I came across the following website while trying to sign up for Twitter for my previous article. I was blown away about how Sachi and Lee make complex online tools easy to understand. I can show this to my mum and I know for sure she'll be able to understand what a wiki is or how it works (in fact I learnt quite a few things from this page myself and it was fun.)

Hence, Education meet Entertainment.

I love the way how paper and pen is still classy, and how we can make simple ideas to go a long way! Common Craft is also an Official Honoree of the 2008 Webby Awards! Congratulations you guys. I also want to try my hand at making a video like this, but meanwhile. Please have a look at a couple of videos I fell in love with on their site.

This one explains what I'm doing here and you're doing there - and of course in Plain English.

This one explains Social Media.



I urge all of you to go check out the Common Craft Show.

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I was surprised to see billboards today across Hyderabad urging us to try out Google Phone Search. Call 1800- 41-999-999 to contact Google Phone Search. I couldn't help myself so I took out my handy camera and took a few snaps.

I also picked up the phone and was connected to a Google representative and I asked him for Chevrolet dealer in Hyderabad. While the representative wasn't able to give me the required answer, he did take my feedback and said that the listing will be updated soon.

I also called them now (1.43am. June 26) and was connected to a voice recognition software. It asked me for Business Name or Type of Business. I selected Pizza Hut and Madhapur and within seconds not only did I have Google send me an sms to my cell phone but the voice recognition software also read out the listing.

When I tried the search yesterday I was also offered the option for call forwarding, which I didn't utilize. Kudos Google!

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Tired of all your digital devices and the usual drab looks? Longing to express your individuality?
Skinit could help you, send out a message loud and clear for a social cause or just have tons of fun.

You can choose from a wide variety of skins made to fit, for a range of devices, from phones to notebooks, MP3 players, cameras and a whole lot more.

And then, if you still aren’t satisfied with what’s offered you can create your own masterpiece from one of those memorable photographic moments or just sketch out your mind and let Skinit convert it to art for you.

Plus, Skinit promises an air bubble free application, scratch resistance to the device and free shipping for orders over $40 and not to mention the photo quality images.
Unfortunately, they haven’t decided on whether to make these available in the Indian market yet.

Some of my favorites are the Absinthe Fairy and The Devil’s Travails and I even have a few designs in mind waiting to get on to that PDA and dull looking, hard-working router I have lying around in one corner of my den. Guess I’ll have Fzkl or Moo pick-up a few of them for me the next time they go globetrotting.

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Wondering what the Android OS is all about?

Well, Google decided to extend its expertise into the world of operating systems and thought they’d start with the most widely used device, the mobile phone. With 3 billion users and growing, world-wide, (that’s half the world population and 3 times the number of personal computers) what better platform to start with than the future replacement of the PC.

The android OS is said to be an open source Linux based OS and supports accelerated 3D graphics even on large VGA displays unlike other smart phones, plus rumor has it that it plays Quake.

Dying for sneak preview of the OS already,

The bad news is that most service providers and mobile phone manufactures worldwide aren’t ready for the “Android” as yet and the expected date has been pushed into the fourth quarter of this year because of this and the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G. Currently, HTC and T-mobile, USA are the only members to stick to their part of the bargain and have support ready by the next quarter.

Guess the lucky ones are the developers, Google’s running the Android Developer Challenge and the price money of 10 million dollars is to be split among the best. For all you know they might just get one of these android powered devices thrown in to the gift hamper.

For the rest of us, we’ll just have to sit and wait …... and something tells me, we on this side of the globe won’t get to lay our hands on one of these beauties until later next year or the year after.

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Being social animals, we constantly want to keep in touch with our friends. Now our innate nature has an "online presence" through the means of micro blogging. Micro blogging is the future. I write this post to you at the end of my day, this post is my way of connecting to the online world. While I'd like to keep in touch with everyone at all times its difficult and time consuming.

Micro blogging allows you to update friends and family with things that you are doing at the moment, in a moment. You can update a 140 character post using your mobile phone or from the site itself and keep your friends and family updated on smaller things in life, which are important, but not important enough to write a post about. Like your visit to the dentist which was funny cause the dentist had his own dental appointment, or when you put salt in the tea instead of sugar just cause you're too engrossed watching Euro 08. These small things can be updated on your micro-blogging platform which will in-turn update your friends. There is also an option to receive updates on your mobile phone, this allows you to stay connected.

I recently signed up for twitter account. I can have my twitter conversations appear on my blog using the embed feature. It also allows you to tag the person who has updated it. I started receiving updates in about a few hours (talks a lot about my social side). Its easy to use and quite addictive.

