Search engines and privacy

CNET makes a comparison of how the search engines handle privacy. Big boys Google and Yahoo retain your data even after 18 months.

Youtube streaming made easy

Youtube now allows you to stream videos much more easily - You can now fast forward, view any part of the video and not wait for the buffering to be completed - just drag it with your mouse!

Joey by Mozilla

Nope .. its not Firefox for mobile phones yet..


Joey can be used to watch a video or read on your PC, and then read the same on your mobile phone. Not sure why someone would do that, maybe a way to send directions, maps ? to your mobile phones.

Look at the video below for more!




Project Joey, Customize Your Mobile Web Experience - Tutorial from AirMozilla and Vimeo

Intel Classmate PC

The Intel Classmate PC displayed at OSCON. Looks good, apparently sells for 200$ (maybe large volumes) - one of the developing countries has ordered more than 100,000 of these. Has a 20G hard disk, 512 MB (?) RAM, runs a 900 MHz mobile celeron processor.

The Classmate runs Mandrake and Microsoft Windows XP

Feedburner Blogger Integration

From the Feedburner site,

If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger's “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed (quite easily, might we add). Gone are the muggy, languorous days of wrestling with "autodiscovery" tags in foreboding corners of your Blogger template code or hacking through this tangled discussion thread for a glimpse of configuration clarity. Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click "Save Settings." Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you've got the complete picture of how your content is being consumed out here, out there, out everywhere.

Why is redirecting so important?

We're glad you asked. By redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary. Why so? Sometimes, publishers inadvertently fragment their feed audience by offering more than one feed address on the blog itself or within their autodiscovery tags (the method by which feed readers automatically detect the address of your feed for syndication purposes). This results in some subscribers not being counted, and no one wants that in a world where everyone should count for something. By redirecting your feed, you can consolidate any straggler subscribers and greatly improve your ability to effectively measure your audience.

Fun with Tables

Via Ajaxian

Brasero - CD/DVD Burner for Linux

If you are looking for an CD/DVD software other than the usual K3B/Nero for Linux/wodim, Brasero might be worth looking at.

It has a simple interface which supports drag and drop of files from Nautilus, previewing of files.

On Ubuntu

Install : sudo apt-get install brasero

Google Desktop for Linux

Long expected, Google finally has released the popular Google Desktop for Linux. I have just started indexing and look forward to searching man pages in a way I never knew :) - All I used to do was man -k before. This would be so much better I would hope.

Get it here

Silverlight is Moonlight on Linux

Flash on Linux will have some competition - Its called Moonlight - the Microsoft Silverlight implementation.

More screenshots here

Free tool to check page load times

Want to check how much time your scripts or images take to load up?

Pingdom has a free tool for you - A Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

Check here

Samsung Ultra Edition II

Samsung's Ultra Edition 10.9 (U600) exudes elegance and modern style, coming in a range of colors which includes sapphire blue, garnet red, platinum metal and copper gold casing. The clever design of Samsung's Ultra Edition 10.9 (U600) includes a unique and stylish interface for uncomplicated usability. It also comes equipped with a 3.2-megapixel camera encased in an ultra slim profile, which boasts a 2.22-inch wide TFT LCD widescreen. For feature watchers, Samsung's Ultra Edition 12.1 (U700) offers HSDPA 3.6 Mbps data transfer speed and video telephony.

Via Mobiledia

Apple iPhone Details

• there's no Flash or Java support
• there is PDF support
• Quicktime is used for encoding and displaying video and audio
• said video is encoded via H.264
• with Safari on the iPhone, links can be embedded in web pages to allow phone calls from a click; this would be insanely useful for corporate directories and such
• web pages are limited to 10 MB (!), Javascripts can only run for five seconds
• the iPhone's browser user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3 (quick, everybody check your http logs!)

Via Ars

Yahoo Mail Unlimited Storage CRAP!

(Click on the image to view FULL SIZE)

So much for my excitement of having UNLIMITED email storage. My Yahoo email account throws the above error - all I did was forward is few hundreds of mails per day.

Forget Unlimited Yahoo CRAP - Download using Gmail POP

Google Error - computer virus or spyware application

If you happen to see a page like above, when you visit a Google page, you need not panic.

