document.

3. Select the entire table (or object).

4. Press ALT+F3

5. A box named “Create New Building Block” will open up. Select the options shown in the image below and click Ok.

Note: You can also add the table to any other category which you think might be easier for you to access.

6. Repeat the steps for all the tables or objects you use frequently.

7. To insert the table or object, go to Insert -> Table -> Quick Tables and select on the table you want to insert.

8. Voila!

Often, we need to highlight the changes in our document after making the corrections suggested by a reviewer. I came across this interesting macro that made my job easy.

Sub HLight_Inserts()

Dim i As Long
Dim iMax As Long
Dim bAccept As Boolean ' Set this to True if you want to accept revision

ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False
' ----------------------------
' Set bAccept  = True if Insertions to be Accepted
' ----------------------------
bAccept = False
' ----------------------------

iMax = ActiveDocument.Revisions.Count
For i = 1 To iMax
    If i > iMax Then Exit For
    Debug.Print ActiveDocument.Revisions(i).Type
    If ActiveDocument.Revisions(i).Type = wdRevisionInsert Then
        ActiveDocument.Revisions(i).Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
        If bAccept = True Then
            ActiveDocument.Revisions(i).Accept
            i = i - 1
            iMax = iMax - 1
        End If
    End If
Next i
ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = True
End sub

To change the highlight color, find the word WdYellow in the code above and change it to WdTurquoise, WdBrightGreen or other highlight color names.

Macro Courtesy: p2p.wrox.com

Follow these steps to make your own animations:

1. Go to “Start” menu and click “Run”

2. Type “Charmap”

3. From the “Font” list, select “Webdings” or “Wingdings 1, 2, 3″

4. Select a character that you want to animate, from the table of characters and copy it to the clip board by clicking “Copy”. You can also press CTRL+C.

5. Open MS- PowerPoint

6. Right- click on a blank slide and paste the font. You can also press CTRL+V. If the font changes to an arbit square or a martian hieroglyphic, select it and apply the correct font from the PowerPoint font list.

7. Select the character and enlarge the font size to “72″ or more. Now the character will be clearly visible as an image.

8. Change the color of the font, if required.

9. Select other characters and repeat the same procedure.

10. Right-click each of the characters and select “Save as Picture”. (This can be a little tricky if you do not select the character properly. Don’t select the font but the whole character.)

11. Type a name and save the characters as image files.

12. In the “Insert” menu, select “Insert Picture” and insert the saved images.

13. Animate each image by using “Custom Animation”

14. Play your slideshow to check the animation.

15. Rejoice!

You can find a simple PPT animation I created by using this method, in the following link:

Download from Google Docs (otherwise you cannot see the animation). This download is not required to understand the method.

Feel free to post questions/doubts in the Comments section.

Profilactic is a lifestreaming website. What is lifestreaming?  Some of us tend to go on a wild signing-up spree when we see amazing new Web 2.0 tools or social networks. We soon realize that we have a staggering number of accounts across the internet and our data is strewn all over the place. Then we wish there was some way to keep all this content in the same place and access them quickly. This is where lifestreaming comes into the picture.

Lifestreaming also helps us to share our online content, profiles and activities with a wide audience including friends and family. Profilactic helps you create a mashup of all your content from various websites and share it with other friends on the site. You can also create a lifestream badge with links to your various accounts and the your latest activity on each of the accounts. This badge helps you display your lifestream on your blog or website for others to see. Similarly, an RSS feed can be generated for all the content you have posted across multiple sites.

Profilactic currently supports 190 social sites.

You can request Profilactic to add new sites which may not be present in the existing list of supported sites. Profilactic lets you aggregate your content with RSS Feeds from your websites. And of course, it counts your tweets in from twitter. Another important features is the ability to save clippings of content where you or your site have been quoted or mentioned on another site. Check this out and trust me, it is pretty useful!

The thing that has recently caught my attention is Digsby. I have always longed for a multiple IM client that helps integrate all chat services but is not minimalistic and geeky. Though, Pidgin is a great multiple IM client, it has issues in enabling file transfers and video chat. It calls for extra-geeky meddling with options, if these things are to be made possible.

Digsby is a cool IM client which is sure to be the next big thing like Firefox. And like Firefox, it seems to hog a lot of memory. However, trust me that should not be a deterrent in using Digsby. This is because Digsby can make up for Msn, Yahoo, AIM and Gtalk clients. Imagine running all of these clients individually and it would certainly work out to that much of memory usage.

The setup file is over 11 MB and takes a while to download. Once this thing is installed, it is completely hassle-free. Though, it has the characteristic geek tinge to its minimalist interface, it can quickly be customized. In fact, geeks have more to rejoice for because it allows for back-end customization and a lot of scope for the ones that cannot keep from exploratory coding adventures.

Rightly represented by a friendly cute logo, Digsby is intuitive all the way. You can immediately configure all your IM accounts. But here is the easter egg. You can also configure your Facebook and Twitter into this IM client. It will give you updates about your Facebook pokes, friend statuses and other notifications. You can also update your Facebook status by using Digsby.

As if this were not enough, there is good news for the compulsive twitter addicts. Twitter allows for updates via IM but Digsby also lets you read your friends’ tweets. You can click on the Twitter tab in your Digsby interface to do this.

Digsby allows for tabbed conversations and has amazing skinning options that makes your boring IM windows look really new age. Those who use gtalk must especially be starved for some skinning and emoticon action. Now you can quench those cravings with Digsby.

