Automatically change your wallpaper

April 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

I am a big fan of wallpapers as I have a cool 17 inces wide screen Lenovo laptop. Whenever I want to chill out, I will start searching for cool photos, wall papers for my Windows Vista desktop. But I found it very tedious to maintain these cool collections and change wallpapers when I get some time (only). I wanted a program to change wallpapers automatically with out giving me any side effects.

I found this cool tool called Desktoptopia (beta) doing a great job on selecting a right desktop wallpaper from awesome collections. It’s tiny, nifty and cool. It can change my wallpapers at given intervals, or allows manual change as well. You can find loads of wallpaper collection which are configurable with your tiny tray utility.

image

 

Download Desktoptopia

Filed under Desktop Toys, Downloads, Technology

Hyderabad Barcamp 5 – Live ! Part 7

February 16, 2008 by 4 Comments

12:40 PM

Session : Women in IT By Kavita Vemuri, Technical Manager, IIIT-H

Kavita Vemuri delivered a splendid Off-beat topic on Women in IT and problems and how people think different, studies and statistics. The statistics that were demoed are very compelling.

She also talked on how things are seen from Women perspective.

I think this is one of MUST NOT MISS session for most of the barcampers out there. It really helps them to mature in their views about fellow women workers in IT field. She hit the nail on the right point where the word “Diversity” is becoming a multi-definition word as per people’s comfirtness in this corporate jungle.

She has also pin pointed on the need for Gender Insensitive policies rather than Gender Sensitive policies.

I liked the quote on her last slide πŸ™‚

“They” Say : Women are key to economic growth, but then they keep changing the lock !!

Disclaimer from Kavita : “They” –> Governments

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed under Events, Google, Hyderabad, live, Technology

Hyderabad Barcamp 5 – Live ! Part 6

February 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

11:45 AM : Tea Break ! It’s suffocating due to some problem with AC system in Google !

Session : Amit Aggarwal talks about Build a Successful Blog.

Amit talks about his experiences around doing blogging for living….i.e Professionally…he is a well known tech blogger who get indexed by techmeme.com from India.

He blogs @ labnol.org.

Amit has shared his invaluable blogging experience such as keeping the visitors in touch, focusing on content, frequency of blogging, Using Google Alerts, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)  etc. Definitely a good session for young tech bloggers out there.

-more to come

Happy BarCamping !

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed under Google, Hyderabad, live, Technology, Web 2.0

Hyderabad Barcamp 5 – Live ! Part 5

February 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

11:24 AM

Session : Lighting the Web, Silverlight 2 By M.S.V Janakiram, Microsoft.

I somehow feel people tend to show MS as a devil and people doesn’t like them, but the fact remains that they use MS technology in and out in thier life. This session was started with a disclaimer that Janakiram will be talking much about generic technology but not specific to Microsoft ! (In Contrast …Check the ealier session I covered in Part – 3 of this series.) Community Spirit seems to be UnCommunitized now ! πŸ™‚

This session is focusing on Rich Internet Application platform and usage of SilverLight. Janakiram started with Quote “Media is embracing the Web” and a mind blowing movie trailer demo with high definition sound effects using Silverlight on Fox Movies website. and… there it comes πŸ™‚ A jazzy bollywood, tollywood movie application shown with high definition video experience in Firefox.

Janakiram described how do developers and designers co-exist and work together using Rich Internet Application platforms like Silverlight and Microsoft Expression and Visual Studio .NET 2005.

Janaki has demoed an application mashup built-upon Google Maps and Silverlight which shows the movie trailers on the pin points of movie theatres across Hyderabad.

-more to come

Happy BarCamping !

 

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed under Google, Hyderabad, live, Technology, Web 2.0

Hyderabad Barcamp 5 – Live ! Part 4

February 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

11:00 AM

Hysea Representatives talked on their activities and events. Boring  for developers like me πŸ™‚ !

