tech·no·philes

Did you run out and get Windows Vista today? Well, even though I can't recommend the upgrade with enthusiasm, I can give you ten reasons why you might care to give 'er a go at some point in the near future. I'll be slamming these points into a :30 video clip tomorrow morning - in an effort to do a better job than Microsoft at marketing Vista to potential users: 1. The new Start Menu can help you find things faster 2. Fast USB sticks can speed up your system instantly 3. Program-independent volume control will keep your sounds in check 4. The Windows Explorer exposes tons of file metadata 5. Parental controls will keep Mom and Dad happy 6. Checking for updates and problem solutions has never been easier 7. Guided Help takes interactive learning to the next level 8. Both wired and wireless network management are smarter 9. There's an infinitely more stable video driver model in place 10. Hardware-accelerated eye candy on the desktop is awesome And here's a slick Vista

Let's make search a better experience . This seems to be the motto of Kartoo . KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. In other words, you would have eye catching search results page. For newbees like me "MetaSearch engines a type of search tool that will allow a user to conduct a search across 2 or more search engines and directories in one go. These engines don't hold an index of their own but are programmed to search across many of the top search tools simultaneously." KartOO search engine is a product of KartOO S.A. (Worldwide leader in Cartographic visualization). I played with this search engine for 20 mins. My verdict: Don't compare it with Google! Enjoy a fresh search experience. Find more about Kartoo: http://www.kartoo.net/a/en/aide01.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoo

After bearing the bungling blues & complicated codecs, I finally managed to get my copy of Nero 7 Premium Edition today (600+ MB). I upgraded Nero 6, crossed my fingers and dumped 4.4 GB of data onto a blank DVD. Screen Capture: Nero 7 Premium It was beautiful, no SCSI error, no over burning, no buffer underruns!! I played with this amazing s/w for an hour discovering some great apps esp to author DVDs. Verdict: It's a must if you don't want to get into the innards of DVD writing. It makes things much simpler and it comes with its own little player that happily decodes DVDs with no additional effort. I uninstalled all DVD utils except PowerISO. I have dozens of .BIN images that Nero ImageDrive cannot mount. So goodbye dVd desperation and hello burning bliss :)

Thanks to my online newspapers (I checked International Herald Tribune), I came to know about Big Blue's new venture. IBM has released a new social networking suite, called Lotus Connections . As per "International Herald Tribune": Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear, profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs. The profiles component, for example, lets users search for people by name, expertise or keyword. The program then not only provides contact information and reporting structure details, but also lists blogs, communities, activities and bookmarks associated with the person. With IBM's quarterly profit rose to 11 percent, Big Blues is seriously looking to make waves once again. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/business/ibm.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_enterprise_social_networking.php#more

Been ages since my S200 died on me. (sniff). I loved it. It was my first digicam and I took some great pictures with it. The S200 Now its time to move on. I read scores of reviews and narrowed down to the 350D. But it's still a wee bit expensive for me right now. But it definitely is on my shopping list. The EOS 350D Detailed review on: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos350d/ BTW this is a great web site for an indepth analysis on digicams!

I just bought my second Motorola in six months. This time it is the Motofone F3 It looks "WOW" and would set you back by a mere 1600 rupees!!! Yes, you guessed right, its a basic phone that does what phones were actually meant to do. It takes some getting used to, but once you do, its a breeze to use. I also had an unfair advantage of being the first to lay my hands on it. So it managed to gather a small crowd wherever I went with it. Most believe I am lying about the price :) Rest are pestering the person who got it for me from UP where its currently available. I believe would be placing an order of a dozen F3s sometime soon... I rate it a: 3.5 on 5 for usability 5 on 5 for looks 5 on 5 for value for money 5 on 5 for robustness (throw it, kick it, the F3 would come out unscathed - I threw it onto the floor couple of time to prove it to my audience. Note: we have wall to wall carpeting ) Verdict : Its a good second phone for people like me who can't carry a camera phone

Yeah, I watched almost half of "Fast and Furious" again. I've lost count of how many times I have done that. I never seem to be able to completely watch any movie. Something always comes up! This time its a "Burning Issue", literally. Problem 2 of Chapter 1 was that Windows XP Pro doesn't support burning DVDs the way it does CDs. I did some research and found that: 1. Win XP Pro can burn DVD RAMs [microsoft technet says] Windows XP introduces native support for reading and writing to DVD-RAM drives using the file allocation table (FAT) or FAT32 file systems. It can also read Universal Disk Format (UDF) version 2.01, a superset of UDF 1.02, which is the current standard for DVD media, including DVD-ROM discs and DVD videos. Further, Windows now makes it possible to burn your own CDs conveniently and efficiently with mastering technology built directly into the operating system. 2. Good ol' Nero 6.0 terminates burn after an "SCSI command aborted...&