I personally use Windows but I understand that Digsby is compatible with Linux and Mac as any open-source software is likely to be. They also have support forums and wikis to assist the newbies.

Digsby is here to stay. Check it out!

To look at some examples in a technical organisation, some people would think knowledge ideally resides in the minds of professionals and the documents that they churn out. While this might work in certain quarters, what can really work is a collaboration and a capture of ideas while the documentation (documents, presentations, .pdf files and more) is being created.

Email exchanges, discussions, and external research links constitute a huge portion of the knowledge which floats around in an organisation. One classic example is technical documentation in technology organisations. While the finished documents constitute a chunk of knowledge, a larger chunk remains in the ‘journey’ of the documentation. Reusability of this knowledge helps in reducing the timelines for similar activities in the future and also helps build a series of best practices.

It is important for organisations to establish methods by which such useful yet undocumented knowledge is saved and shared for future activities.

By

Jiten Gajaria

• A useful and underused technique in Windows could have been implemented into the tooltip system. The tooltip is a very common meta data organizer which lets us know what we are doing in Excel sheets, tells us the names of commands or what they do, and so on. Unfortunately, although people use tool tips well otherwise, it is not popular with the masses who create content which can be downloaded or programs.
• The linux desktop offers a great alternative to the folder maze. Enter Leaftag. This is a nifty little set of utilities which can tag folders and files and make the information inside the folder make sense. What is especially interesting is that on linux systems with Leaftag there will still be files as usual, but they could be tagged in case you want to remember something about them.
• Delicious‘ system of social bookmarking is a great way to organize information on the web specific to a user’s browsing activities. It is interesting what a combination of RSS and Delicious bookmarks can do. Why is it not possible to do the same within the framework of a desktop?
• There is a software for Windows too, as shown in this lifehacker post:

In order to encourage you to tag new files as they’re created, tag2find can also monitor your new files and prompt you for tags. tag2find then provides a couple of ways to search through your tags, both of which seem to provide snappy results. Add to that automated tagging by filetypes, tag clouds, and Windows Media Player integration, and tag2find is a surprisingly powerful tool.

I await more proliferation of the ideas of Web 2.0 to the desktop. But this is second in line after my favorite wishful hack idea: instant-on computers. (And no, I don’t mean boot times of under 15 seconds as you get in SSD powered computers.)
]]> http://arbitweb.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/web-20-on-the-desktop/feed/ 0 philramble http://arbitweb.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/black-xp-theme/ http://arbitweb.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/black-xp-theme/#comments Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:25:55 +0000 Phoenix http://arbitweb.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/black-xp-theme/ ]]> I have always wished I could have a black theme for XP and I stumbled upon something exquisite.

Use this link to download the Zune theme from Microsoft – Zune Theme from Microsoft

Install it on your system and voila your system looks totally funky!

Metacafe has a video demo of the whole procedure.
Watch Demo

Enjoy your black XP!

Windows-XP has a “feature” (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the “Scroll Lock” key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:

1. Start regedit. 2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll
4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify
5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK.
6. Close regedit and reboot your system.
7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing “Scroll Lock” twice.

Note:

Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:

1. Go to Control Panel > System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button.
4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.

Happy crashing…!!

Source: The Straight Dope

Keyboard shortcuts

* CTRL + Mousewheel up/down: Change the font size in a conversation window.
* CTRL + E: Center text
* CTRL + R: Right justify text
* CTRL + L or CTRL+J: Left justify text
* F9: Open Gmail to send an email to the person you talk to
* F11: Start a call
* F12: Stop the current call
* ESC: Close the current window

Conversation

* Some smileys are converted by Google Talk: :-O B-) :’( :O
* To write bold text, type *your gtalk message*
* To write italic text, type _your gtalk message_

Startup parameters (go to Start/Run and type “c:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /one_parameter_from_the_list_below)

* /nomutex: allows you to open more than one instance of Google Talk.
* /register: write Google Talk settings in the registry.
* /checkupdate: check for new version.
* /factoryreset: revert to default settings.
* /mailto email@gmail.com: send an email with Gmail.
* /diag: start Google Talk in diagnostic mode.

For many Orkut addicts, it is nearly impossible to live without Orkutting.

So here we have the solution for your problem.

Follow the steps exactly as written here and in the same sequence.

Procedure:

1. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL. Open the Task Manager and go to Processes.
2. Look for svchost.exe under the image name. Find the ones that have your username under the Username tab.
3. Press DEL to kill these processes. Click Yes to ignore the warning.
4. Repeat for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Be careful not to kill svchost.exe with system, local service or network service.
5. Now go to My Computer.
6. In the address bar, type “C:\heap41a” and press Enter. Delete all the files in here.
7. Now go to Start. Click Run and type “Regedit“.
8. In the menu bar click Edit and then click Find.
9. Type “heap41a” and press Enter.
10. The display will show you the following:
    “[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(some number)\std.txt”
11. Press DELand click Yes to ignore the warning.
12. Close the Registry Editor.

BANG! The virus would be gone!

Note: Please format all your pen drives because the virus might be hidden in there in a microsoft.exe autorun.inf file, which you might not be able to find. This would mean you should repeat the whole procedure above. (After the pendrive is formatted.)

Now you should be able to access Orkut without much trouble!

