As the year 2008 is coming to end, there is a delay in the begin of 2009. Yes, 2009 is gonna be delayed by one second. There is one more second given for us to enjoy in 2008 which is called as Leap Second. On December 31, the planet's official timekeepers will add a “leap second” to the Coordinated Universal Time Scale (UTC) followed around the world. The additional second makes up for the difference in two clocks – one based on Earth’s rotation and the other on the more precise atomic time of the UTC. The extra second was mandated by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris, and is not to be taken lightly.

Can we just imagine that we have 24 hours and 1 second in a day. One second is not a small thing as some people think. The worth of a second can be better explained by a person who got second place in a 200 meters running by missing his first place in a second delay.

In the U.S., the extra second will be added by the U.S. Naval Observatory at 6:59:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (11:59:59 p.m. Universal time). It will be the 24th “leap second” tacked on to the universal time scale since 1972. To keep the time scales within 0.9 seconds of each other, the IERS Service, which tracks the differences between the clocks, periodically inserts or subtracts a second to Universal time. The last one was added on New Year’s Eve three years ago.

Lets Welcome 2009 one second later or rather I can be optimistic by saying an extra second is been gifted in 2008. Happy new year!!

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When most of us are nailbiting to work on Windows 7 by expecting the official release of Windows 7 Beta 1 around January 2009, sources proves that the Beta 1 version has been leaked. This Microsoft’s new and upcoming operating system is currently in the development phase.

But according to CNET, there are leaks already exists which allows people to test and try on it. People who has tried on these leaks has even reported few flaws which has been identified. There are almost 1,800 people seeding the operating system in the Pirate Bay, a torrent website, inspite of the offical release. This will be a 2.44 gigabytes download size file.

Microsoft has just started sending out invitations for the Windows 7 Beta 1 testing program. This successor to Windows Vista, Build 7000, or Beta 1, of Windows 7 is nothing more than Build 6801 with a few tweaks added to it. This Beta 1 of Windows 7 seems to be solid and stable which addresses a lot of the complaints and issues that Windows Vista currently has.

Let us know if you try downloading from the torrents and get the hands on of the original version before the release.

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Recently a survey was conducted by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which states that the internet has become the second most important source for national and international news for many people. The survey was taken among 1,489 adults out of which 40% of the people accepted that their main source for news is Internet.

When the same center conducted a survey last year, only 24% of people opted internet as their source of news where 74% opted television and 34% opted for newspaper. But this year in 2008, though the television rates as the first source of news, the percentage of people depending on television has gone down from 74% to 70%. But the Internet stands second by 40% of people depending on internet for news.

In the emerging world of internet, people depend more on internet for any kind of news than newspaper since the communication and way of reachability and the major advantage will news can be spread all over the world in no time. When the adults survey has itself showed a much difference, undoubtedly in the survey among the youngsters the percentage of people who rely on internet as almost been doubled from 34% to 59%. Lets see the progress in 2009 and its not gonna be a big surprise even if the Internet takes over the first place!!

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Nokia has Launched its first touchscreen mobile phone, Nokia5800 Xpress Music, formely known as Nokia Tube. Nokia 5800 is targeted for Music lovers.In other words, it can be called as iPhone killer. Nokia 5800 is been designed to act as a complete rival for Apple iphone.



The feature-packed phone, said D. Shivakumar, managing director, Nokia India, is a better converged device than Apple's iPhone 3G. "What iPhone did was to bring the touch element to a multimedia converged device. Since we are already the leader in converged devices in India, Nokia 5800 will be a revolutionary launch from our stable," he said.

Nokia 5800 also offers latest technologies like 3G, GPS big touchscreen etc. The various other specifications and features can be viewed here.

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E-Swecha is a free software project initiated by the Free Software Movement in India and was aimed at developing a free Operating System to, for and by the engineering students. This first Indian operating system is a collaborative work of  hundreds of engineering students in and around Hyderabad. Crucial inputs from a team of academicians, most of them teaching in various engineering colleges has been a major contribution to the project. The name is derieved from "E(ngineering)- Swecha" [Swecha is the telugu word for 'freedom']

Father of free software, Richard Stallman visited Hyderabad on 23rd Dec,2008 to oversee the migration of thousands of  computers to a new "Indian" operating system. E-Swecha is been installed on 21,000 computers across Andhra Pradesh. It is based on the Debian OS Linux, was created by the student community in engineering colleges in Hyderabad and has been in development for a year. The OS is packed with all the tools that engineering students could possibly need on a single platform.

Stallman said that free software use in India was fairly high, though much remained to be done. He said that Kerala took the initiative by migrating computers in its public schools to free software, due to the efforts of the Free Software Foundation of India. While some schools in Karnataka and West Bengal have made the switch, progress was stalled in Andhra Pradesh, Stallman said.

For more details on E-Swecha, see here.

