I have met a lot of people who confidently said “I have received my free CD. I am ditching Windows and switching to Ubuntu”. Ubuntu is good when it comes to uniqueness and free doorstep delivery. I am a Ubuntu fan, and I too admire it’s uniqueness. It’s Open Source, has a great GUI, features are good enough and is also capable of  performing many activities that a Windows operating system can perform. But, as of now it’s not yet stable. And that’s what the development stage is all about.

It’s true that Ubuntu has a long way to go to grow into a “complete operating system” to actually compete with the “accessible capabilities” of Windows OS. When I first heard of Ubtuntu and other similar linux operating systems, i too was excited to try them out. I haven’t tried many linux operating systems but among all i found Ubuntu more accessible and user friendly. But, I had a terrible time using Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex and even Jaunty Jackalope. Try accessing the General Help section on the ubuntu forum , you’ll know what i mean. And I am referring to issues related to stability only.

At this point Windows users cannot totally migrate to Ubuntu as the most common issues like stability(i’ve mentioned this above) and compatibility will creep in. Atleast for now, I am using Ubuntu for learning purpose only. Windows XP is still my primary OS.

What are your thoughts on Ubtunu and Windows?

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Over the past couple of years, the necessity of finding sustainable alternative fuels to replace coal, oil, and natural gas for the next decades has become abundantly clear to everyone with a bit of common sense. Researchers from various universities and institutes have taken it upon themselves to come up with solutions, and efficient wind turbines, solar panels, fuel cells, and electric motors have been shortly after created. However, a small part of this initiative has focused its efforts on the most unlikely place to find something that burns – ice sheets.

Methane ice could offer some much needed relief for all countries, while they switch their energy production from fossil fuels to alternative sources

Their research on the vast stretches of ice did not come from their desire to uselessly spend the money they got as funding, but because these regions contained potentially the vastest unexploited energy resource in the world, namely methane ice. More formally known as methane clathrate, the solid clathrate compound features large amounts of methane, trapped within the crystal structure of water ice. The stuff was originally thought to only belong to the outer regions of the solar system, where temperatures were very low, and large amounts of water ice already existed.

However, careful investigations of the planet’s oceans have revealed vast deposits of methane ice immediately beneath a superficial layer of sediments on the ocean floors. According to the most recent and scientifically founded estimates of the amounts of methane clathrate in the Earth’s oceans, we could benefit from one quadrillion to five quadrillion cubic meters of the stuff.

This is equivalent to 500 to 2,500 gigatonnes carbon (Gt C) of energy, as opposed to the some 230 Gt C natural gas reserves estimated to have remained around the globe. As for other fossil fuels, an estimated 5,000 Gt C are left, including yet undiscovered deposits, those under miles of ice or in rough seas, as well as those locked in tar sands at high latitudes.

Some countries, including the US, China, Japan, South Korea and Canada, have already begun to take steps towards exploiting their methane ice reserves. According to the South Koreans, their deposits could meet all the energy demands of the country for the next 30 years. Plans are to bring the first operational plant online by 2015. The great difficulty that lies ahead now is to figure out the best way to extract them, without polluting the environment in the process, such as while extracting oil from tar sands.

Source: Softpedia News

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Water Proof Pen Drive from Supertalent

This is the third time when my pen drive has been actually revived from being drowned in a water and it hasn’t been the first time when i forgot my pen drive in my pants and sent it for laundry. Duh! me. Here in India, the traditional way to wash clothes is by soaking them up in soap water and later beating up the clothes by a hard wooden rod so that  the stains go away easily. Thanks to the house maid who discovered the pen drive before beating it up to pieces. Now hold on, my pen drive isn’t still in usable condition.

Fixing a Wet Pen Drive:

• Preserve the pen drive in sunlight for a day so that all the moisture evaporate away. Now try using the pen drive, it should start working!

If your pen drive has already passed away, you can try bringing it back to life. These tricks may or may not work, depending upon the severity of damage on the device.

Ways to Fix a Dead Pen Drive:

• Drop It - Yeah, this trick has worked for many,
• Hit it - Similar to above,
• Freeze it - This trick is used to retrieve data from hard drives (works for larger hard disks). Wrap it in a plastic bag and put it in a deep freezer. After freezing it for about 6-7 hours, you can try plugging it back to retrieve the data.

These are some ways that i have learnt and tried to revive damaged pen drives. I hope this article helps you. If you have any questions, feel free to drop in a comment.

