iKaraoke - Karaoke You Can Carry

iKaraoke from Griffin Technology is a low–cost karaoke system that you can carry anywhere. The iKaraoke is a simple microphone like device that plugs into any iPod with a dock connector and processes any music that you own. Music is processed to mute the vocals so that you can fill–in.

The playback can travel by cable to a headset or amplifier, or it can be broadcast wirelessly to an FM receiver up to 20 feet away.

The muting is not perfect, you will still hear the lead singer at least faintly in the background, and, unpredictably, it works better with some songs than others.

The microphone has three reverb settings to enhance your voice and help you compare more favorably with the vocalist you are replacing.

Via: New York Times

Farewell to Floppies

Alternative backup formats, new storage such as the CD–RW and the arrival of mass internet access, consigned the floppy disk to the dusty corner of peoples’ desks and, eventually, the bin.

The first floppy disk was introduced in 1971 by IBM and heralded as a revolutionary device as it replaced the old–fashioned punch–cards. The eight–inch plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide was nicknamed "floppy" because of its flexibility. With technology advancement the disk shrank to five–and–a–quarter inches in 1976. By 1981, Sony shrank it some more – this time to three–and–a–half inches – the standard used to this day.

During 1980s and 1990s, only the floppies provided the essential back–up as well as playing a crucial role in transferring data and distributing software.

By the early 1990s, the growing complexity of software meant that many programs were distributed on sets of floppies. But the end of the decade saw software distribution swap to CD–ROM.

The first nail in the coffin came in 1998, when the iMac was revealed without a floppy disk drive. Then in 2003, Dell banished disk drives from its higher spec machines.

In 1998, an estimated 2 billion floppy disks were sold, according to the Recording Media Industries Association of Japan. Since then global demand has fallen by around two–thirds to an estimated 700 million by 2006.

With computer users increasingly using the internet or USB memory sticks – some of which store 2,000 times the capacity of the floppy disk – to transfer data, floppies are becoming increasingly redundant.

Source: BBC News

Do Your Stuff with Brainwaves

All work – emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches – do every thing with nothing more than brainwaves and mind control. Looking ahead in the future, keyboards and computer mice might be remembered only as medieval–style torture devices for the wrists.

It may not be too long before we get to see these radical changes. Thanks to the sensational research work on brain patterns being done by scientists at Brown University and other institutions, in collaboration with Foxborough, Mass.–based company Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems. The research was published in the British science journal, Nature.

Research is being done on the brain of a 26year old quadriplegic man, Matthew Nagle. Nagle was hooked up to a computer via an implant smaller than an aspirin that sits on top of his brain and reads electrical patterns. Using that technology, he learned how to move a cursor around a screen, play simple games, control a robotic arm, and even – couch potatoes, prepare to gasp in awe – turn his brain into a TV remote control.
Nagle was able to accomplish all this because the brain has been greatly demystified in laboratories over the last decade.

Cyberkinetics and a host of other companies are working on turning those discoveries into real products.

Brain–reading technology is improving rapidly. Sometime back, Sony took out a patent on a game system that beams data directly into the mind without implants. It uses a pulsed ultrasonic signal that induces sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images.

Stu Wolf, one of the top scientists at Darpa, the Pentagon’s scientific research agency which gave birth to the Internet, believes in about 20years, we’ll have super fast, super tiny computers that make today’s machines look like typewriters, we’ll all be wearing computers in headbands by then.

Controlling devices with the mind is just the beginning. Next, Wolf believes, is what he calls "network–enabled telepathy" – instant thought transfer. In other words, your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain. If you think instant messaging is addictive, just wait for instant thinking.

Via: CNNMoney

Using a Mobile Phone is Safe – Latest Study

A recent research carried out by the Mitsubishi Chemical Safety Institute (MCSI) (sponsored by Japan’s three largest mobile phone operators, SoftBank Mobile Corp, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI Corp) has concluded that high powered radio waves from mobile phone base stations appear to have no adverse effects on human tissue. Experiments involved researchers blasting samples of living cells from brain, skin and lung tissue with radio waves up to 10 times stronger than legal safety limits for mobile base station transmitters.
The researchers claimed that no adverse effects were detectable even after as much as 96 hours of exposure.