According to Viruslist, Google might have just blacklisted some of the IPs which might have sent automatic queries to its search engine and you might have just picked that IP address when you renewed your Internet connection.

So, next time you get this, you should probably just ignore the message, enter the Captcha or try to renew your Internet Connection again

Safari - trying to fool the world ?

Mark Wilton-Jones has researched a bit more to show Safari isn't as fast as it claims to be

"At the release of Safari 3 beta for Windows, there were several claims about Safari's page load performance. It was giving results that showed it was clearly faster than other browsers. Since I generally like to check things for myself instead of trusting what companies say, I gave the new Safari a whirl. Sure enough it was very fast. Its CSS was quick, its page loading was quick, its JavaScript was quick. Perhaps quick, but certainly not as fast as they seemed to claim it was.

I have a variety of machines that I tested it on, and all showed the same thing; it was fast, but not really faster than the competition (Opera, for example, but other browsers were also faster in some cases). But when tests used JavaScript to check the page loading speed, Safari produced numbers far smaller than other browsers, even though the actual page load was not faster when tested with a stopwatch. Simple CSS float tests would produce times of less than 100ms, while the actual page load (from disk, so no network lag is involved) could take as much as 5 seconds."

Read more

Galeon - the fastest browser in the world

I was looking for a lightweight browser to supplement Firefox (I use Cookieswap for different profiles too). I was trying to use Opera but somehow I hate the way it renders. So, ended up trying Galeon - which based on Gecko and again am pleasantly surprised at the amazing rendering speed - Now, I believe it's probably the Fastest browser in the world


To install on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install galeon

Safari - no, its not the best browser

Ars Technica reviews Safari for Windows and yes they are absolutely right, Safari is no way close to being the best browser - I find it painful to use Safari - just too many things to get used to - Stick to Firefox

Read the review here

Gmail POP: Username password not accepted

Another Gmail quirk - I don't know why it happened to me, but if you get this error

This is what their official help suggests

"We suggest making some adjustments in your mail client's settings so you aren't always prompted to enter your username and password. Please check the following settings in your mail client:

• Make sure that you entered @gmail.com after your username. For example: john.doe@gmail.com
• Re-enter your password to ensure that it's correct. Keep in mind that passwords are case-sensitive.
• Make sure your mail client isn't set to check for new mail too often. If your mail client checks for new messages more than once every 10 minutes, your client might repeatedly request your username and password.

Now, please follow the steps below to resolve the problem:

1. Disable all POP clients you're using to read Gmail messages. (If you use one at work and one at home, please disable both.)
2. From the computer on which your POP logins are failing, visit http://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha
3. Enter your Gmail username and password, and the letters in the distorted picture.
4. Once you have successfully logged in, restart your mail client and try to download your mail."

Worked for me :)

sylpheed - the no frills mail client

I haven't tried out sylpheed since gtk-1.2 days. I was looking for a replacement for Evolution which I was using as my second mail client (use Thunderbird as the primary client) .

I wanted the simplest of GUI based mail clients and Sylpheed seems to be perfect fit - Its fast, does most of what a mail clients do (protocols, privacy, junk mail handling, command line options, etc) and more importantly doesn't crash (evolution crashes a lot!). Its a little unconventional in terms of UI, but I guess its manageable.

On Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install sylpheed

Nokia 8600 Luna Phone

• Slide open the glass cover to reveal the keypad and camera beneath
• Light your way onto the scene - the keypad glows subtly beneath the polished glass cover
• View pictures on the high-resolution display, supporting up to 16-million colors
• Capture special moments on video or with the 2.0-megapixel camera with up to 4x digital zoom, landscape camcorder and video player
• Enjoy music and videos with video playback and streaming, built-in FM radio, and the music player supporting AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MIDI, AMR, and WMA audio formats
• SMS reader and high-quality text-to-speech instant messaging (IM) and presence-enhanced contacts
• Downloadable Java applications via J2ME to complement preinstalled games (High Roller Casino, Soccer 3D, and 3D Golf Tour)
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR (enhanced data rate) specification supporting stereo audio streaming via A2DP BT (advanced audio distribution profile for Bluetooth
• Use Mobile Search to find and connect to local services, websites, images, and mobile content
• Micro-USB 2.0 connector for audio, data, and battery charging and synchronization with PC using Nokia PC Suite

Via Mobiledia