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Microsoft's Certified Professional exam is designed for IT professionals. As you know accomplishing Microsoft's Certified Professional exam with flying colors is an achievement according to various IT professionals. A girl named Lavinashree, who is nine years old, from the Tamil Nadu region of India, passed Microsoft's exam this week, according to Indian media reports. As you see, though, being ahead of her age is nothing new for this young gal as she has been breaking records since she was three.

Lavinashree is now the youngest person to ever do so, breaking a previous record held by a 10-year-old girl Arfa Karim, from Pakistan. By achieving this feat, the girl has boosted all our self confidence for the people from India to achieve more and more. Hope this fourth standard girl will be role model for many of us.

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Nokia shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan's territory in its mobile navigation system. At the time when Indo-Pak relationship is getting worser owing to the recent Mumbai terror attacks, this information played havoc with a Nokia shop in central Jabalpur city, Madhya Pradesh, which was attacked by the activists of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the youth wing of BJP.

Nokia Maps is an application which comes preloaded on certain handsets and offers maps of over 200 countries across the globe. It can also be accessed online through the PC and/or a mobile device. In an older version of its maps, Kashmir is showed as part of Pakistan's territory.

While clarifying this issue the company said, 'Nokia India, deeply regrets an inadvertent error in depicting certain international boundaries in an older version of its maps. This was as a result of a technical error that occurred in merging various map data layers. The error has been identified and corrected earlier this year. Nokia urges all its consumers to upgrade to Maps 2.0 and access the latest version of India maps. Consumers can also update the Maps application and the maps on their device by either accessing the maps from the website or Nokia map Loader or visiting a nearest Nokia Care Center. Nokia is one of the few handsets manufacturers that provide Government approved maps of India. Nokia remains committed in providing accurate and official map data information to all our users.'

Now this situation has really made map making software companies give it a second thought as to how to deal with such disputed borders or even national claims.

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Every year, Google gives holiday cash gift of $1000 to its employees worldwide. But this year, this tradition is going to change. Instead of giving $1000 cash gift, Google is handing out version of T-Mobile’s G1 Android mobile phone as Christmas gift to its employees worldwide.

The G1 Android phone will be given to 85 percent of Google’s 20,123 global staff in the United States, Western and Central Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Japan, according to an internal email sent to its employees. In the countries where the G1 Android phone has not been released, employees will be receiving $400. This is $600 less than the usual $1000 cash bonus, saving $17 Million for Google.

In an official memo to its employees, Google told them "The holiday bonus is a Google tradition — it’s a great way to thank everyone for their hard work. In the past, we’ve done this in cash. This year, we’ve decided to give Googlers a different kind of present — a Dream phone.”

What's your say on this? is this a Google way of marketing and testing their Android G1 mobile phone?

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As we are aware, the Chrome install is very easy. Even when the security features are concerned, Google claims that Chrome is more secure than IE8. Google says that each tab runs in its own “sandbox,” so that if there’s nasty spyware-type software running on one Web site, it has no access to the rest of your computer, or even the other tabs. Google asserts that this is much stronger protection than Internet Explorer 8 gives you, especially in Windows XP.

But when it comes to speed, Google also ensures that its own services run better in Chrome than in other browsers. Is this part of Google’s great conspiracy? If you had noticed, in Gmail website in IE, you’ll see a link at the top that says "Get Faster Gmail" - it’s placed next to your Gmail user name and highlighted in bold red.

As you could expect to see some tips or tricks to make Gmail faster, but surprisingly that link will lead you to page which contains link to download Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. You can also see a phrase in that page, which says that Gmail will be twice as fast in Google Mail supported browsers.

I wonder whether Gmail website is really that fast on Chrome or is this just an indirect promotion of Google Chrome for IE users?

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As we know, IBM Lotus Symphony has been selected as the Product of the Year 2008 for Desktop Applications. This was announced few weeks back by CRN, a leading industry publication. The editors at the Test Center for CRN evaluated hundreds of products in 2008 out of which IBM Lotus Symphony was ranked first.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, and other documents. It is a richly-featured set of productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. Users can enjoy the easy-to-use interface and online community for templates, tips and support.

Inspite of all these advantages, IBM is now delivering IBM Symphony's CD at your doorstep for free of cost. Openoffice.org being a 142 MB application, with slow internet connections cannot be downloaded efficiently. Hence, IBM is offering the IBM lotus symphony suite CD door delivered for those who live in India.

Residents of India can just fill in this request form and an IBM Lotus Symphony CD will delivered to your place free of cost. Still, it can also be downloaded from IBM website.

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Currently, iPhone is one of the most popular devices on the market and many people buy it and even take photos using it. By seeing this trend, Hewlett-Packard(HP) has announced a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch and can be downloaded from App Store for free.

This application is called HP iPrint Photo and allows pictures stored on an iPhone to be printed using HP's inkjet printers attached to a Wi-Fi network.

All you need to do is load up the application in iPhone, view a picture, and tap on it. A few seconds later, it will wirelessly begin printing on your inkjet printer. Images printed with the iPrint application will be of 4 x 6 size.

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Till now we have heard only of iPhone and iPhone Touch Phones, but it seems something new is also coming. iPhone Nano, that's what it is called according to the latest rumors that are going around before this year's Macworld Expo.