This has added further fuel to the ongoing controversy of weather using a Mobile Phone is actually safe. Research into the health effects of mobile phone use has produced a wide range of results.

Another study by the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found that long–term mobile phone use could slightly increase the risk of brain tumours developing on the side of the head where the phone is held. This effect was only observed in cases where the user had owned a mobile phone for more than 10 years.

With each research study concluding with conflicting remarks, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a concrete judgment. It is definitely not possible to stay away from using mobile phones, personally, I would resort to using a mobile only when absolutely necessary. Better still, using a handsfree is convenient, also lets you keep away from radiation if any after all.

Via: iTnews

Charge Your Phone While Riding a Bike

If you are used to riding a bike, why not tap in that extra energy and perhaps charge a phone. That’s the premise behind the new cell phone docking station from Motorola that mounts on a bicycle.

Let your pedals power up your phone battery as you swerve around dodging cars and pedestrians. Not only will you save time, you’ll help the environment too.
Just remember not to take any calls while cycling.

Via: Gizmodo

Make Money from Videos - YouTube

Publishing your videos over YouTube may soon let you make money. With over 70 million videos viewed on the site each day, YouTube, currently owned by Google, may soon start sharing its revenues with its users.

YouTube co–founder Chad Hurley said:

"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users. So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up."

It’s not immediately clear how much users might receive, or what mechanism would be used. The focus of the initiative looks to be to build a community of YouTube users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

YouTube goes Mobile

The popularity of social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace are increasingly attracting the eyes of mobile phone operators, desperate to increase revenues as the price of making calls continues to fall.

YouTube, the online video sharing site which was recently bought by Google, has always been interested in expanding its services beyond computers. A recent tie–up between YouTube and Verizon has made watching and downloading video on mobiles or PDAs possible. The service has since been expanded to other mobile phone operators like Cingular, Sprint and T–Mobile.

YouTube–Mobile Video Uploads: http://www.youtube.com/mobile

Turbo 10 - Search the Deep Net

Use Turbo 10 to search the Deep Net. Deep Net refers to the thousands of topic–specific search engines on the Internet, including those that are inaccessible to traditional crawler–based search engines like Google or Yahoo.
Turbo 10 is a metasearch engine that provides a universal interface to these Deep Net engines. Turbo 10 also pulls out information from database sources that are not web–based (e.g., peer to peer networks). The service offered by Turbo 10 is free and you can:

• Find more quality information from specialist, topic–specific engines.
• Directly access online government, business and university databases.
• Search these databases in real–time, the moment you enter a search.
• Save time, you can search up to 10 Deep Net engines simultaneously.

Turbo 10 also lets you add more engines to the collection on which your search query is executed.

Process Explorer for Windows

If you ever wanted to find out all the DLLs used by a particular program, Process Explorer is the way to go. It not only shows you information on the DLLs loaded by a particular program, it also lists all the handles that the selected process has opened.

The Process Explorer display window is divided into two panes. The top pane shows a list of currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts. The bottom pane displays the handles opened by the process selected in the top pane or you’ll see the DLLs and memory–mapped files that the selected process has loaded, based on the mode the Process Explorer is in. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

Process Explorer works on almost all flavors of Windows including 64–bit versions for x64 processors, Windows Vista and is useful in tracking down DLL–version problems or handle leaks, and provides insight into the way Windows and applications work.

Download Process Explorer: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip (1.5 MB)

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Remove Ads from Google Search and Gmail

To start with, text only ads from Google were an innovative idea. Unlike most other ads the text ads were seen as harmless and were welcome by most of us. With continued use of Google’s services, these ads tend to draw attention and are starting to get annoying. Well, why would you want to spare your screen space for something that’s not useful to you anyway?

Here is a simple trick to hide ads from Google Search including ads in Gmail. The trick works in Firefox and uses Greasemonkey to manipulate pages displayed by Google.