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June 1st 2009 marked a tragic and a controversial crash of Air France Flight 447.  216 passengers and 12 crew members lost their lives on the way from Brazil to France when the flight crashed over the Atlantic Ocean, with the cause unknown. The day when the tragedy struck, people were informed that Air France Flight 447 has mysteriously disappeared in thin air. The first thought that many would ponder on is ‘How can a huge machine like an air plane with people on board disappear all of a sudden?’ Well, there is still no relevant answer for that. As per Wikipedia, four possibilities have been discovered so far:

Prior to the disappearance of the aircraft, the automatic reporting system, ACARS, sent messages indicating disagreement in the indicated air speed (IAS) readings. A spokesperson for Airbus claimed that “the air speed of the aircraft was unclear” to the pilots.

An aviation safety expert explained a few days later that “complete failure would require 100% failure of the electrical system,” which “did not happen early in the flight, because the system was uplinking data to the maintenance facility, indicating there was some electricity on the airplane

On 27 May, four days prior to this incident, Air France received a telephoned bomb threat regarding an earlier flight from Buenos Aires in Argentina to Paris

From satellite images taken near the time of the incident, it appears that the aircraft encountered a severe thunderstorm, likely containing hail and extreme turbulence.

To add to the above list, there is video claiming a UFO that followed the same air route through which Air France Flight 447 traveled and the video has been shot just few days after the incident . I know it sounds weird. But it’s not the first time a UFO has been spotted.

Video source: UfoCaseBook and Youtube.

No related posts.

It has always been a matter of concern regarding the easy access to explicit content on the internet. Google Safe Search filter does not really block all the potentially explicit content while browsing through. In fact, Safe Search is available for Images only. Even if search for the term “hot” with the filter set as “Use strict filtering (Filter both explicit text and explicit images)”, the image results will still return with content that won’t be suitable for minors. And not to forget the “Related search” suggestions.

Microsoft’s Bing is proving a tough competitor to Google Search with it’s speed an better search results. Bing is strict on blocking explicit content for web searches and image searches too. Bing has a seperate invisible domain explicit.bing.net for allowing users to search explicit content. If you don’t want user access to it, just block explicit.bing.net the way you block any other objectionable site.

I am not being Anti-Google. It’s interesting how Google will answer to what Bing has done for blocking pornography.

It’s like Superman Vs Spiderman

The New York Post reports:But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft’s rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned

It was destined that Google Search had to face a tough competitor. Lets see how Google and Bing outsmart each other.

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The most preferred media players like GOM, WMP, Crystal Player, Media Player Classic and VLC are not only free, but they are very distinct from each other in terms of reliability, stability and the most importantly playback support.

As of today there is no media player capable of a “Standalone Playback Support”. I have tried and scrapped many of them and now i use a combination of K-Lite Mega Codec Pack + GOM Player + Crystal Player which provides a playback support for all types media files available. You first need to install K-Lite Mega Codec Pack followed by the above two players and you have an almost complete combination of media playback support.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack:

• Media Player Classic Home Cinema
• Media Player Classic
• ffdshow
• DirectShow video decoding filters
• DirectShow audio decoding filters
• DirectShow audio parsers
• DirectShow source filters
• DirectShow subtitle filter
• Other filters
• VFW video codecs
• ACM audio codecs
• Real Alternative
• Codec Tweak Tool [version 2.5.1]
• GSpot Codec Information Appliance [version 2.70a]
• MediaInfo Lite [version 0.7.14]
• VobSubStrip [version 0.11]
• GraphStudio [version 0.3.1.0]
• Haali Muxer
• FourCC Changer
• Bitrate Calculator

Crystal Player:

• Full Windows Vista support
• Built-in MPEG4 decoder
• Skins
• Speed troubleshooting modes
• Multilingual support
• Multicolor on-screen controls and seeking-bar
• Subtitles
• External audio track support
• Playlists with bookmarks
• Image capturing
• Runtime help messages
• Runtime statistics & suggestions
• Aspect rate and audio/text skew correction
• Graphical ten band equalizer
• Video postprocessing
• Zooming, scrolling & panorama
• Supersampling
• Multisampling
• Video filters
• Audio filters
• Automatic codec downloader
• Native Crystal MPEG1/2 format support
• Native Crystal AVI format support
• Crystal MPEG1/2 video decoder
• Crystal AC3 multichannel audio decoder

GOM Player:

• Codec Finder
• Play Broken AVI Files (Patented)
• Powerful Subtitle Support
• Convenient Playlist
• Support Different Media Types
• Screen Capture
• Customize brightness, contrast and saturation.
• Sharpen and add noise to your video.
• Try the audio equalizer.
• Repeat a section of your video with our A-B Repeat feature.
• Fast forward/rewind a few seconds using left/right keys.

