A-be-ce-darian

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Sawlogs - Record, Store And Share Your Dreams

Everyday morning we fumble for that damn alarm which cuts us off from our dreams. If some dreams are beautiful some turn out to be nightmares. But still we love our dreams. But they last only for that moment. We forget them easily and a new dream pops up. How about remembering those dreams for ever? How about letting the world know what you dream about? Well, here is a new Web2.0 tool Sawlogs that allows to record your dreams.

Sawlogs is an online tool that lets you record and store your dream journal online in a secure, password-protected area — and at the same time lets you share the dreams you'd like to make public with the other folks using Sawlogs. It's just like sharing your bookmarks, audio and video.

Also with Sawlogs you can discover who dreams like you, discuss dreams, get stats and facts about your dreams.Here are some interesting dreams of others I have come across

Hole in the Ceiling
My Chance Meeting With George Bush
Monkeys turn into Dinossaurs
Wolves in a library
Ghost and Underwater


Once you post your dream and made it public others can rate your dream and comment on it.

What are you waiting for? Dream it. Log it. Share it.

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Thursday, November 23, 2006

PortableApps.com Unveils PortableApps Suite

Have you heard about PortableApp? If not here is a small introduction. A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device (such as USB drive) and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

Portable applications developer PortableApps.com announced the first release of its new PortableApps Suite. PortableApps Suite is a combination of several popular software programs like Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird along with an integrated menu and easy-to-use backup utility.

Screenshot of PortableApp Menu

With this suite you can
  • Carry your web browser with all your favorite bookmarks
  • Carry your calendar with all your appointments
  • Carry your email client with all your contacts and settings
  • Carry your instant messenger and your buddy list
  • Carry your whole office suite along with your documents and presentations
  • Carry your antivirus program and other computer utilities
  • Carry all your important passwords and account information securely
The PortableApps Suite is available in multiple Editions for drives of every size.

Standard Edition: Includes the menu, backup and icons mentioned above as well as ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Firefox Portable (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Sunbird Portable (calendar/task manager) and Thunderbird Portable (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.

Lite Edition: Uses AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable and runs comfortably from a 256MB drive.

Base Edition: This is just a simple edition with some basic folders. This has PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. It’s less than 1MB.

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Saturday, November 18, 2006

Generate Color Themes For Your Webpages With Adobe Kuler

Looks like Adobe is into full action. It has recently rolled out Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe Soundbooth. Now, it has rolled out a new tool for designers to play with. A tool to generate cool color themes.

Kuler is a new product from Adobe Labs which helps to create color themes for webpages, designing projects and for other creative works. Kuler is lot more cooler, as, one doesn't need to dowload and install it. All you need to have is a web browser. It's completely an online product and free!!!

Adobe has also added a little social touch to it. We can even share our created themes with others. This is really a great feature for those who are bad at creating new color themes. One can visit "Popular" and "Highest Rated" sections which have lots of color themes rated by existing Kuler members.

Creating a color theme with Kuler is just like playing with a toy. Play with the color-wheel spectrum and sliders provided by it and the Hex, CMYK values are automatically generated for you.

Related:
Adobe Digital Additions
Get Color Pixel Value

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Call Bill Gates if Your Country Crosses One Billion Population

Microsoft has four major R&D centres across the world. If Microsoft at Redmond is a well known R&D center, others are located in Europe (in Cambridge, UK), India and China . While US and UK R&D centers were setup for obvious reasons, India and China centres were set up for a special reason - size of those two countries' populations!!!

Gates said at an Innovation Day event in Brussels that "It is the size of those two countries'(India and China) populations which made the choice of location an easy decision."

"Basically, wherever there is one billion people, we are putting in a research centre," said Gates. "When people ask me, 'When are you going to put the next one into my country?' I say, 'When you have a billion people, give me a call.'"

The sheer number of well-educated people entering the workforce in those countries means the rate of innovation will soar, he said.

So, to see a Microsoft R&D center in your country, wait till one billion population mark.

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Monday, November 13, 2006

Enhance Your Skype Experience With Pamela

Skype is undoubtedly the widely used tool for communicating with others for free and sometimes at minimal rates. Many of them use Skype for placing personal calls to conducting interviews, seminars and so on. With Skype becoming more and more powerful the need for some good features is growing.

Pamela from Pamela-Systems is one such tool which provides rich and abundant features to enhance our Skype experience. Pamela is a Skype certified software add-on that makes Skype even more effective and fun!! Pamela is available in four different versions - Basic(free), Standard, Professional and Business. It's upto us to choose. Advanced versions allows us to even record the Skype calls/video.