The virus meddles with the ’Show hidden files and folders’ option in the Folder Options and the option keeps bouncing back to ‘Do not show hidden files and folders’, despite repeated trials.

Here is how you can set this problem right:

Navigate to the windows registry:
Go to Start menu
Click Run
Type regedit in the text box and then click Enter.

When the Registry Editor opens, perform the following steps:

Go to the following registry key:

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then open Software.Under this navigate to: Microsoft -> Windows ->  Current Version -> Explorer Then go to Advanced -> Folder -> Hidden -> SHOWALL
Delete the value CheckedValue.
(Its type should be REG_SZ and data should be 2 or 0.)

Create a new DWORD value called CheckedValue (same as above, except that the type is REG_DWORD).

Modify the value data to 1 (0×00000001).This should enable you to select the ‘Show hidden files and folders’ option without much problem.Do drop in comments if there are further queries and we shall try to find answers.

Buxfer is an amazing money management site. I have been using this for a while now and it is very impressive.

The following are some of the functionalities that Buxfer offers:

1. Group Money Management:

If you have roomies or friends with whom you make regular financial transactions, then Buxfer is the place to record them. You can add your friends’ email ids to your group and a transparent system takes care of showing the I-O-Us to the concerned people in the group.

2. Bank Statement Import:

You can import your monthly Bank Statements in Quicken, MS-Money or .csv formats. Buxfer neatly and intuitively lists out all your credits and expenses in your transaction data.

3. Expense Analysis:

By adding tags to all your expenses, you can see a pie chart of how your money has been spent. This would help you understand the areas in which your money is wasted or well-spent, allowing you to alter your spending methods.

4. Scheduled Payments:

You can schedule monthly loan or insurance payments to be automatically debited from your statement. This will save you time while keeping track of your regular expenses. There is also a facility to set reminders for such payments.

5. Budget Maker

You can set a budget for certain expenses and try to keep within the limits. Buxfer gives you an indication when you exceed your budget.

Buxfer has many more tools and features which go a long way in letting you take control of your money.

Some typical Web 2.0 features include:

a) The ability to add a new transaction through SMS.
b) A google gadget that can also be embedded into Netvibes (like everything else. )
c) Intelligent auto-tags
d) RSS feeds for your transactions
e) A frontpage that shows you in a nutshell what your current status is.
f) A site blog with regular update news.

What more are you waiting for? Get in there and explore. Control your money.

The Star Trek Plot Generator came up with these: (of course they have misspelled “whilst” everywhere) (at last I got an opportunity to use sic..hehehe)

1. Whlist (sic) investigating a space warp the guest star gets brainwashed when the Enterprise encounters a horde of little things which tries to ingest them and hijacks the Enterprise so the guest star dies a heroic death, which means everything turns out okay, and everybody forgets it ever happened. Then, finally Sulu says something snappy and they leave at warp factor ten.

2. Whlist (sic) ferrying bigwigs about the crew of the USS Enterprise gets brainwashed when the Enterprise encounters an apparent duplicate of Spock which is in fact an android but their opponent turns out to be mad and vulnerable to a show of emotion and so the guest star dies a heroic death, which means everything turns out okay, and everybody forgets it ever happened. Then, finally Spock says something snappy and they leave at warp factor nine.

The Froo Froo Menu Generator generates exquisite names for nearly inedible dishes:

Ground Chinchilla with a Dusty Broth

Brined Roebuck with a Radish Demi-Glaze

Broasted Cougar with a Headcheese-infused Dressing

Crispy Silver Fox with a Bologna-infused Stew

Pressure Fried Duckbill with a Crunchy Custard

The Soap Opera Recap Generator is hilariously creative:

1. Corky lies to Lucky. Erica chases Marlowe at the carnival. Huxley makes a rash decision about McArthur.

2. Greenlee lets the cat out of the bag to Carter. Kitty exacts revenge from Bell in the pool house. Silvia discovers familial ties to Monet.

3. Lily grills Adeline. Astor secretly spies on Calypso in the graveyard. Buffy is stricken with amnesia and can’t remember Raoul.

(Now try substituting all those names with Indian names or kinship terms like chitti, chittappa, paati. Heehee! )

With the Band Bio Generator I came up with my own band and its phenomenal bio: (My band is called Fluorescent Afros )

A history of indie rock icons: Fluorescent Afros

Originally formed in an abandoned laundromat in Tiruchirapalli, Fluorescent Afros rose to the top of the indie rock scene in 2007 with their debut album, Yet to be released. The band’s latest album, Already released, juxtaposes Sharadtriyama’s irreverent lyrical stylings with road-seasoned instrumentation to somehow pump out some seriously inspired crowd pleasers. With standout tracks like “Release,” already certified platinum in Europe, Fluorescent Afros can count on loads of future success.

And finally for the greatest of them all – Dilbert Mission Statement Generator

Want to get a bullshitty mission statement for the work you do? Use this one.
1. Our challenge is to proactively restore quality benefits while continuing to dramatically build long-term high-impact meta-services while promoting personal employee growth.
2. We strive to professionally integrate corporate infrastructures in order that we may seamlessly restore prospective deliverables to set us apart from the competition.

Enjoy! There are many many more out there are Generator Land!

The Speed Dial automatically opens on every new tab.

I wonder why someone would choose it over the drag and drop bookmark option.

Go to “View” and click “Toolbars” and then click “Tables and Borders”.