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The best way to get the most from this service is to register on OpenDNS (it’s free) and follow the setup guide. When you’re done setting up the basic configuration, you can further customize it. Like you can block  unwanted domains which are related to adults only, abusive, racism, adware and a big list to chose from, thus making the internet browsing experience much faster and safer.

Other features include a phishing filter, domain blocking and typo correction. By collecting a list of malicious sites, OpenDNS blocks access to these sites when a user tries to access them through their service. OpenDNS also launched Phishtank, where users around the world can submit and review suspected phishing sites.

Here are some handy links to get started:

Use OpenDNS
How it Works
For Small/Medium Business
For Home Network
About OpenDNS

If you just need better DNS querries, you can continue using the service with registering. The OpenDNS servers are:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

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A team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, Germany, is working on a device which incorporates eye tracking to influence the content presented to the viewer. Without having to use any other devices to enter instructions, the wearer can display new content, scroll through a menu or shift picture elements simply by moving her eyes or fixing on certain points in the image.

The data eyeglasses display information and respond to commands. Credit: Fraunhofer IPMS

“We want to make the eyeglasses bidirectional and interactive so that new areas of application can be opened up,” says Dr. Michael Scholles, business unit manager at IPMS.

According to Scholles, the bidirectional data eyeglasses will yield advantages over current head-mounted displays (HMDs) by providing information at the point of task to people who do not have their hands free to operate a keyboard or mouse. For example, mechanics could view superimposed schematic diagrams over machinery that they’re working on, and an operating surgeon can access a patients’ vital functions, MRT and x-ray images.

According to a news item on the IPMS site, the team have integrated their system’s eye tracker and image reproduction on a CMOS chip, making the HMDs small, light, easy to manufacture and inexpensive. Below is  how the eyeglass display works:

The chip measuring 19.3 by 17 millimeters is fitted on the prototype eyeglasses behind the hinge on the temple. From the temple the image on the microdisplay is projected onto the retina of the user so that it appears to be viewed from a distance of about one meter. The image has to outshine the ambient light to ensure that it can be seen clearly against changing and highly contrasting backgrounds. For this reason the research scientists use OLEDs, organic light-emitting diodes, to produce microdisplays of particularly high luminance.

With his team and colleagues from other Fraunhofer institutes, Scholles is already working on the next development stage of the bidirectional eyeglasses, but there is no word on when the devices will be available on the market.

First developed for use in military aircraft, head-mounted displays (HMDs), aka head up displays (HUDs),  may eventually be as commonplace as Bluetooth headsets, but hopefully not as conspicuous.

Source: Zdnet Blogs

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Atrex footwear will allow family members to instantly see the whereabouts of the wearer of the shoes. It is also possible to set up a geo-fence around a user’s home that would trigger an alert to a cell phone or computer.

There are a growing number of seniors suffering from dementia and we know over 50% ‘wander’ without anyone’s knowledge of where they are and where they are heading, said Chris Walsh, an ex Nike executive and current COO of GTX Corp.

Five million Americans are afflicted with Alzheimer’s and this is estimated to grow to more than twenty million as the Boomer population ages, states GTX Advisor Andrew Carle.

Shoes make a good choice for this technology because Alzheimer’s patients have a tendency to remove unfamiliar objects from their person. Product testing should begin by Q4 of 2009.

From a science-fictional standpoint, this kind of device will create a map of the wearer of the GTX GPS shoes. In his classic 1936 novel The Cometeers, Jack Williamson wrote about a remarkable device that would create a map of your movements across an alien world.

He reached to unsnap the cartograph from his belt. He had brought that tiny instrument to map their movements. He opened the cover and peered at the strip..

If you are thinking that they’re putting GPS into everything these days, you probably don’t even need to read the following set of links to fascinating related stories:

Via Sawf News; thanks to Peter Jacobs for the tip on this story.

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Here are the current highlights of Little Big Star:

• Multiplayer gaming
• Support for VST plugins
• Support for Guitar pro tabs
• Open Source Code
• For Personal Use Only
• Only a few mega bytes in size
• Supports Ogg Vorbis
• Supports Windows XP and it’s later versions
• More upgrades in pipeline

The program is in Beta and it’s obvious that you might not get an exceptionally great performance. I have used it and I have to admit that Little Big Star will definitely fly a long way.

Download Little Big Star from http://littlebigstar.net

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