The story behind this latest rumor is the listing of ‘iPhone Nano’ silicon cases by a company called XSKN on its website. This company even listed the cases for the iPhone 3G and iPod Nano in advance of the announcement by Apple.

Some reliable sources even claims that some people even managed to see the iPhone Nano. So, now the big question which remains is when this will be launched? The Macworld Expo is due next month but since Steve Jobs won't be giving the keynote, that seems unlikely. It's possible that iPhone Nano might be unveiled in a separate event organised by Apple, the way recent product were unveiled.

Let's wait and see!!. In case, you have any news regarding this iPhone Nano, do share with us.

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In the current trend, almost one in four cell phone users access the Internet on their device and about one in six users does it frequently. This is the reason why mobile web browsing is predicted to become the next predominant Internet platform. Hence making your website Mobile-Friendly is more important.

Listed below are the few tips for designing a Mobile-Friendly Blog,

1. The first point you should consider is the sizing of the screens. The user would like to view the entire content of the page without having to scroll, and would wish to navigate between the various parts of the page and to interact with the UI very naturally. Some famous mobile phones uses resolutions as 128 × 160 pixels, 176 × 220 pixels, 240 × 320 pixels and 320 × 480 pixels where as the blog would be designed for industry-standard screen resolution – 1024×768. Hence you can use a single column design, which will work best across the variety of resolutions. Also you might need to consider touch-screen.

2. Secondly, you should concentrate on traffic and efficiency during page loads. Phones can't handle very large pages with more images etc. Mobile blogs generally display only one post per page which helps keep size down. If you write long posts and use more than three small images per post then look for a mobile blogging platform that can split large pages and resize or strip images. For maximum traffic and usability your site should support thematic consistency.

But the best way I would suggest is to use a service that creates a mobile site from your RSS feed. There are many sites which does this Mowser, FeedM8, Feed 2 Mobile, MoFuse etc.

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Lenovo has achieved a new milestone in the computing industry by introducing a ThinkPad W700ds laptop that features two LCD screens. This is the first laptop ever that has two LCD screens, a 17-in primary screen and a smaller 10.6-in secondary display panel.

This ThinkPad laptop used quad-core Intel Core 2 processor and Nvidia Quadro mobile graphics CPU with as many as 128 cores. It also comes with as much as 8GB of DDR3 memory and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage.

The Thinkpad's secondary screen can be tiled up to 30 degrees and the main screen is rated at 400 nits of brightness. It has dual fans with dual heat-reduction systems and the whole thing measures 16 by 12 inches and is 2.1 inches thick.

It weighs around 11 pounds which is far heavier than the norms and will have a starting price of $3,600, when it goes up for sale in January.

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As we know, the existing Google Webmaster Tools had support for 26 languages but recently, Google extended its language support to 40 by adding support to 14 new languages. The new languages that is supported are Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese (Portugal), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Now the total list of languages that are being supported are itemized below along with their universal code.

Arabic (ar)
Bulgarian (bg)
Catalan (ca)
Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) (zh-TW)
Simplified Chinese (zh-CN)
Croatian
Czech (cs)
Danish (da)
Dutch (nl)
English (en)
English UK (en-GB)
Filipino (fil)
Finnish (fi)
French (fr)
German (de)
Greek (el)
Hebrew (iw)
Hindi (hi)
Hungarian (hu)
Indonesian (id)
Italian (it)
Japanese (ja)
Korean (ko)
Latvian (lv)
Lithuanian (lt)
Norwegian (no)
Polish (pl)
Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR)
Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Slovakian (sk)
Slovenian (sl)
Spanish (es)
Swedish (sv)
Thai (th)
Turkish (tr)
Ukrainian (uk)
Vietnamese (vi)

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Ever experienced difficulty in filtering out clip-arts or pencil drawings from the google image search. Now it can be easily done as because of the google's new options in searching.

Along with the faces and photo content, Google has also added up Cliparts and Line Drawing options inorder to filter out the images based on user's wish and need.

All of these options can be selected from the "Any content" drop down in the blue title bar on any search results page, or by selecting one of the "Content types" on the Advanced Image Search page. User need not type any queries newly instead just a selection will do.

Tell us about your experience whether this new feature really helped you in filtering out what you needed?

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On December 18, Symantec unveiled Norton Internet Security for Mac which includes traditional virus protection, a Firewall, and tools to help Mac users protect against the spyware and identity thefts.

Though currently not many users of Mac faces these problems, but in the long run with Mac becoming more popular among users, this would be a better solution to be ready to face any potential threats. This application is integrated with the protection found in Norton AntiVirus 11 for Mac, Norton Confidential, and two-way firewall functionality.

The Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection was also released along with this. This application will also protect against phishing Web sites, protecting your identity and protecting files against keyloggers and other types of eavesdropping applications.

Norton Internet Security for Mac is also linked to Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System, updating the firewall rules at least once a day to protect against the latest attacking IP addresses. This ensures that Mac users will be protected on an ongoing basis without having to really think about many of the threats.