Let’s start with installing Greasemonkey for Firefox. Greasemonkey is a popular Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the way web pages are displayed, it’s available for free from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/.
You would need to restart Firefox after installation, so ensure that you don’t loose track of the information on this page.

Next, browse to http://userstyles.org/style/show/353 and click on “Load as user script” button to install the Greasemonkey script. Now open Google Search or Gmail – ads are gone.

A word of caution, with this hack we are only hiding the ads from being displayed. They are actually still there, just that they are not visible. It is also worth noting that as this hack is based upon manipulating existing html structure, it is very possible that this hack might break as Google Search or Gmail continues to evolve.

The Self-Destructing E-mail

After the usage of invisible ink, self-destruct cassette tapes to securely exchange information, now it’s the turn of self-destructing e-mails. The development is designed to improve security and avoid potentially sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

The idea is simple, allows the sender to create e-mails that will expire after a set time. The sender will also be able to restrict who is allowed to read the e-mail and prevent recipients from forwarding messages or printing them. The new technology could potentially be used by governments and companies to prevent leaks of sensitive information.

There are several free online services available like willselfdestruct. In most cases the recipients are sent a link to the message. The message is displayed on a browser window and vanishes (self-destructs) after the specified interval, all records of the e-mail are erased.

Microsoft Office 2003 also includes e-mail privacy and security features, including the ability to designate specific readers, prevent message forwarding and printing, and a "time-stamp" which results in e-mail deletion on a specified date. However, the e-mail will still be retained on the sender's computer, and in corporate networks copies would be kept on the back-up tapes of mail servers.

Self-destructing e-mails could also help those involved in shady dealings as well, who might have other reasons for not wanting a permanent record of their dealings. As the technology evolves it remains to see how the idea might take shape and how successful it might be in sealing its flaws.

Related Links: Inside Office 2003, from PCWorld.com.

The Fine Print on Printers – How to Choose the Right Printer

With almost a dozen hungry printer companies out there, each trying to better the other in order to take their product to the user’s desktop, it is often difficult if not confusing to choose the right printer for your specific needs. If you happen to walk into a showroom, you might find a horde of different printer models sporting different features that’ll certainly baffle you unless you know what you are looking for. Point being that before you walk into a consumer electronics shop, focus on a list of features you require of your printer. This will save you time and unnecessary confusion.

How intense will your usage be?
Are you a novel writer who frequently takes prints of your latest drafts? Or, are you interested in high-quality prints of photographs taken with your digital camera? Or maybe you need to print your school/college projects that contain of a mixture of writing and graphics. Well, the printer required in each case is quiet different.

In the first case, the printer’s primary job is to spew out pages and pages of text – fast! Print quality isn’t high on the list as long as the text is readable. Here’s where black and white laser printer would excel. On an average, a laser printer can print anything between 15-20 pages of text every minute (PPM). Expect such laser printers to print 2000-3000 pages before the toner cartage runs dry. A large paper tray capable of housing over 200 pages would also be quite helpful. But if printing photos is what you need, look for an inkjet photo printer. An inkjet is far cheaper to maintain than laser printer. It also has separate ink cartridge for each color (CMYK). So if the printer is low on yellow ink you will need to replace only the yellow cartridge and nothing else.

As a drawback (assuming you’re printing photos), you won’t get more than 40-50 prints per cartridge depending on its capacity and level of quality you selected. Caution: Don’t expect more than a couple of prints a minute, as photo printing is time consuming. Also take into account the price of good quality photo paper. For good prints, you need premium paper. If you need to take prints while on the move, consider going in for a mobile photo printer, as they are much easier to lug around.

Finally a conventional color inkjet printer will more than do the job if you merely make prints of school and college projects featuring both text and pictures. An entry level desktop inkjet printer would not be too heavy on your pockets. As long as the printer can do about 10 PPM and can house about 100 sheets in the paper tray, you’re good to go.

Don’t forget cartridge price: The next thing you should look for is the cost of the cartridge. Many users buy low-cost printers thoughtlessly and then cannot afford to buy new cartridges once the old ones run out of ink or toner.