Select the text you wish to highlight.

Click the “Shading Color” button.

You can choose a number of colors from the drop-down list.

Now you can highlight your text in any color you want.

There is a module for netvibes customization with which you can change the background image, remove the header and change the opacity of the modules.

Get it here: Netvibes Customize Module

To avoid such a situation, I decided to use Microsoft’s own File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service, which is very easy to configure. Visit this link to learn how – FTP: Setting Up Windows NT 4.0, 2000, or XP Workstations to Accept FTP Transfers .

The advantage in Microsoft’s FTP is that no special client software is required to view the files on the FTP. They can be viewed directly from the Explorer window. Also, the VB.NET code used to open the FTP connection and to read/write files is pretty simple. The code can be found here: VB. Net FTP Client.

A second level of protection I used was a Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/ IP) connection which prevented people from playing the game more than once. The advantage of this technique is that the connection stays on as long as the server machine is on and the internet is working. Because of this, people could play the game at any time of day.

The game was a success. Overall, 50-60 people played it and except for one response which was not captured due to a faulty internet connection, all other details were successfully captured.

The TCP/IP server is still on in Tucson, AZ and since I’m in California at the moment, I use it for accessing files etc. on the host server (in addition to using Remote Desktop Connection). Another technique (which was incidentally suggested to me by a Microsoft programmer) is to use Cygwin’s Secure Shell (SSH) service (Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows, in case anyone is wondering). Simple configuration instructions are given here. I used FileZilla Client on the client machine (which, in my opinion is the easiest to use SSH client) and it worked like a charm. I had to shut down and restart the SSH service occassionally, but other than that I never had any problems.

I’ve transferred over 8 GB of data from one computer to another (within the same network). By the way, I did try other solutions, including using the FileZilla server, but found the above two methods to be the easiest.

As an aside, in my opinion, this is the most relevant article I’ve written on this site, considering its focus on Web 2.0 and Linux. My previous articles had more to do with Microsoft desktop software and an mp3 player that no one is interested in. :-p

Well, Enlightenment 0.17 is the latest version, and 0.16 is the most loved version yet. Of what? A window manager for Linux desktops. If you are a new Linux user, you probably don’t know about desktop environments or window managers other than KDE and GNOME. While these projects have been around for some time, they are less scalable and are feature packed than old ones and light ones like TWM, FVWM2, WindowMaker (which I will cover in a future post) and also the new and popular lightweight desktop environment, XFCE.

A screenshot of E-0.16. Pager on the left-bottom, and iconbox on the right-bottom.

Note transparency on the terminal program E-term.

Each mouse button is assigned a menu when clicked on desktop.

While all these other window managers are more about functionality than style, Enlightnment (simply and affectionately called E ) is in a different league. And it is not my favourite window manager, but it is what I would like my favourite window manager (WindowMaker) to look like. Simply put, E exudes class. It is the Mercedes Benz – no, make that the Bugatti, of window managers in Linux. It has some great graphical eye candy in all its themes, especially Ganymede, which will make other window managers look positively sedentary. Enlightenment was developed from code used on FVWM2. This window manager was highly customizable, and these characteristics continued into E. There are plenty of image maps and all are put to good use on the title bars and the decorations and window borders. Transparency used in locations which you would not have imagined. There is a set of applets called Enlightenment Epplets, or simply Epplets, which run on your desktop, everything from music players and sound mixers and desktop lock and screensaver controllers, a command line, a drive mounter, CPU and memory and network traffic shown as “flames” of different intensities, all right there, on the desktop. These applets, called Enlightenment Epplets, are themed by each theme which comes with E, and so everything on that graphical real estate in front of your eyes is a visual treat.

The menus don’t come on a task bar. There is no concept of one. All menus are accessible on a click on the desktop. And there are multiple desktops, virtual desktops and pagers. You can customize wallpapers for them, you can scroll down to the desktop above or below. Move your mouse to the edge of the screen and voila, you have moved to the next desktop. Navigating in a multi tasking environment could not be easier.

Then there are the task management facilities – there is an iconbox, which catches any window you may be minimizing, and stores it as a small image icon of the same. The kind of feature which Windows and some of these other Linux based window managers would have to kill to have. The titlebars and endlessly customizable. There are also the special effects – FX Ripples and FX Waves which create ripples and waves on your desktop. The menus are customizable, and there is the popular E-conf tool, which is also known as the Enlightenment Configurator – E-Conf, for short.
Enlightenment has been subject to criticism – for being a resource hog especially on lower end machines. It has crashes with some themes, but things can be set right by editing E’s configuration files in a text editor and restarting the window manager. Which is another superb feature – you can simply restart Enlightnment from a menu command and not affect the other processes you have open. This is really useful if you want to install a new theme or test a theme you have created.

E-themes are highly customizable!

Note E-epplets on left cluster and right, also a special menubar on the extreme right! There’s plenty to play around with in Linux, and Enlightenment window manager is a good place to start. It is a clean desktop environment and is really very slick in terms of visual quality and the “gnarly” factor. If you want functionality with style, albeit without the heavy customizations and conventional styles of the other window managers like KDE and GNOME, try Enlightenment. It won’t let you down.

From Launchy.net

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

More details are available here. It’s a very useful tool. Simply press the key combination: Alt + Space to bring up the launcher and in a few keystrokes, you can run your favorite program. Furthermore, you can also index your documents, music, etc.  Of course, if you’ve found a better alternative, please feel free to leave comments.