You can purchase Norton Internet Security for Mac for $79.99 and Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection for $69.99.

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The Google webmaster team has prepared a very good 22 minute video presentation, which gives tips on how to improve your site’s presence on Google search and how to deal with issues like image search, fluctuating PageRank, duplicate content etc.

The presentation slides used in this video can be downloaded from Google Docs.

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Toshiba introduced the world's first 2.5 inch 512GB solid state drive. This multi-chip NAND based flash storage is based on 43nm manufacturing technology.

It supports excellent read speeds of 240MBps and write speeds of 200MBps. The drives comes with AES encryption, which improves data protection. Toshiba also plans to introduce 64GB, 128GB and 256GB SSD versions.

They are designed for laptops, gaming and home entertainment systems. The company plans to demonstrate new SSD in January at CES 2009.

Shipments of engineering samples of the new drives will begin in the first quarter of 2009 and mass production is scheduled for the second quarter.

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Samsung Electronics is developing an Android-powered version of the Korean market Omnia smart device for launch on Sprint and T-Mobile in the second quarter of next year in North America.

The launch of Google phone by Samsung is regarded as a signal for increasing its smart phone market share by releasing handsets in various operating systems.

On December 18, industry insiders said that Samsung Electronics is currently in the development process of its new Google phone to release out in the Q2 2009 via Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA in North America.

A team of 80 developers is currently working on it including 30 Linux and Java experts. Although the developers have been at it for a year, Sprint needs the Google phone quick and has asked Samsung to speed-up.

The Google phone will feature the Google Map based location information service, messenger G-Talk, the G-mail application and Google Search.

A Samsung official said, “We are accelerating the development process for Google phone in order to meet the specific need of local carriers. We will be able to release Google phone in the second quarter of the next year in the US market. ”

Currently, HTC, a Taiwanese mobile phone maker, only released a Google phone, G1.

Its Google phone has been assessed to have lower competitiveness in design and quality.

That’s why Samsung’s full touch Google phone is drawing attention from the market.

Lets us know your views whether this phone could be an iPhone killer?

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Wikipedia is the most commonly used free content encyclopedia written by a global community of volunteers. This has launched its mobile version of its site to address the needs of the ever growing mobile subscribers. The site has been built as though the basic model phones which have a WAP browser can access it.

The two major advancements in mobile version is it can support 14 languages as of now and another feature called Spoken Wikipedia which will give some practical use of the nearly 800 spoken articles on the site. Currently this feature is not enabled to users. This site involves no graphics except the Wikipedia logo.

Visit mobile.wikipedia.org and let us know the feedback.

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Google has released the latest version of it’s AdWords Editor v7.0 in just 2 months after the last major upgrade (version 6.5 in Oct 2008). Google AdWord Editor version 7 includes a number of changes and improvements including First page bid estimates, Keyword Quality Score, Keyword Opportunities Locale, Campaign targeting in the data view and Send feedback to Google.

Google AdWords Editor is a free program that lets Google AdWords users to download their account, update your campaigns with powerful editing tools, then upload your changes to AdWords.

Advertisers will welcome the latest upgrade, as the more useful metrics included in the editor will make it easier for them to make informed decisions and changes with their campaigns.

After you've installed the new version, you can download your account and import the backup file.

Download the latest version of Adwords Editor from here.

Please let us know what you feel about this new version of Adwords Editor.

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Gmail labs has just added a new feature in Gmail, which will allow you to create a new document and save it in Google doc format by just a simple click. After you enable this feature, you will get an option ‘Create a document’ while browsing your emails.

To enable this feature, login to your Gmail account and then navigate to Gmail Labs tab under Settings. Select "Enable" next to "Create a Document" option and click on save changes. From now on you will see ‘Create a Document’ option next to each email message in your Gmail inbox for quick and easy conversion to document format.

In case you do not want to convert any email to document format and want to work on fresh document then press the G key followed by W key on the keyboard. This will open blank docs window, provided keyboard shortcuts is enabled in General tab under Settings.

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Getting bored with the plain and simple background of your Flickr’s photostream? Here’s a great way to view your wonderful photos in a cool and different interface. Picsviewr is a Web app that provides a wide variety of slideshows in both flash and HTML so that you can view your Flickr photos with more flexibility.

Picsviewr currently provides 7 different templates which includes Tiltviewer, Polaroid gallery, Photos stack, Wall, Mini wall, dfGallery, Slide film Gallery, Flashapi, Grey gallery and Black gallery.

As you enter your Flickr’s username (in your Flickr’s dashboard, click on photostream and copy and paste the URL into the text field provided), Picsviewr lets you choose whether you’d want medium or high quality for your photos. Select one of your preferred design and click “Demo”. Using the drop-down menu in the photo viewer, you can select which photos you’d like to view by choosing the tags.

If you love what you see, you can bookmark it and view the page anytime you want.

I like the Tiltviewer template very much. Do let me know which you like the most.