But things don’t just end here. Low priced cartridges also imply lower capacity. Unfortunately, you don’t have much of a choice. Different manufacturers stick to different strategies. For example, Epson printers use low–capacity cartridges that are cheaper. HP, on the other hand, sells expensive ink and toner cartridges that lets you take more prints. If you find it easier to spend a small sum frequently, it makes more sense to go for a printer with cheaper cartridges.

Optional Features: Once you have figured out the basic features you want in your printer, look for additional features that suit your needs. For instance, if the printer is for your office, you may want one with network points so you can connect it directly into the network without first having to connect it to another computer. Next, check the built in memory buffer. This will help if you are printing a heavy file. Here the entire file is directly loaded into the printer’s memory, which will speed up process. This is especially important if the printer is over a network.

Let Size Not Bother You.

Sending large files through e-mail can be a pain. It’s all fine to make a fancy PPT with liberally using lots of video clips and pictures, but when it comes to sending them over email you’re stuck. Often you may end up with the mail servers chocking on your large transfer.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just drop them over at some place and have your friends or colleagues pick them up?

The option: With websites like DropLoad (www.dropload.com), you might just have an option. This is one of a new breed of companies that offer workarounds to using emails to send large files. Some other services worth mentioning are DropSend (www.dropsend.com), YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com) and SendThisFile (www.sendthisfile.com).

The advantages: The best part about these services is that they are very simple to use. To start using these services, you just have to register with them (mostly for free). Then, as you’d do with your email, upload your big files to these servers, specify who should receive the files and you are ready to roll. This will let you get around servers that don’t let heavy files through, since all that the recipients get are e-mails with a link to these files, no filters will be able to block the mails or attachments for their size.
Another plus is that the entire transaction takes place at the server end. So you don’t have to bother about installing an application or stick to a single computer either to upload or download files. The one exception to this is DropSend, which lets you install a small piece of software for easy upload. There isn’t any co-ordination to be done either, so the recipients can come by anytime and pickup the files.

Micro projectors

Although technology evolution has made large screens on mobile phones possible, the screen sizes are constrained as the phones will have to fit into a palm. With new features being added to mobile phones regularly, and with the growing need for most of us to stay connected, phones these days are increasingly assuming the role of a regular laptop or a desktop computer. The notion of phones being a mere communication device is changing and phones are seen as more of a "personal assistant" for a business user.
With relatively smaller screens on a phone, it may be difficult if you were to make a presentation from your phone (you think this is too much to expect from a phone?).
Enter "The Micro Projector" - The technology may actually add another dimension to the way you use your mobile phone.

The Micro Projector has two parts - a set of RBC lasers made of semiconductor material and a 1mm mirror that tilts on two axes. As the lasers flash on the mirror, the mirror gimbals on its two axes, flickering to produce 30 million pixels a second, each illuminating a surface for 20 nanoseconds. Using this laser and single-mirror setup, the projector paints a scene onto a surface one pixel at a time. It does this so quickly that our eye perceives those scenes as a static image or a continuous movie.

This technology is really poised to change the way people communicate. Friends might share more movies and pictures, and business professionals who hesitate to pack a bulky projector for a presentation might start using more visuals when they pitch their products.
A company called Microvision has pioneered the Micro Projector technology and the device is right now in a prototype stage. It might be sometime before the device is mass-manufactured and phone makers and consumers could buy these devices. As per company reports the device is set to rollout in 2008, and they have already signed deals with an Asian mobile phone giant. If all goes well, we may soon see people watching full-length movies right from their cell phones.

About About.com

About.com is a good place to start with if you are looking for information about something. It has information on just about anything you can think of. It is not a search engine though, nor is it an encyclopedia; at about.com you can find detailed information about a topic, written by experts in their respective fields. You can therefore be assured of the authenticity of the information that you find there.

About.com home page is neat and well laid out, though a first time visitor may be slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of links. Since all information on this site is from an expert guide, there is a personal touch. Most pages are written in a matter of fact way and they are conversational in tone.