The site calls itself user-friendly, and that is precisely what it is. The site lists over 10000 free fonts for viewing and downloading. Usually fonts sites are cumbersome to navigate through, and previews are either unavailable or misleading. Clicking on one link could take us to another site altogether. Advertisements litter the pages and you generally have a hard time before you find a font you were looking for (which is unlikely) or before you settle for something lesser.

Better Fonts is better in so many ways because it shows a direct and immediate preview of every font. There are very for all types of documents, listed in alphabetical order. There are some interesting fonts like A Bug’s Life and A Picture Alphabet. Navigation is a breeze.

This is the interface of the site.

Clicking a font from the list on the left will display its preview on
the right. You can change the  preview text as well. After this, if you
wish to download the font, you can immediately do so from the link given
below.

Go ahead and download your favourite fonts now!

As mentioned earlier, Max is a photo-sharing tool and an RSS reader. Now, I have no idea why one would need both these features in one piece of software. In this review, I’ll examine the features of Max.

Installation:

The software installation process is painfully slow. It takes 20 – 30 minutes (because the .NET framework has to be installed too) and the computer needs to be rebooted at the end of it. I guess things will improve with Vista. As of now, the software is not compatible with Vista, though.

The photo sharing features are decent.

One can make some cool looking albums in 2-D and 3-D view, but there is no provision to publish it to the web. As mentioned above, you can share photos only with people who have this software installed. On the whole, I don’t see this as a very useful feature.

The news/ RSS reader, on the other hand, though rudimentary, is gorgeous. Adding a feed is simple – simply click on “Add a feed” and enter the address. All feeds that you’ve added are visible on the left. Clicking on any of them brings up a nice view of the page, as shown below. Deleting feeds is also a simple two step process. However, several advanced options that are available in web-based feed readers, are not available in Max.

On the whole, Max makes great use of WPF but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make this product useful.

I created this image with some pictures I got from Google..
I wished to make a header out of it.. but obviously I cannot show all of it!

*Firstly, thanks to “phoenix” for inviting me to post on this site. This article is a slightly modified version of the one I posted on the sparks team blog.*

Microsoft until now followed a model where they provided a DRM scheme to hardware manufacturers such as Creative, iRiver and Samsung and didn’t get involved in the hardware part. That model has obviously not worked in its favor, since Apple controls over 75% of the mp3 market in the US. Some time late last year, Microsoft decided enough was enough and asked J. Allard of the XBox team to start working on an mp3 player. Last week, Microsoft finally (officially) launched their own mp3 player. Newspapers and blog sites (the ones I read) have been abuzz with articles about it. So, why not add one more to the list? Here’s my take on the features, the UI, and the looks in general of Zune. I’ll list things I like and dislike about it and features that I’d like to see when it’s released. All this is based on what I’ve seen and read on the Internet and I’m liable to change my opinion in future. Let me start with the things I dislike about it.

1. Firstly, it’s not as attractive as the iPod. It looks cool and everything, but I don’t like the middle wheel – it seems to be made of some cheap plastic.
2. Also, why are there no markings on the wheel. That’s pretty weird.
3. Is that an Ipod? Frankly, though, I’d rather that they copy the iPod than anything else. Also, MS holds the patent on iPod’s click wheel (although Zune doesn’t have one).
4. Too little, too late: Microsoft is joining the party five years too late so you’d expect the device to offer something new or revolutionary, right? WiFi can hardly be considered that.
5. It looks too big and unwieldy. Will it even fit into the pocket?

The things I like about it:

1. Brown color: I love the brown Zune. I’m probably the only one in this country who does. Who cares. I like it nevertheless. It seems like a throwback to the 70s culture that Gap, American Eagle, Express, etc. are trying to bring back. Nice!
2. WiFi: While WiFi will initially be limited to allowing people to share music, the possibilities, as MS has pointed out, are endless. I see a scenario where one can wirelessly transfer songs from the computer to the music player one day.
3. Video quality/ Screen size: They rock. Not only does the device have a big screen, the video and image quality are also great (see the pic).
4. FM radio: This seems to have been done well. You can see the name of the song that’s playing, which is pretty useful.
5. The “click wheel” is not a click wheel: In an iPod, you have to move your finger over the click wheel to increase the volume. Now, although it may appear so to iPod users, it’s not the easiest thing to do. Thankfully, Zune has buttons instead of a click wheel.
6. I’ve heard that the UI is more intuitive than the iPod’s.

Things that I’d like to see in the Zune:

1. Developer support: I’d like to see people being able to develop applications and games for the Zune. I’m sure this is in the pipeline, since it’s already been done with the XBox.
2. Games: Good ones, not the crappy $5 iPod ones. Free games created by Microsoft and third party developers (see point (1)). Frankly, this is where buttons are more useful than click wheels. I’ve played a couple of games on the iPod and the click wheel is a pain.
3. Ability to stream videos from YouTube directly. I don’t even know if this is possible. If it is, I’d love to see it.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty decent offering from Microsoft, considering that this is their first time, for a product like tis. And, although journalists and pseudo-journalists have tried to label it as Microsoft’s “iPod killer”, Microsoft is definitely aware of the fact that it’s practically impossible to dethrone iPods with just a single product. This product is more of getting a foot in the door for Microsoft. I like their marketing approach too. Instead of trying to get big names like Bono to tout the product, Microsoft has instead chosen to go with smaller bands and viral videos. It’s a good approach and only time will tell if it’ll succeed. They’ve also come up with a couple of viral videos at comingzune.com. For more information and pics, go to zunethoughts.com or zuneluv.com or better yet, go to the source – Ceser Menendez runs a blog site, zuneinsider.com, where you can get the inside scoop on the product. It also features a list of sites related to Zune. So, check it out when you have the time. The product will be launched in the US some time in November and will apparently cost $229.