Session : Prasad Y, CMD of  teleonto talking about his experiences about Product development. Boring again. More like self perspective session and people seems to be taking an unofficial break in Bar Camp….:-)

I will take a break too….

-Happy BarCamping !

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed under Events, Google, Hyderabad, Technology, Web 2.0

Carry your Browsing Experience to anywhere with Google Toolbar now.

December 13, 2007 by Leave a comment

I must say “Hats Off” to Google for this. Google Toolbar 5 Beta has been released with very cool features today. One of the best features is “Sync up Toolbar” feature. I have posted recently on a Google Addin for Firefox which can sync up your favourites to any computer using Google credentials. I have search for a similar add-ons for IE but failed to find one. Now this toolbar solves my problem with IE bookmark sync πŸ™‚

Install Google Toolbar 5 Beta

One the toolbar is installed, you will be prompted something like this. If you enable this, You are ready to carry all the stuff you do on your computer to anywhere.

ScrSht

With new Google Bookmarks integration, Google has almost challenged del.icio.us bookmarking system seriously. If Google could make it’s toolbar users addictive to their bookmarking system, I am sure everything else will be done automatically.

Filed under Daily, Downloads, Google, Just Posts, Software, Technology

How to Quicky Crop or Resize a large image with out any Software?

October 22, 2007 by 2 Comments

This is a very frequent problem that almost every avid blogger faces in world. Many of the bloggers are not enough tech savvy to know how on image editing beyond MS Paint or Microsoft Picture manager in the world of windows. Yes…blame microsoft for that πŸ™‚ MS Paint could have been more friendly. Isn’t it ?

Yes, We have picnik.com for us, which can do lot of cool stuff online with any software installed on your desktop. (well you need Flash to be installed in your browser). But do we have that much time with us to wait and see until picnik loads all the sunshine, blossoms and bird songs?

If you don’t want to wait for such a long time, well there is an application ready to serve you in a quicker way for FREE and completely online.

http://www.fixpicture.org/ provides you a quicker way of resizing your large images with a single click conversion wizard.

fixpicture

Choose any large picture (up to 3 MB in size) and select your options as shown above and click “Convert”. Your picture should be ready for download as soon as possible.

Absolutely NO desktop software is involved in this operation.

Filed under Fun, Technology, Web 2.0

Copy files faster than ever in your PC (Windows Only)

September 19, 2007 by 5 Comments

Everyone must have gone through atleast once through this pain. "Copying large volumes of files". Nothing can test our patience than doing this tedious task and waiting for long hours and late nights to do backups. The default copy program in windows is bit slower because of the buffer usage algorithm doesn’t care about the volume of the files or the size. It just copies the files in a single thread and pre-defined buffer for any scenario.

TeraCopy is a nifty small copy handler for Windows XP/Vista, which does a smart job of making the copy jobs much more faster and reliable.

A Free copy for Home users can be downloaded from HERE

Lets look at the cool features at a glance…

  • It uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times in file copy operations. It also does asynchronous copy between two different hard disks to make it more faster.
  • Pause and Resume file copy process anytime
  • Does not terminate the whole copy job for any error in reading files
  • Tracks the failed copy transactions
  • Completely integrates with Windows Shell and replaces the original boring copy dialog.

Sounds cool huh ?  πŸ™‚

Filed under Daily, Downloads, Software, Technology, Windows Software

Find shortcuts for any program

September 19, 2007 by Leave a comment

This is sweet for all keyboard champions and fans like me. I hate to use mouse for every action that I need to do in software. I enjoy the productivity gain that I get my keyboard. But how can I refer to all keyboard short cuts in one place for any application (popular) ?

Here it comes to save my time..

http://www.keyxl.com/

KeyXL is a search engine for Keyboard shortcuts. You can find full list of short cuts for many popular applications like Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Examples

01. Gmail : http://www.keyxl.com/aaa2334/41/Gmail-web-based-email-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

02. Microsoft Excel 2007 : http://www.keyxl.com/aaa33ef/136/Microsoft-Excel-Software-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

03. Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Mac) : http://www.keyxl.com/aaaaa5f/149/Adobe-Photoshop-CS-software-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

Filed under Daily, Technology

Shameless Skype Software Horror (SSSH….)