Opera Software has nominated Yahoo! as the exclusive provider of mobile search on their browsers for mobile phones. Currently, Opera has Opera Mini and Opera Mobile , across more than 100 countries worldwide. Opera will launch the new Yahoo! oneSearch somewhere in March 2007 (Q1 of 2007). Yahoo! oneSearch is a completely new mobile search service designed to give consumers instant answers & Search results. These results are grouped by subject making it easy to read through and drill down to get more details. Opera and Yahoo! will also jointly market the availability of Yahoo! Search on Opera Mobile to help drive consumer awareness and usage. It seems that Yahoo! is ready for serious action in Year 07. Good Luck Yahoo!!!!!!

Okay so I took a day to solve the first problem, but then that's what happens when you spend half a day at work and come home to a power outage! Coming back to Problem 1 : Codec to play DVDs In English this means that you cannot just snap on a DVD drive and hope that your Win XP WMP9 would start playing DVDs. You would need a codec/player. Whatever happened to plug 'n play? But that's another discussion so lets not even get into it. What is a codec? [wiki says] A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal . The word codec may be a combination of any of the following: ' Co mpressor- Dec ompressor', ' Co der- Dec oder', or ' Co mpression/ Dec ompression algorithm'. 20 mins of googling and a dozen codecs later, I understood that I need a codec that is: 1) Free (yes! most ask you to pay!!!) 2) Lightweight (i saw one that was about 100 MB) 3) Easy to setup (something about messing exi

My 40 mins journey with Sphere helped me to understand the importance of Blog Search Engines in today’s blogging world. No wonder! This web 2.0 technology impressed me. I'm sure; you would also fall in love with Sphere after reading this blog! What is Sphere? In simple words, it is a blog search engines in the form of Bookmark. It would help you to find blogs related to the respective topic. As per Sphere's creators (Martin Remy, Steve Nieker,Toni Schneider, Tony Conrad): "The Sphere It! Bookmarklet is a free bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you're reading on the Web. It may change your life" This San Francisco based blog bookmarklet can be accessed by hitting the following URL: http://www.sphere.com/ How to use it? Internet Explorer Geeks: You may add it to IE favorites by right clicking on the button . Please ignore the JavaScript warning message (Trust us!). Once you are done with this, visit any of your preferred new. Clic

Just got myself a Sony AW-G170A Dual Layer 18X DVD Writer and a Gemini 5.25 casing. Hooked it up and presto XP recognized it as Drive S: That's when problems started. 1) Need a codec to play DVDs (wt..!!!) 2) XP has no native support for DVD writing 3) Nero 6 turned 2 DVD-Rs into coasters after a damned SCSI error (no!! forums didn't help fix it) I'll be posting how I go about solving each of the above. For now, remeber to buy atleast one DVD-RW disk when you buy your DVD writer. I now have 5 shiny new coasters on my coffee table.

Is it software? This was my question, when I heard about RoR (Ruby on Rails) for the first time. Then, I used all the popular search engines(Special thanks to Google) to digg about it. Hope you would find the following information useful & intresting: Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework written in Ruby (An old object-oriented programming language with a super clean syntax emerged in early 90's [1995]). Rails Framework takes full advantages of Ruby's simplicity, which helps to create dynamic web application much faster than any other development framework. Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson while working on Basecamp , a project-management tool by 37signals . It was released to the public in July 2004. Ruby on Rails' works on two guiding principles: - Don't repeat yourself (DRY) or Once and Only Once DRY says that every piece of system knowledge should have one authoritative, unambiguous representation. Every piece of know

After Y! Techbuzz, here comes another innovative game, blufr (bluffer) . Check it out at http://www.blufr.com From the website blufr is a new trivia-type game that hopefully gets people of all ages addicted to learning obscure facts. There's no evil agenda. Just play and keep playing. Each bluf shows the percentage of people who were fooled by it.

We recently tried Fling to sync two computers. Fling was chosen after trying out different online store services including Xdrive (an AOL service). Here's about fling from their help pages... Fling is software which makes it easy to upload or transfer files. It is perfect for maintaining a web site on a remote hosted server or to automate backup of folder files. The software supports both file transfer protocol (ftp) upload, network file transfer and transfer between computers or external hard drives. After you install the Fling File Transfer Software you setup one or more Fling folders. These folders exist on your local computer. You can work in the folder like any other folder on your computer. Whenever you add or change any file in the folder just right click on it and select "Upload" and Fling will transfer to file to the correct location on a remote ftp server or network folder. The operation can also be set to be automatic (upload as soon as the files a