iPod and iTunes

The integration of iPod with iTunes and the songs on the iTunes music store may be of interest to techies and journalists, but frankly, do high schoolers and college going kids really care about all that? Do they really buy an iPod because of iTunes (it actually works the other way around)? Most youngsters buy iPods because of peer pressure. They don’t compare iPods’ features to those of other mp3 players. They just don’t care. They buy an iPod to fit in and for that reason, the initial release of Zune needn’t have any killer features. They just need to market it well so that these people will want it. And of course, they need all the luck they can get. It’s not easy. In fact, if you ask me now if this product stands a chance, my answer will be an unequivocal ”no!” Like all other iPod wannabes, this product will probably soon be forgotten. Of course, there’s one thing that sets this product apart from the rest – it’s been made by the world’s largest software company and for that reason alone it’s been generating a lot of buzz. It remains to be seen if this initial buzz will translate into sales, but based on the initial feature-set, I wouldn’t bet on that. In fact, I think it’ll probably eat into its partners’ marketshare first.

Technorati Tags: Zune, music, technology, microsoft, mp3

Are you a student or a lecturer in a college who is looking for good class notes and study material to help guide you? Are you looking for self learning programmes through which you can learn about new concepts in various fields or reinforce the fundamentals of some science, or mathematical technique? Are you looking for interesting ideas and theories in literature, art or for “further reading” books in various subjects? If so, MIT OpenCourseWare is a web resource that you should definitely look into. It is an online course material website, which has published around 1400 courses, in various fields ranging from the sciences, through engineering, art, literature and many more fields. MIT is well known as one of the world’s best universities in engineering, technology and science courses, and some of MIT’s initiatives are being followed by some other prominent universities, both inside the US and outside it, like universities in China.

My experience with MIT OCW’s course notes has been memorable, since their collection of course notes have helped me understand many aspects of aerodynamics, aeronautics and structural engineering, which I needed to learn in detail for certain projects on the job. Apart from these areas (and other engineering subjects), my friend and the other poster on this blog, Phoenix, comments that the courses in literature and psychology are well compiled and interesting and informative.

I think that distributing knowledge freely is one certain way to encourage students to embark on higher learning. This free course ware would also help people discover the things they want to study and perhaps lend focus to one’s career or academic interests. I feel that anyone who is interested in educating themselves on the job, should really consider visiting MIT’s OCW website and downloading the course notes of the subjects which they need to gain proficiency in. It worked for me, on my job. Needless to say, students will find this collection of course notes very useful. I wish I had had such course notes for some courses during my college degree!

Technorati Tags: MIT, OCW, Open Courseware

Etymonline is a website which helps you find the origins of English words of all kinds. There are many of us who are keenly interested in etymology, the origin of words, or perhaps some of us just get curious enough at times to want to find the origin of some word, like “onomatopoeia“, or “braggadocio” or perhaps “distend“. What does one do at these times? When you don’t have a dictionary with you which gives you even the meaning of these words, it is best to resort to etymonline.com.

Etymonline is a simple search site. You just have to key in the word you want to find the origin of, and hit the “search” button. There are several options for searching – Natural language searches, which search within the known set of English words, you can search for single terms, exact phrases or terms with the word in the search field inside them. All this makes it really interesting to do a great deal of jargon busting with. If you, like some of my friends and me, are taken up with how much you don’t know about the internet despite not being computer illiterate, and in fact, despite being pretty internet-efficient, then this site is for you. If you are a linguist who wants a nice reference, this site is for you. If you have a passing curiosity in words, or are preparing for an exam like the GRE or the TOEFL, which require English proficiency, this site offers an easy way to discover the roots of difficult words.

All in all, a superb site!

Technorati Tags: etymology, online etymology search

This post is about one of the coolest Firefox extensions I have ever used, called Performancing for Firefox.

To begin with, you can install this extension at this link: Performancing for Firefox

(If you want to know how to install Firefox extensions, read this tutorial at mozmonkey)

Performancing is a blogging tool. It is a WYSIWYG editor for your blog. After you install it, you should restart Firefox. Then you will find a small button that looks like a notepad, on your browser’s status bar. Click on this. The Performancing extension is ready for use.

You must initially configure your blog account into this. You can configure blogs from all the major blog hosts. From there, you need not login to your blog ever again to publish a new post.

To configure your blog, click the Add button at the bottom right. It opens up the Performancing Account Wizard.
Type your blog url and click Check URL.

If the url is correct then you will be asked to login to your account.

Provide your username and password.

It will immediately list all the
blogs you host from the specified blog account. You can choose the ones
you want to use Performancing with.

And voila! It appears in the list of blogs at the right side.

You can type your blog post out, add links and images, and format text. You can also add technorati tags using the Publishing Options button. You can save the posts as draft or publish them to your blog directly with the Publish to: button. To edit a previous post, you can go to History and click on the post you want to edit. After making changes, click on Publish as Edit.