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It might be a surprise for many people but Microsoft has increased the storage space for their free online storage service, SkyDrive from 5GB to 25GB, making it one among the largest free online storage providers. The look and feel of the SkyDrive has been changed and now it has been opened up for 6 more regions and 13 more languages.

Below are the few things, you will find in new SkyDrive:

• Free storage space increased to 25GB
• Now entire folders can be downloaded as ZIP file(s).
• Photos can be viewed in beautiful slide show.
• Files can be shared with users who don’t have Windows Live ID, just by using their email addresses.

But on the downside, the Windows Live Photo Gallery is still not linked to SkyDrive so you have to upload your photos one by one, which may take weeks.

One more downside is the individual file size restriction, which is 50MB. So incase you are thinking about uploading a file which is more than 50MB, then you have to split the file and then upload.

Hope, Microsoft looks into the following issues and resolves it in the next update!!.

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In the last few years, we saw many mobile phones allowing us to access Internet but it seems we have to wait one more decade for mobile phones to become the primary means of connecting to Internet world wide.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's "Future of the Internet III study," nearly 600 Internet experts said the combination of portability and relative affordability will turn the cell phone into the leading Internet gateway by 2020.

Some of the views shared by the experts during interview were

• Some 77% said the mobile computing device (the smartphone) with more significant computing power will be 2020's primary global Internet-connection platform.
• Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said the original Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a next-generation 'net by 2020.
• By 2020 it will not be so easy to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop.

Based upon the report, Pew suggests mobile technology may offer a better alternative for providing Internet access than computers through projects such as One Laptop per Child Initiative.

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MyWebDesktop is an online tool which enables you to access, collaborate and communicate with your colleagues between desktops by sharing files, bookmarks, notes and communicate with each other using a message board or via instant messaging.

To start collaborating with your workmates on projects, you will have to connect with his or her desktop.

Key features includes private space for files, bookmarks and notes, tagging for easy searching, notebook application allowing collaborative writing and many more.

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Want to annoy your friends by typing your text upside down so that they have a difficult time finding out what you're typing unless they turn the whole computer upside down? Well, I'm stumbled across a site called FlipTitle which lets you do so.

Using a program that converts text to unicode characters and symbols that look inverted, FlipTitle generates flipped text by inputing some words and symbols in the textfield.

This tool is useful as it adds some security if you use flipped text in your passwords. However, some services or platforms can't read upside-down text.

Besides that, you can use it as IM names, putting it in social networking profiles, encrpyt your download links to prevent leechers and to annoy your friends.

FlipTitle only supports English letters, most puntuation marks such as question mark, comma, brackets, exclamation mark, etc. Some general typography isn't allowed like $, &, etc. Numbers aren't supported.

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Whenever you post tweets on some micro-blogging platform(like Twitter), sometimes you add a short URL as a link to an article in your blog. The most popular URL shortener out there is TinyUrl but many people turn away from TinyUrl because they don't provide analytics which may be valuable to bloggers.

BudUrl does provides tracking features but only limits up to 250 short URLs for a free account.

Cligs is another URL shortener which not only lets you create short URLs but also provides analytics to track the number of hits, referral statistics and recent mention of the clig itself on Twitter.

The most interesting feature is that this powerful and useful tool allows you to create and track unlimited number of cligs pointing to the same URL at no cost.

The downside of Cligs is that it doesn't allows you to create custom cligs unlike TinyUrl. Cligs requires registration to track the short URLs.

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One website which is making quick rounds on Twitter this weekend is Tweetwasters, a site that gives you an idea of how much time you’re wasting posting messages and status updates to the popular micro-sharing service. Users are calculating away and tweeting about it, ironically spending even more time on Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

There’s even a WordPress plugin that lets you show off your Twitter usage stats to your blog visitors, and if you try hard you might just make the Tweetwasters Hall Of Fame.

Tweetwasters estimates that a user spends about 30 seconds on creating a Tweet on average. They multiply that by the number of Twitter messages you have produced and they provide you with the approximate number of seconds, minutes, hours or days of your life you have spent on Twitter. Of course, most people spend more time reading tweets than writing them, so it’s probably way more than Tweetwasters will ever be able to tell you.

The service was built for fun by Sugarrae, but there’s an application called Wakoopa that tracks your software usage continuously and provides you with details of what you use the most (both for desktop and web applications) and tells you what other software you might find useful.

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Google has removed the beta tag from its Chrome browser - just 100 days after the software was first launched, which claims more than 10 millions active users in just over 3 months.

Since launching, Google has gathered tons of customer feedback and performance reports, and they kept rolling out new features and bug fixes. Chrome is fast, stable and secure without a doubt, but it still doesn’t support Mac and Linux. Also, an extension platform (Firefox’s add-ons style) is strongly required by a substantial amount of users.

As you may know, many google products are in beta for years, including Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. So, why google took Chrome out of beta so quick?

One of the reasons could be that Google is not happy to pay Firefox millions every year. Google paid Firefox $66 million this year for the default search box in the Firefox browser, and the bill would go up if Firefox gets more online search market share. So, Google desperately wants to reduce that bill by encouraging people to use their own browser, Chrome, and it gives users more confidence by simply removing the magic beta label.