August 21, 2007 by Leave a comment

16th August : Skype is down…and everyone are panic. The world of communication is not fallen or AT & T, Virgin did not lost their satellites..but skype has got crashed data servers and the world is panic.

16th August : As a usual routine, the major OS vendor, Microsoft has issued critical security patches to their operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista worldwide. These patches are available as part of Windows Update (which can be configured not to download updates automatically by any user) worldwide. The criticality of these patches also demands a safe restart of the operating system to make sure it is secured from any malicious attacks. Every machine in this world which has been updated using windows update was restarted….

What happend to skype?

Now the funniest thing that could ever happened to a software which was made with no idea of disaster scenarios comes in to picture. The massive restart of windows machines all over the world has apparently brought down skype servers and caused a big disaster. To my understanding , Skype does closes the connections and commits the calls in shutdown process. Massive start of windows machines (skype is not sure how many ….), it has got massive log-in  requests which are enough to give their servers a sleeping pill.

Who is the culprit ?

My vote goes to Skype. Hats-off to their product engineering which has never taken such a scenario of disaster. I am wondering what the hell their testing team doing with load testing? Do they test skype servers with a 500 simultaneous login transactions? How could anyone blame someone with so much of irresponsibility at their own house? This is funnier than fun.

Windows update restarted many machines and all the other IM networks survived including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google and why not skype? Does skype is going to disable the auto sign-in feature in future? πŸ™‚ are the questions now…

Read more on this..

Filed under Fun, It Sucks !, Microsoft, Software, Technology

The best way to read Digg.com

July 6, 2007 by Leave a comment

Do you love digg.com? or Addicted? well, then you would have definitely felt tiresome of opening your browser very often to read digg.com latest stories. I used to always dream about a cute offline client which can provide digg.com experience in-built. Now I found it too.

DiggTop is a shiny little application which syncs with digg.com and gets you the latest news and videos down to your desktop. You can even set alert thresholds on digg count of any story. The following are some of the screenshots of the cool diggTop.

image

image

image You can download this application from GSkinner Website for free. This application runs on Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). So installing AIR is mandatory.

Install AIR Here….

Filed under Fun, Technology, Web 2.0

How to make Vista Windows more cool ?

June 21, 2007 by Leave a comment

I love Windows Vista’s windows for two things. No…not for that flip-3D animation. But for the those three re-designed form controls with glow on left-top corner and the stylish border of the window when you enable Aero effects. 

But by default you get a form border which is a bit thicker than anticipated for any cool window. It looks some what like this…

4-border-window 

Don’t you think, it looks bit bold but not so soft at the edges? Well, it requires a simple plumbing to get a sleeky, thin edge shape. Let’s try to get something like this…

2-border-window

To get the above effect, just follow these steps…

  1. Open Start Menu
  2. Type “personalization” in search box
  3. Open Personalization Dialog
  4. Select “Window Color and Appearance”
  5. In this window, you can see “Open Classic Appearance……” link. Click that.
  6. In “Appearance settings” window, select “Advanced”.
  7. In “Advanced Appearance” Window, select the “item” dropdown and choose “Border Padding”.
  8. Make it to “2”.
  9. Close all the dialogs by clicking Ok.

Windows will take 10 seconds to adjust the borders and you get nifty cool windows ready.

Filed under Daily, Technology

The 100 Best Products of 2007

May 23, 2007 by Leave a comment

PC World has published the World’s 100 best products for 2007 today. They have ranked software, hardware, web sites, media technologies and services which are rising and falling in the current timeline and in future.