For WordPress users, it also provides a Categories list with which you can choose categories for your posts.

Now for the interesting part. Performancing has a few addons. One such addon allows you to make posts to your Myspace blog.

Another addon is OakFlickr. You can find it in this link: OakFlickr

With OakFlickr you can upload and add your Flickr images directly to your blog posts. This saves a lot of trouble to photobloggers.

Interestingly enough, this whole post has been typed on Performancing for Firefox. All the images were uploaded using OakFlickr. Now, do you have reason enough to try it?

Technorati Tags: Performancing, WYSIWYG, firefox extension, blogging tool

The peerfactor module uploads the song to a certain location and provides you with a link from which your friends can download your file.

Add Peerfactor Module to Netvibes

During upload…

After upload…

You can use my link to download the song Gin Soaked Boy by Divine Comedy The Usendit Module mails your file to a specific email address within seconds.

Add Usendit Module to Netvibes

After you click “Send it” you will be redirected to the Yousendit site where you will be given information on your file’s location. In case your friend fails to receive the file, you can give this link to him/her.

You can use my link to download a cute picture.

Happy filesharing through netvibes!

Note: I am not sure of the number of days my two files will be available. Please let me know in case there are some dead links. Thank you!

Technorati Tags: netvibes, filesharing

Hey all.. I found a nice method to create categories on blogger. It
involves some hard work especially if you have a huge blog already
because you have to manually put each post in a category. I’ll tell you
how I went about it. I certainly got inspiration from some material I read but I kind of improvised on it.

Get an account at Del.icio.us

Install the small application called del.icio.us extension for firefox.
You can get it here
Del.icio.us Extension for Firefox

Click on Install V.1.1 now. (Firefox 1.07 or newer required)

After installation, close your browser and open it again. Now open
your blog. Right-click on each post link or permalink (most blog
templates provide title links to a post). If this is too tedious go to Google site map generator
and generate the links for all the posts on your site. It generates
permalinks for the posts in the month from the archive links too.
However, this involves typing the titles of the posts again.

A new option named “Tag this link” would appear on the right-click
menu with a delicious icon. Click on it. Add a Tag according to the
category.

Accordingly you can create tags named Mathematics, Art, Literature,
Books and so on. Remember to keep this delicious account specially for
your blog posts alone. You can tag every post in this fashion.

Another method to tag them would be from the “View” option in your
Blogger Dashboard list of posts but it is difficult because this too
does not add the post name automatically. You have to type it out.
Instead you can tag them from your blog itself. I used the search
option in the blogger nav bar for quicker access to what I remembered
would belong to a certain category. Accordingly I accessed all my poems
from memory for the “Poems” category(tag) After tagging all your posts
you’ll have all the tags on delicious with the number of posts
mentioned next to them.

Go here – Tag rolls
and choose the number of tags you want to display (size) colour and size of the fonts. Select the tag count check box.

I have removed the title from the script and added my sidebar heading instead.(title and icon)

The above method works for Firefox users. I am not sure if there is a tag tool for IE.

Try it on your blog.

Technorati Tags: categories for blogger, categories, blogger, del.icio.us

Previously I had a hi-5 account but it was so full of losers and nude people popping up on my home page from nowhere, that I quit. Even quitting required that I send a mail to the customer support. It was too chaotic a site for me.Yet when I visited it last,  a lot of ajax had been added and it had made navigation a lot better.
 
Another site Fropper could have called itself Flopper.

So that is where my socializing stood. Amid all this however, one site caught my attention.

Faces.com is the site. I cannot yet say it is a top-class site for socializing but it certainly has a number of features that make it a Web 2.0 wonder. To  be honest, I am yet to add a single person to my friends list on this site because I have no clue how to go about it. Too many complicating links. Yet I must say, it is a promising site.

Perhaps they should not have pitched themselves up as a socializing website. They seem to specialize more in social music sharing. It is certainly their unique selling proposition.

When you sign up, the site gives you your own blog.The blog editor has an intuitive interface and is easy to use. The site gives you the ability to upload 100mb worth content onto your site every month. You can get a Pro membership if you want to upload unlimited content. It costs $24.90/year for a Pro account. The basic account of course is free.

Faces allows you to upload music and convert them into tunefeeds. This is the most innovative feature in Faces. Tunefeeds are similar to podcasts but the cool thing is, you can save them and manage them with an in-built filemanager.

You can listen to others’ tunefeeds with a tunefeed player. The streaming is very good even if your connection is slow. There is also the option to make your blog and music private.

Faces gives you tools to upload music straight from your desktop.

You can also upload photos and create slideshows which you can share with friends. Then, there are the regular features like a message box to receive mails from friends in your network.

The thing I like best about Faces, is very trivial actually. The buttons. It is one site which is psychedelically coloured and thoroughly keeps you clicking.

Try it and tell me!

Technorati Tags: faces.com, social networking, web 2.0, tunefeeds

After this I signed up at Furl
I should say I liked furl a lot. It allowed me to mark pages and stored a copy of them irrespective of changes on the page itself. In other words it was like a cache. It also provided me with a Furl firefox extension to mark the pages I visited, to visit my archived pages and to mail the pages to my friends.

However, I was still looking for a site that would store all my bookmarks in one place that was easy to navigate through and to retrieve information from.