Second reason could be that many computer manufactures (OEMs) agreed to pre-install Chrome on their new computers if Google takes Chrome out of beta. It always makes sense to keep the key customers and partners happy, especially when they offer to help you.

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Gmail has released a nice upgrade to view PDF document attachments without having to download them. This is great news for those who are sick of their computers slowing down from having to open the Adobe PDF reader software and bad news for Adobe themselves.

In order to view the document, Gmail users just have to click “View” next to the attachment description. A new Google Docs window or tab will open the document.


There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

To view the document in HTML. The link for HTML format is at the top of the new PDF viewer. PDFs can still be saved and viewed with Adobe’s software by clicking “Download.”

The exisiting link to open up PDFs as HTML pages straight from the message, has been removed but still the document can be viewed in HTML format in the new PDF viewer and in search results from Google.com.

Presumably Google.com results will get the updated viewer next. This would be a huge benefit to Google Search users because Google's current HTML conversion wipes out much of the formatting that can keep fonts and image placement intact, which can make things like brochures and newsletters unreadable.

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People tend to leave their Gmail open all day, every day. Whether they’re at their computer or not their email sits there, ever checking.
One problem with this is that Google Talk tends to stay active too. If someone needs to get a hold of you they’ll try, and try, and try your Google Talk and get no response because you’re not there!

Well, now you can send a message straight to your friend's phone from your Gtalk chat window.

You can activate this handy feature by visiting the Labs page in Gmail settings.

According to the Gmail blog post, the site is currently testing out the service with US phones only for now (messages can be sent from abroad, they just need to be directed at a US phone).

This isn’t by any means the first chat service to offer free SMS messaging - major chat networks like AIM have been doing this for years. But it’s a handy feature, especially for the many people who use Gmail all day long.

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Few months back, Google India introduced a new product called Google SMS Channels that lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages.

SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to. You can also create groups over SMS to communicate with your friends, family, and co-workers all without paying any fees to your mobile carrier.


Other than receiving blog RSS feeds via SMS, you may also use the Google SMS service to get news alerts and weather information on your phone.

Another interesting part – you don’t really need a mobile phone to send an SMS to your group as there’s an option in Google SMS channels that lets you can compose and send SMS messages via the web itself. It supports English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

Google SMS channels currently works only with with phone numbers of India but they are “working towards making this service available to international numbers.”

If you are based in India and like to subscribe to this site on your mobile phone via SMS, please join the Techno Mirror SMS channel on Google.

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Google is teaming up with dozens of publishers to index old magazines and make them available online, according to a blog posting by the company.

The move is another facet of Google's ambition to organize the world's information and comes two years after the tech search giant embarked on a scheme to scan and index millions of books.

In September, the company launched a project to digitize newspaper archives, making millions of old newspaper articles searchable online.


The new offering allows users to browse magazine covers and to delve into individual issues, which will be presented in exactly the same way as they first appeared in print, including all the ads. The magazine pages will be shown alongside contemporary Google ads and links to publishers' web sites.

Dozens of publishers have already signed on for the project. Among the magazines already available are New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Ebony.

'Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google book search results,' wrote Dave Foulser, the software engineer in charge of the project.

'Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for,' he said.

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According to a report published on BBC News, Microsoft is preparing to launch online versions of Word, Excel and other programs in the Microsoft Office suite plus Exchange and Sharepoint in 2009.

Users will be able to use these programs via a web browser rather than installing them on a PC.

Some versions of the programs are expected to be free to use provided users are happy to view adverts alongside the software.

"We expect fully that the full range of Office utilities, from the most advanced to simpler lightweight versions, will be available with a range of options: ad-funded, subscriptions-based, traditional licensing fees, and so forth," Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's business division told the Reuters newswire.

The move to web-based versions is also seen as a belated move by Microsoft to bolster its credentials in the move to so-called "cloud computing" in which applications only live online.

So far no date has been given for when the web-based versions will be available - though they are expected to be put online in 2009.

Mr Elop said Microsoft had seen strong interest from many existing customers in the web versions. Using such software would free many from maintaining their own hardware and software to support locally-installed versions.

"What we think is in five years, 50% of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud," he said.

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Unlike Wordpress, one of the feature which was missing in Blogger till today was Import and Export feature. But, finally that feature has also been made available in Blogger from today.

The Import & Export feature in Blogger can be accessed from the Settings tab of your Blogger dashboard.


Using Export Blog feature, you can easily create a complete backup of your Blogger blog on your hard drive and this can be pretty useful in case you accidentally delete some blog posts or Google blocks your blog for some reasons so that you can host the backed up content on a new blog.

This feature can also be useful if you want to merge two blogs into one blog or just want to move individual posts between different blogs just by exporting content from one blog and importing the same content in the other blog.

Currently, Import feature is provided only for Blogger blogs so for those who want to move from WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or any other blogging platforms have to wait till Blogger supports those platforms too.