Jaiku is another such micro blogging platform. It was acquired by Google in October 2007. I applied for Jaiku, since its an invitation base I got an error message saying " Your request has been received! We'll notify you by email when an account becomes available."

I hope to get an account soon because I want to see how it works. I see tremendous things coming into play with Jaiku and Google's merger. Mobile blogging? Mobile scrapping on Orkut? I can't wait to see what else we're going to see on the micro blogging front.

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Opera is one of the most under-rated browser out there. I have been using opera for the past 2 years and I have found it extremely elegant and easy to use. It looks good, works fast and has some really cool features that puts other browsers to shame. Some of these features might be available as plugins in other browsers, however, Opera runs really fast because some of these features are well integrated into the browser itself.

Here are some highlights and features:
1) It is free just like IE or Firefox.
2) It is really fast in loading pages.
3) Opera is one of the most feature laden but light setup browser coming in at 6.7 MB for the english version where as firefox is 7.8 MB.
4) It looks good.

My favorite features in Opera:
1) Speed Dial: Speed Dial is a set of visual bookmarks you see when you open opera. Just click on the image link and get right to your favorite website.
2) Recycle Bin: Accidentally closed a tab in the browser? No worries, Ctrl Z or Command Z will act like undo and restore the previous page you were viewing from the browser's recycle bin.
3) Opera Link: Syncs your bookmarks and Speed Dial settings between your various computers and mobile phone. No more carrying around your bookmarks or being worried about not having them when you need them the most.
4) Opera Voice: Don't have the patience to sit in front of the monitor and read a big article? Just highlight the content with the mouse, right click and choose speak. Opera will convert text to voice and read out information to you. You can also issue voice commands over a mic for Opera to obey.
5) Quick Search: This has to be the most coolest feature of Opera. Want to search something in Wikipedia? Just type w followed by search keywords in and address bar and see wikipedia search results. Want to search in google? Type g followed by search keywords. The best part: you can create custom search shortcuts for any website you visit and run searches from the address bar real fast.

Other cool features:
1) Bittorrent downloader.
2) Integrated Email and newsfeed client.
3) Mouse gestures (make the browser behave any you want without keeping your fingers on the keyboard)
4) Widgets: Add widgets to your system using your browser. These widgets run on the browser engine but are accessible outside the browser.

Download Opera 9.5 here.

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iTunes University is the hidden jewel of the Itunes store. Accessible via the Itunes media player, ItunesU is a collaboration between Apple and universities across the world to bring the very best of audio/video lectures on a variety of subject, for free.

To download the video/audio lectures, all you need is the iTunes software that you can find here. You don't have to register at the itunes store to access these free audio video lectures.

To access iTunes U,
1) Install iTunes
2) Click on the iTunes store in the sidebar
3) If prompted that iTunes service is not available in your country, choose United States
4) The iTunes store box in the top left corner has iTunes U as the last link
5) Beneath this choose away your subject category and view all the lectures
6) Alternatively choose your university and see all the university specific courses

Ride the free knowledge!

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MIT OpenCourseWare commonly referred to as OCW, is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. For those who haven't heard of MIT, it is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the premier universities in the world. Information is shared in the form video/audio lectures, class notes, exams, recommended books and course syllabus.

To quote the OCW description at their website:

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.
OCW is not an MIT education.
OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.


Now the cool part:
1) There is no registration
2) Dowloads of course material and other details are free
3) There are discussion groups to interact with other people taking the course

Bookmark the course index page available here.
Find all Audio/Video lecture based courses here.

Courses covered range from Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Health Sciences and Technology, Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, Management and Science.

Some of my favorite courses:
1) Circuits and electronics
2) Linear Algebra
3) Structure and interpretation of computer programs (SICP)

The OCW website doesn't seem to have the lectures for the SICP course, but I found them here.

There is no excuse anymore for not having a world-class source of educational information at the click of your mouse. Enjoy!

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Topic Bean is monetized by Google AdSense. I love AdSense because of its amazing relevancy. It always shows the most relevant ads, until yesterday. I noticed that there were ads regarding cows on my site. Seriously?!

Okay so I have Moo scores for the product reviews I do, but ads regarding cows on a mostly tech site doesn't really make any sense. So before complaining about how shitty AdSense targeting is, I went through their Help Center, it was quite confusing navigating through the page but i did (finally) find the answer - Section targeting.

They say "Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting."

If you're using blogger, you will be able to make this change more easily. You can include this in your edit HTML tag next to your compose.

If you are using Blogger, in your post editor, you can make the following changes.