The Top 10 list goes like this…(via pcworld.com)

  • Google Apps Premier Edition Review
  • Intel Core 2 Duo Review
  • Nintendo Wii Review
  • Verizon FiOS Vendor Site
  • RIM Blackberry 8800 Review
  • Parallels Desktop Review
  • Pioneer Elite 1080p PRO-FHD1
  • Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV
  • Apple Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” Review
  • Adobe Premiere Elements 3 Review

    • The full list is available here.

    Filed under Software, Technology

    Receive your Phone calls on iPod

    May 16, 2007 by Leave a comment

    Think about this; you are in the world of music on your iPod and you get an urgent call. In most of the cases, you would definitely miss that call. How about if your iPod start receiving phone calls for you and display caller ID on iPod itself?

    MYBLU enables you to address this exactly the way you want your iPod wanted to be.

    MYBLU connects via your iPod and converts your iPod in to phone call receiver cum FM Radio too. Well it doesn’t require any batteries too.

    The features are as follows

  • Receive and make calls on your iPod.
  • Plug ‘n’ Play with most Bluetooth enabled mobile phones.
  • Caller number ID displayed on the iPod screen.
  • Automatically pauses and resumes music durring incomming calls.
  • 15 preset and auto scan FM Radio.
  • Last 9 numbers redial from your iPod.
  • Voice dial when paired with supported Bluetooth phones.
  • Use your own headphones.
  • No need for batteries.

    • This cool gadget was priced at around 4450 Rs in India.

    If you are interested you can directly buy this gadget right from manufacturer.

    Technorati tags: , ,

    Filed under Apple, Gadegts, Technology

    Yahoo Photos are going to be FlickrD !

    May 4, 2007 by Leave a comment

    Via TechCrunch

    TechCrunch reports that Yahoo is going to announce the shutdown of their famous Yahoo Photos service which was recently refurbished in terms of UI and experience. Yahoo photos was one of the most famous photo album storage sites before the services like Sony’s ImageStation started in Web 1.0 era.

    Post acquisition of Flickr, the world’s favorite photo storage service, Yahoo has started developing features and Yahoo integration on Flickr.

    Yahoo is not going to ditch you by throwing all of your photos in the garbage. Instead, yahoo will provide a smooth transition process of moving the existing image albums to famous  social photo services like Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterfly with 1-Click transfer support from Yahoo photo albums itself. Yahoo will also make all the images available to be downloaded at full resolution or to be printed at discounted price to the normal price.

    Filed under Technology, Web 2.0 and GYM

    iGoogle.com ? India’s Google

    May 2, 2007 by 2 Comments

    Google has re-furbished it’s home page API channel “ig” also known as Google home page earlier. Now they renamed it as iGoogle, sounds a bit of Apple here, but google managed to get in to the “i” space.

    But amazingly the domain iGoogle lead me to Google India home page rather than google.com/ig.

    Google must be working on it to redirect to the relevant page soon. Goog ! are you there?

    Filed under Apple, Google, Technology

    Caller ID on your Watch – Fossil Bluetooth Watch

    April 21, 2007 by 2 Comments

    This is one great feature I always wish to have in my watch. Nothing but to check who is calling on my mobile right from my wrist watch, so that I don’t have to pick my mobile phone from pocket.

    Fossil has introduced a watch which can pick the Caller ID information right from your Bluetooth enabled mobile phone.

    This watch is compatible with most of the Sony Ericsson blue tooth enabled mobile phones and Symbion based phones.

    The Compatibility is as follows…

    • Sony Ericsson Bluetooth enabled mobile phones (K610, K610im, K618, K790, K800, W710, W850, Z610, Z710, P990, W950, and M600)
    • Series 60 phones using Symbian OS version 7, 8, and 8.1 (coming soon)…
    • More details here

    Filed under Fun, Gadegts, Technology

    Microsoft unveiled so called "The Flash Killer"

    April 16, 2007 by 1 Comment

    Today, Microsoft has unveiled the much awaited, so called “The Flash Killer”. It was named as “Microsoft Silverlight”. Sliverlight was famous for it’s old name “WPF/E” which means Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. WPF is one of the key elements in Microsoft’s new initiatives around managed API for Windows. It is a part of .NET 3.0 (formerly WinFX) now. Silverlight is Cross platform, Cross browser compatible system. That means one can develop applications using Silverlight independent of any OS or browser.