Some good features of Pamela are:
  • Free Skype answering machine
  • VideoMail (Video answering machine)
  • Auto chat replies
  • Birthday reminders
  • Skype call/video/chat recording
  • Email Forwarding
    and many more....
Click here to visit their site.

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Mixxer: A Language Exchange Site For Everyone

There are many students, teachers, employees who wish to learn a different language. Reasons for learning a new language differ. Some learn out of interest and for some it's compulsory. Books can help us. However, a book cannot replace the methodology of "learning by speaking".

If you are too a new language learner then Mixxer can provide you with some help. The Mixxer is a free educational site for language learners and teachers to find a language partner for a language exchange. The language partner is someone who speaks the language you study as their native language and is studying your native language. The partners then meet online to help each other practice and learn a foreign language.

The program most commonly used among Mixxer language partners is Skype. Once we register with the site, we can search for a partner and can contact him via Email or Skype.

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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Know When Your E-mail is Read

E-mail is one of the main sources of communication. We use E-mails for all sort of communication - from conveying wishes to sending important information across the internet. If the E-mail sent is a trivial one, no need to worry. But, what if the E-mail sent contains information that the recipient must see it in a day, week or a month? How would we know whether the recipient has read it or not? No standard E-mail services such as (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) notify us when the E-mail sent is read by the recipient.

DidTheyReadit is a service that sends us a notification when our E-mail is read. When we use DidTheyReadit, e-mails that we send are automatically and invisibly tracked. The instant the recipient opens our message, DidTheyReadIt automatically notifies us.

Sample return receipt

Once registered with the site, open your personal E-mail account (such as Yahoo,Gmail) and compose an E-mail to your friend. However, you have to append ".didtheyreadit.com" to the recipient address. For example if your friends Email Id is "friend@yahoo.com" you have to change it to "friend@yahoo.com.didtheyreadit.com".

This service from DidTheyReadit is free. But, you can only send 10 messages per month. However, premium services are also available where you can send more messages.

Posts related to E-mails
Send Video Emails
Create Your E-mail Icon

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Monday, November 06, 2006

Find Out Your Internet Connection Speed With Speedtest

If you feel that you are being cheated by your Internet Service Provider, then use Speedtest to find out the exact speed of your connection.

Speedtest is an online tool to check the speed of your connection. Though there are many other online tools available such as Speakeasy, this tool has a cool interface and is pretty fast when compared to others. Also you can test your connection speed against different geographically located servers.

You can also share your results with others via the link provided by Speedtest.

Speedtest [via Lifehacker]

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Thursday, November 02, 2006

Delicious Site From Yahoo - Yahoo! Food

Yahoo today launched a new service. A service which makes us all hungry. Yahoo! Food, a new site devoted to food that will feature videos and other content from celebrity chefs.

"People are searching the Web and Yahoo every day for life's biggest question -- what's for dinner?" said Deanna Brown, general manager of Yahoo Lifestyles. Most of the content on the site comes from its partners such as Rachael Ray, Reader's Digest etc.

You can find recipes for special occasions, special days, everyday and so on and so forth. The videos and the content about a recipe specify ingredients needed and directions to prepare.

Soon Yahoo! Food is going to contain a database of thousands of recipes.

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Top 500 Supercomputers List

Ever tried to know about the fastest supercomputers? I did. I always wanted to know what are the fastest supercomputers available, where they are located and what are they being used for.

Top500 is one website where we can find a list of top 500 supercomputers. It also provides information such as what are they being used for, their location, their speeds, the number of processors used etc.

The main objective of the Top500 list is to provide a ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications.They compile the list twice a year with the help of high-performance computer experts, computational scientists, manufacturers, and the Internet community.

Click here to visit their website.

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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Google Talk Now Allows us to Leave Offline Messages

The much awaited feature from Google Talk is now out. We can now send offline messages to anyone in our contact list!!

Till now, when we send a message to someone not signed in, an error is displayed stating: "<email address> is offline and can't receive messages right now." But now we can send messages to our friends though they are not signed in.The message from Google talk appears like this "<your friend> is offline. You can still send this person messages and they will receive them the next time they are online."

The great thing about this new feature is, the offline messages sent to us can also be viewed in our gmail account. However offline messages won’t work if the recipient hasn’t enabled chat history. What's happening here exactly is, the offline messages written by us are sent directly to the recipient's gmail account and will be stored in the chat history. However if we disable chat history there is no way the messages get stored. So, ensure that your chat history is enabled.

This is how it appears if the offline messages are viewed in our Gmail account

Now Yahoo will be a bit worried.

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