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Good News for Gmail users! Google is giving away free Gmail stickers to all Gmail fans.

There are various stickers which includes Gmail logo stickers, list of Gmail shortcuts which you can paste anywhere on your keyboard and get familiar with the shortcuts.


Anyone can get hands on these stickers by sending a self addressed-stamped envelope to the below address:

Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420

For those who are outside U.S, enclose an international reply coupon (IRC) along with your envelope.

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Ever wondered how to install multiple versions of IE in windows XP but could not find a solution. Then here's a solution.


To install IE7 and IE6 on your PC, or VMWare Windows environment on your mac, you must install IE7 as your main IE application, and then go to TredoSoft.com to install earlier versions - IE6, and even earlier.

It does not support IE7, which is why IE7 (or IE8) needs to be a regular installation.

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Few days back, Delicious a social bookmarking service released a couple of updates to its Internet Explorer and Firefox add-ons, fixing a couple of bugs and adding some features.

One of the new feature that they added was an audio player which can play your MP3 bookmarks inside the browser.

The audio player pops up in a horizontal bar, consisting of back/forward navigational controls, and has integration with Yahoo! Search, along with timer and playlist features. The interface of the audio player resembles much like Yahoo! Mediaplayer.

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If you are creative, then there is a contest waiting for you. Intel is running a contest called What's Inside You, and you can participate in it by submitting an image, an audio file, or a video file.

The submission should describe how Intel processor played a key role in your project. When you've completed your work, submit it and it will be put up for Internet fan vote. Contest judges will decide winners from the top 10 vote getters based on creativity, innovative use of technology, and the relevance of the CPU in the design.


To participate in the contest, you must be at least 18 years old and a resident of the United States. The prizes include Intel Centrino 2-based notebook computers($3000), Amazon.com gift cards($200), and cash($300). The contest ends on January 15, 2009 and the winners will be announced on February 11, 2009.

Check the contest rules for more details.

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Much to the surprise of the developers, Google has released the first unlocked Android Phone, the G1. They call this as Android Dev Phone 1 and will be sold exclusively to the developers which will have an unlocked SIM and hardware.


Since it will be unlocked, it can be used on any network that will support it and any kind of application can be created on the phone that the hardware will support.

To get hands on this phone, you must register as a developer for $25 and the best part is, the Android Dev Phone 1 is costs only $399.

More details can be found on the Android Developers Blog.

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NVIDIA has unveiled the world’s first personal supercomputer named Tesla personal supercomputers, which is 250 times faster than the average PC. It is based on the revolutionary NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores

The new computers make innovative use of graphics processing units - a technological breakthrough, which the company claims could bring lightning speeds to the next generation of home computers.


The supercomputers will help scientists to discover cures for diseases such as cancer and malaria.

Until now, supercomputers were massive made up of thousands of machines taking up entire rooms, which cost millions of pounds to build and maintain. By contrast, Tesla personal supercomputers will cost between £4,000 and £8,000 and look much like an ordinary PC.

They went on sale to British customers yesterday and will initially be sold to universities and to the scientific and research community.

The PC maker Dell, however, said that it would soon be mass producing them for the general consumer market.

If you are interested to buy this supercomputer, visit NVIDIA website.

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Last week, Nokia revealed its upcoming touchscreen N97 handset but till its release, Nokia was successful enough to hide N97 from public. But, Nokia failed to stop the leak of promotional posters of their next generation touchscreen devices.


The above image shows the upcoming full touchscreen handsets with a UI that looks absolutely different from current S60 devices. These might be S60 5th edition devices with eye catching home screens.

It looks Nokia has some big plans for touchscreen devices in 2009 because Nokia has finally recognized Apple as a major competitor.

Now, we just need an official word from Nokia whether these will be real phones or just concept devices?

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Last week, Nokia revealed their brand new N-series handset, N97 and we couldn’t have wished for anything better!

The key features include:

• Touch display (3.5″ of it) which slides and tilts to reveal a full QWERTY kepboard plus d-pad for easy navigation.
• 5 Megapixel Camera.
• Carl Zeiss integrated optics coupled with a dual LED flash.
• A massive 32GB of internal memory with MicroSD support for further memory expansion.
• Integrated Assisted GPS.
• WiFi and HSDPA.
• DVD quality video capture and 16:9 display.

The N97 is a cutting edge smartphone that includes support for their OVI service as well as the Nokia Music Store. Nokia have called the N97 “the most advanced mobile computer” and have done well to keep ahead of current mobile phone usability trends. With more and more people using their phones to browse the net, to access email accounts and share photos online we expect that the likes of the N97 will become the most demanded everyday phone. GPS has also become a standard on handsets and more and more people are expecting their phones to have integrated GPS. App developers are also aware of this and the number of cool GPS reliant applications is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Nokia have announced the expected release date for the N97 to be first half of 2009 and is expected to hold a pre-tax price tag of 550 Euros.

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Whenever people buy notebook computers, they get outdated within an year or two so Fujitsu has come up with an interesting scheme to deal with this problem.