This was when I discovered Blinklist. Blinklist has a very neat interface that is user-friendly and is pimped with AJAX left, right and centre. It is quite thrilling to navigate through that site. It is full of pleasant surprises. The signup process was interesting. After logging me in, it offered to import bookmarks from my browser. I had to point to the html file that stored all my links and voila they were imported in no time at all. Now it had yet another surprise for me – The “Import from Furl” option. I did that too. After this I realized I had an opml file full of links from my feed reader, which I had to import. I wondered initially and then found a neat method to do it. I imported the opml into my browser bookmarks and exported it as html. Then I uploaded it to blinklist again. Now I had some links on del.icio.us and guess what.. yeah you’re right.. blinklist imports from del.icio.us too. So there they were .. my links all in one place. Neat and tidy.

If you thought the excitement ended there, then you’re mistaken. There was somebody visiting my profile and sending me messages through live chat. It was superb.

Then I could export all my links as a tag cloud to my blog.

Then there was an extensive search tool with tag prompts, like google suggest with which I dug through the entire world of blinklist links.

I also got a bookmarklet for my browser with which to blink sites as soon as they caught my attention.

Overall,all my votes go to blinklist, for user-friendliness, an intuitive browsing atmosphere and a set of great tools to make life easy.

Here is my blinklist: Risenphoenix

Technorati Tags: blinklist, social bookmarking, tagging, link manager, web 2.0

Personally, I was blog hopping till my mouse pointer hurt, before I discovered the magic of feed reading. However, feeds are not so widely prevalent in the minds of web surfers yet. Many of them are yet to understand its significance. This certainly does not stop the influence of feeds on the world wide web. Feeds are here to stay.

What is a feed?

You might find a hundred definitions for the word “feed”, in the techno world. It is basically a machine-readable document that only an application called the feed reader can decode and reveal. For the lay person, a feed reader is a one-stop destination to consolidate all the information that s/he may require. With feeds, you can read comics, top news stories, blogs and just about anything that you may want to read on the internet. In recent times, you can subscribe even to podcasts which are nothing but video and audio feeds.

Where do feeds come from?

Every website can have its own feed. A feed contains all the information a web site may wish to present to its readers. The readers can subscribe to this feed from a feed reader and read it in leisure. You can also create a feed for your site. Sites such as Feed Burner also help create feeds and to optimize and publicize them. You can even keep track of the number of readers accessing your site through feeds. There are web news crawlers that may integrate your feed into them. You can use search tags that will allow users to access your feed from search sites like Google or Technorati.
How do I read feeds?

Feeds are not readable in their raw form. Only a feed reader can help you read feeds. A feed reader is a magic wand upon whose touch the mysterious and indecipherable codes in an rss or xml document get decoded. Another beauty in feed readers is its ability to aggregate information from various places within seconds and present them to you on a platter.
Some of the well-known feed readers are Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines and NewsGator.

Where do I find feeds?

Feeds have their own urls. The act of accessing a feed through a feed reader is similar to a magazine subscription. Sites like Blogger and WordPress generate default Atom or RSS feeds for their member blogs. You can subscribe to any blogspot feed by inserting the respective atom url into your feed reader.
Example: http://*yoursite*.blogspot.com/atom.xml (remove the asterisks and insert the blog name instead of ‘yoursite’.)

Along with this watch out for this icon

Wherever you find it, there is a feed to a particular site that you may want to read. Click on it to subscribe to the relevant material. Also look out for RSS and XML icons.

Where do I start?

To begin with you can look at a site like Share OPML to see what thousands of feed subscribers are currently reading on the internet. You might be able to do a subject-wise feed search with an RSS search engine like Feedster or Plazoo.

I personally recommend Netvibes, an AJAX feed reader, as it is largely customizable and user-friendly. Netvibes also integrates several other tools that give you a complete web package.

Employ these methods and enjoy your feed reading experience!

Note: I have previously published this article at Desicritics – Feeds for Thought

Technorati Tags: Feeds, RSS, Feed reader

You could be designing a web page for someone in the UK. It would indeed be a long process to create a prototype on your computer and send it over to him for approval. You could be wanting to ask your sister in the USA as to how to rearrange the furniture in your bed room. You might want to show a simple process flow to a colleague in Delhi. A quick conversation on the net can only do so much to convey pictures and visuals. Well, how many of us can draw a square on Yahoo Doodle IMvironment? It is in these occasions that Gliffy will come in handy.

Gliffy allows you to create diagrams on the fly without the need to download any software. Certainly one more of those Web 2.0 wonders. It gives to you a number of premade symbols and shapes which you can incorporate in your drawings. You can create a comprehensive process flowchart with available shapes and connectors.

You can create a complete home with furniture, wall colours, floor patterns and upholstery. Gliffy allows you to manipulate the distances , the spaces between objects. There is a grid (removable) for proper measurement of sizes in your diagrams.

It is possible to create the prototypes for an entire web page or software interface, with Gliffy. It contains object models for all components in a user interface.

You can create graphic representations for abstract concepts such as “data flow” or “network security”. The best part however comes only after all these. The “Share” option enables you to publish your diagram to your blog or web site. You can download the images in different sizes and send them across to people you may want to show them to.

Gliffy interface is extremely user-friendly and fast considering it is still in its beta. We can look forward to more features and functionalities in the successive versions.

Note: I have previously published this article at Desicritics – Spiffy Drawings with Gliffy

Technorati Tags: gliffy, online diagrams, diagram