     

     

    Silverlight uses .NET 3.0 runtime and works with major browsers just like any flash based applications. The big deal with Silverlight would be the powerful environment support from various languages that are supporting .NET and WPF. Using WPF’s powerful graphics and video features, developers can now develop high end media rich internet applications like this…Album Browser

     

    Read the The Top 10 features of Microsoft’s Silverlight (infact only 9 :-))

    01. With a couple of lines of code,it supports wmv playback both on windows and mac seamlessly. Supports glitch-less transition between full-screen (720p) and window mode for any video.

    02. Separation of mark-up (XAML) from code. This enables both web developers and designers work in a familiar web metaphor.

    03. Silverlight mark-up (XAML) is HTML integrate seamlessly. Developers can treat XAML just like any HTML tag using JavaScript.

    04. XAML can be used directly with in HTML with out having to add any opaque binary content.

    05. Full runtime support for Silverlight XAML.

    06. Just a 1 MB download for any PC.

    07. It is fast. You can view multiple videos simultaneously with out having dropped frames from videos.

    08. It is server or client agnostic. You don’t need any special microsoft software needs to be installed on server. This means one can deliver Silverlight experience right from a linux server.

    09. Though Silverlight uses a light-weight WPF, it is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. This means developers can use Silverlight code right away in WPF with out any modifications at all.

    10. This was not revealed yet :-)…Watch it in Mix’07

     

    Future : Microsoft is planning to introduce these technologies as part of IIS 7 media pack plug-in future upcoming server technologies according to PCWorld. There will be releases of lot of integration and developer support for Microsoft Silverlight for web application developers such as IDEs and 3rd party integration software.

    Filed under Microsoft, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

    Former Microsoftie is in the Space now !

    April 9, 2007 by Leave a comment

    Charles Simonyi, a former Architect and Pioneer of Microsoft Office Suite, lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 17:31 GMT, Saturday (7th April, 2007).

    A human spaceflight misson named Soyuz TMA-10, a successor of Soyuz TMA-9 is carried the billionaire Charles Simonyi to Space. Charles will be back to earth after 11 days with Soyuz TMA-9 in it’s return journey to Earth.

    You can track Simonyi on his website live…

    Charles is also famous for his invention in coding practices called “Hungarian Notation“, a standard way to name the variables.

    Filed under Geekism, Microsoft, Technology

    Microsoft’s Atlas and Google joins Open Ajax Alliance…So?

    March 23, 2007 by Leave a comment

    This could be a little news for most of the net savvys, but must be a great news for millions of web developers who work on cross platform applications and SOA.

    Microsoft and Google formally joined the Open Ajax Alliance, which consists a group of vendors, OS projects and companies (around 75) using Ajax as standard application interface. This list also includes the pioneers like google, Dojo, Sun and Oracle along with Microsoft.

    Read more about the formal announcement here…and here

    So, the question is, how does it can help the developer community ?, which stands out the core & heart for Ajax adoption worldwide.

    According to Open Ajax forum’s statement, the future looks awesome for Ajax developers…I have highlighted some of the notable things down here…

    — Seamless integration of multiple Ajax products and technologies within the same Web application, particularly with applications that use mashup techniques

    — Greater certainty about product choices and reliability

    — Lower training costs, lower development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations due to industry adoption of common approaches that build from OpenAjax standards

    — Interchangeability of Open Ajax Conformant products, such that customers can choose among multiple vendors (and change vendors in the future)

    That means, now the developers will be able to use a standard set of declarative and protocol based language to talk to any web server technology. This also makes the web services interoperability much more robust and meaningful.

     

    Technorati tags: , , ,

    Filed under Microsoft, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

    ← Older posts