You can buy any notebook from the Fujitsu Lifebook range and they’ll send you a brand new notebook every three years for the rest of your life free of cost.

To claim your free Fujitsu notebook, you should not lose the initial sales receipt for making the claim and if you forget to ask for an upgrade, then you are ineligible for any future laptops. The pricing for the three year warranty scheme is yet to be established.

The company is also launching another interesting scheme with its Esprimo range, offering a complete refund of the original sales price if the customer needs to send the notebook back to Fujitsu Siemens for any repairs but excludes case cracks, small numbers of dead pixels, broken keys, smashed screens, software issues, virus infections or failed batteries that are older than one year.

For more details, visit the Lifebook4life scheme website.

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Researchers at BitDefender have discovered a new type of malicious software that collects passwords for banking sites but targets only Firefox users.

The malware, which BitDefender dubbed Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A sits in Firefox s add-ons folder, said Viorel Canja, the head of BitDefender s lab. The malware runs when Firefox is started.

The malware uses JavaScript to identify more than 100 financial and money transfer Web sites, including Barclays, Wachovia, Bank of America, and PayPal along with two dozen or so Italian and Spanish banks. When it recognizes a Web site, it will collect logins and passwords, forwarding that information to a server in Russia.

Firefox has been continually gaining market share against main competitor Internet Explorer since its debut four years ago, which may be one reason why malware authors are looking for new avenues to infect computers, Canja said.

Users could be infected with the Trojan either from a drive-by download(when a user visits a site, if something gets downloaded from the site without his knowledge) which can infect a PC by exploiting a vulnerability in a browser, or by being duped into downloading it, Canja said.

When it runs on a PC, it registers itself in Firefox s system files as Greasemonkey, a well-known collection of scripts that add extra functionality to Web pages rendered by Firefox.

BitDefender has released the details about the malware on its website along with the removal instructions.

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A virus named “Koobface” is infiltrating Facebook’s 120 million users by using the social network’s messaging system to infect PCs, and get credit card numbers.

This is the most recent attempt of hackers looking to take advantage of users on social network sites.

“A few other viruses have tried to use Facebook in similar ways to propagate themselves,” Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said in an e-mail. He said a “very small percentage of users” had been affected by these viruses.

The way Koobface works is by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been infected. The messages include a subject header of, “You look just awesome in this new movie,” which directs the recipient to a website where they are asked to download what it claims is an update of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash player.

Once the software is downloaded, the virus infiltrates their computer, which takes the user to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines.

On Wednesday, McAfee warned that its researchers had discovered that Koobface was making the rounds on Facebook.

Chris Boyd, a researcher with FaceTime Security Labs, said, Facebook requires senders of messages within the network to be members and hides users data from people who do not have accounts. Because of that, users tend to be far less suspicious of messages they receive in the network.

“People tend to let their guard down. They think you’ve got to log in with an account, so there is no way that worms and other viruses could infect them,” Boyd said.

Facebook has posted a short message on its security page acknowledging the worm's attack. The notice urged users whose accounts had already been compromised to scan their PCs for malware and then reset their passwords.

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Google has launched the much awaited service Google Friend Connect to public which allows you to grow your social network by allowing your visitors to connect to your blogs and increase your network. This service can be added to your site even if you are not technically strong by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code.

Using Friend Connect, you can become a member of any friend connected site and also interact with other members who have similar interests as yours. You can log in Friend Connect using your existing accounts of Google, Yahoo, AOL or OpenID. You can also invite friends from orkut, Gtalk and other social networks to join the community.

Visit the homepage of Friend Connect, click on ‘Set up a new site‘ link to get started.


You will be asked to enter your Site name and blog's Home URL. Next, you will be asked to download 2 files to your computer and then upload to your blog’s root folder. One is for gadget functionality(canvas.html) and the other for security features(rpc_relay.html). If you are using Blogger, these files are not required.

Once you upload the files to your root folder, you need to click on ‘Test & Finalize Setup’ to complete the whole process. Now, feel free to add different gadgets to your site by customizing the size and color of the gadgets as per your needs.

For further details, visit Friend Connect support site.

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Developed by the folks at Mesa Dynamics, Stainless is the simplest and most useful web browser you could ask for. The new web browser supports some of the features found in Google's recently-launched Chrome.

Stainless is really just a technology demo and is likely to stay that way. Some of the features of stainless Mac OS X browser can listed as
1. Multi processing browser
2. Easy tab dragging between windows
3. Single bar to search and type url
4. Private browsing mode

Stainless 0.4 has also been added with Web Inspector support, as well as a deferred plugin loading in hidden tabs. The makers of the simple web browser for Mac claim they've created it because it was “a cool way to leverage the multi-processing technology” they developed for one of their other apps – Hypercube.


Even though Stainless can be tried out by anyone owning an Intel or PPC Mac, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is required. Tiger users may see their OS supported in future versions of Stainless.

It is free to download and can be downloaded from here. Many new features of managing bookmarks and downloads will be added in the later updates!

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