!-- google_ad_section_start --

part of the text you want to target

!-- google_ad_section_end --

You can also get the AdSense bot to ignore part of your site by following the steps below.

!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --

part of the text you want to ignore

!-- google_ad_section_end --

I think its pretty simple to do and now you should have relevant ads appearing on your page. Remember you will have to be patient to allow the bot to crawl your page.

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So, get those trainers on, pick-up your personal fitness coach and jog on to synchronized music track while the coach keeps you on track with a real-time narration of the distance covered, calories burned, heart rate and pace. You can also create or chose from a variety of programs designed by world-class athletic trainers to meet your personal fitness goals, while the stride sensor and heart-rate monitor gauges your performance to the requirement of a particular program.

Then the 1GB memory lets you save data from previous sessions while retaining your favorite tracks in formats like MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA if you don’t want to tune into the local FM station.

And just in case you wanted a few health tips from the web, the SGH F110 offers connectivity through EDGE/GPRS using a WAP 2.0 browser and makes it easy on the eye with a 176x220 TFT 262K touchscreen LCD.

For more details on your “Micoach”, log on to
MY RUN, MY RHYTHM, MiCOACH

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Ask yourself the following:

1) Have you ever been bothered that you have the same (or mostly the same) password for all your login accounts?

2) Have you ever felt insecure about losing that one password and consequently losing your privacy or important information in the login account with no way to recover or undo what has been done?

3) Have you ever feared forgetting your password because you had to add numbers and special characters to make it stronger?

If the answer to any of the above is a "YES", read on.

Nothing creates as many identities as being an active user of the internet. These range from innumerable email accounts to almost every other service on the internet. And remembering passwords for all of these is a tough task. Managing passwords can be quite painful and the fear of losing them is irritating. There are a lot of password management tools out there but somehow I am not very comfortable with the idea of having a software track all my passwords. Besides, since I am not the only user of my computer, I find it safe to remember all my passwords in my mind. But remembering too many isn't easy and I needed an algorithm that I could quickly execute on my brain.

After some thinking I came up with a method to create unique and strong passwords for every account that I hold and a convenient method of changing them. I have used this method for three years now and it works like a charm.

The password is generated using four pieces of information:
1) The name of the website for which's account you are trying to create the password. Eg: Yahoo
2) The username at this website. Eg: phyliadilia
3) Place of birth. Eg. oslo
4) Year of birth. Eg. 1985


Now the above information is manipulated like this:
1) The first character of the website is taken = y
2) The first character of the username is taken = p
3) The characters of the place are right shifted by 1. So "oslo" becomes "ptmp"
4) The date of birth is right shifted = 2096

The password is framed by combining the above = ypptmp2096

Advantages, logic and rules of the strategy:

1) Since the first parameter is website dependent, I already know the first letter of my password whenever I visit the website.

2) I have different login names for different websites (due to unavailability mostly). Most often, many begin with the same alphabet or there are not enough variations. So if I forget the password, I just need to recollect some of my commonly used login names and try it in combination with the rules of the rest of the password.

3) Parameter 3 brings in a non dictionary word into the password and adds character count. With every additional character added to a password the time taken to crack a password using a brute force cracker will increase by powers of 10.

4) Parameter 4 brings in a number into the password thereby introducing non-alphabet character which make the password tougher to crack.

5) The last two parameters remain the same for any website and account and the first 2 characters vary. I have noticed that this strategy over a period of time is very easy to recollect by remembering the base algorithm of password formation.

6) Whenever I want to change the existing password (in case the password expires), I just add a right shifted second character from my name to my password. Eg. if "ypptmp" expires, I change it to "yphptmp", where the h is the 2nd alphabet of the login name. For ease of rememebrance, I do this to all accounts whenever I do it to one.

Enjoy safe, distinct and easy to remember passwords.

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Now you can give Walt Disney a run for his money. I stumbled upon this amazing website, befunky.com and it allows you to convert your pictures to cartoon. Now, how cool is that?!

I loved how simple this tool is to use. They have an amazing set of videos to understand how the tool works just in case you don't know how to use it by following their simple instructions. I loved the really "funky" eyes rolling logo which really made me smile every time the site took some time to upload the image.

I don't use social networking sites much but I know from what friends tell me that its cool to have avatars. This site allows you to create your virtual self and give it some attitude.

My friend allowed me to use his picture to experiment. His first picture is the real photograph taken in bad light. I played around with his picture on the site a little and converted my "guy-next-door" friend to a gangsta brother with da bling. Love the transformation!

I have some weekend plans with this tool! Who'll be my next victim! (evil laugh).

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