Jun 17 2006

Nooz

Tag: Discoveries @ 10:45 pm

Here’s a new social bookmarking site with a brand new twist / speil.

It’s called Nooz and it’s

Rojo

‘s attempt at getting at the huge number of teenybopper (I use that term loosely and as a pun) users of MySpace.

You need to have a

MySpace

account to register on Nooz. Justification for this comes from the admittedly nice integration that Nooz pulls off. It picks up all your photo information and other details straight from your MySpace URL!

Coming from the Rojo team, it’s no surprise when it picks up all the links you Rojo Mojo’d on (I

love

saying that! :) ) and lists them as your Nooz. Yes, you can submit your own links and bookmarklets are present for that as well.

Shortly I’ll be figuring out the submit URL parameters for it and adding it to my

social bookmarking

template (yes, I’ll add it to the

Blogger

and

Wordpress

templates too).

I left the

best

for last. :)

One of the cool new things they’re trying (you might just begin to see a lot more of this type of thing) to do is to offer several types of tickers and blocks of links that point to your Rojo/Nooz items. My Nooz ticker is shown above. Nooz recommends that users display it in their About me section in MySpace. What they don’t say is that it works on

any

site. Including my own Amieo based one. ;-)

Edit: I just skinned the ticker courtesy this NooZ Faq page.


May 27 2006

Blabb

Tag: Discoveries @ 6:42 am

Just found blabb.com courtesy 3spots. Blabb is a completely AJAX based site – the site never loads a page again after the first one comes down. Even for search.

It’s fast, it’s neat and tidy, and it’s cooler.Click for full size

Why?

  • You don’t *have* to sign up to post something. Don’t know how they’ll tackle spam posting, ultimately.

  • Posts are classified simply by theme as compared to tags by everybody else. This should be a lot simpler for the “simple” folk to put in new stuff against themes which are titled creative, useful, readable, technical, media, scholarly, fun and etc
  • It’s FAST.
  • Most importantly, it attempts to solve the problem of “The click”. What the heck am I talking about? Each and every one of these sites, at it’s root, deals with one simple core fact. Delivering it’s users to websites of interest. The problem: How to collect metadata for these links? All the other sites, take your pick, digg,delicious,whateverelse, simply ignore this and let the user click on the title of the link change the page to the target site. Blabb does a one-up on this by opening a shmoooth AJAX frame that shows a live preview of the site. The user can then add the site to his favorites and whatever else, including clicking on the link again to open it in a new window. I loved this! :)

Recommended.


Jun 30 2005

43 Places!

Tag: Discoveries,Raves @ 10:51 am






Just saw a new link on 43things right beside my account saying I am going to 0 places and clicked it to figure out what was going on, and….. voila!, they now do places!


Same account, more goodness!


It’s really cool, each place you click on shows up with beautiful pictures and people’s experiences there and recommendations.


Your account page even shows a global zoomable flash map highlighted with all the places you wanna go.


Awesome. Not just recommended, you must go and check it out.


Incidentally, 43things also has been adding more stuff, there are now tags with goals and subscriptions. These guys keep updating their stuff. I like. :-)


Jun 17 2005

Holy Supersmooth pates, Batman!

Tag: Discoveries @ 5:04 am

A while back, I went through a phase where I decided that the sparse hair on my head was not worth keeping on and had regularly started taking it all off.


Those days, I would regularly go down to my barber and have him do the needful to emerge with a freshly shaven bald pate.


Perhaps, I would have kept up doing it if I had – the Headblade S4. This thing would be an awesome experience – to shave my head. It even has a kickstand – to keep the blade off it’s edge when it’s on rest.


Jun 15 2005

UberGeek Keyboard

Tag: Discoveries,Weird Stuff @ 1:44 pm






So you think you’re a super geek.


You think you can key in stuff from your keyboard faster than the eye can see.


You think you are the best that’s out there.


You need Das Keyboard.


The keyboard for the UberGeek.


This is just the kind of thing that us UberGeeks love to show off on. A keyboard without any key labels. None. Whatsoever. So even if you look down while you type, you don’t see what you’re gonna get. ;-)


The site says: “Since there is no key to look at when typing, your brain will quickly adapt and memorize the key positions and you will find yourself typing a lot faster with more accuracy in no time. It is amazing how slow typers almost double their speed and quick typers become blazing fast!”


Something I would definitely wanna try out.


Mar 17 2005

AmazType

Tag: Discoveries @ 8:09 am

This web application lets you type a name of any author and then creates a collage of the author’s name using the covers of the Author’s books!


Really cool and eyecatching. You can even drill down and see more details on any particular book and clicking on it again takes you to an Amazon page where you can buy the book, itself.


Link: http://amaztype.tha.jp


Feb 25 2005

Google does movies!

Tag: Discoveries @ 9:01 am





Google Movies Was just browsing around when I came across a news item that said that Google was now doing movie reviews. I checked it out and Google, as usual, has done a great job of it. Anytime you want to look up a movie, just type movie: followed by the name of the movie and Google will display a list of movies that match your keywords along with the number of reviews available on each hit. Each link goes to a page dedicated to the movie with an aggregated movie rating along with links to individual review pages from different sites.

Great job Google, I think it’s perfect for movie buffs like me. :)


Jan 02 2005

Unky Moods!

Tag: Discoveries @ 7:32 am

            

Came across this nice site dedicated to providing a mood widget for personal websites. Its called Unky Moods and it’s got a huge list of moods that one can choose from. The idea being that you sign up on their site and then choose a mood to depict the way you’re feeling. The site gives you a small piece of HTML code (it’s javascript) that you can paste in your own web site code. Then whenever you want to change your mood you just need to head over to Unky Moods and the mood widget automatically displays the mood you choose there, on your website. I’ve set it up on the right bar of dhigu.com, check it out!


Dec 20 2004

Gmail enables POP3 access!

Tag: Discoveries,Tech @ 4:33 pm

I was just fooling around on the Gmail website when I saw a link to check out their new features. Check them out I did, and boy was I surprised! Google is now giving complete access to their service through POP3. Not only that, they even support SMTP so that you can send your mail out directly from your client itself! Both SMTP as well as POP3 are protected by SSL. Note, you have to enable POP3 access from your Gmail settings for all this to work. Check out how to configure your client from this page.


Free POP3 and SMTP


Sometimes I really wonder on how Gmail does all this and that too for free. First they broke into the free web mail market by giving out 1 Gb of mail space and now this! I can hardly wait to see how the other free email service providers move to tackle this latest feature on Google’s email service.


Aug 20 2004

Sneaking around AutoCop

Tag: Discoveries @ 9:04 pm

A lot of times, my AutoCop car security system has given me problems. Especially when I’m trying to sneak in/out of my building without waking up the neighbours, at night. One big relief is that I’ve got a switch that cuts off the reversing siren, which I most conveniently use when I’m reversing out of my building in these situations.

However, there is one sound the security system makes which until now defied any sort of control. Every time I lock or unlock the car, the security stem makes a loud single or double beep, respectively. I’ve finally figured out how to stop this sound from occurring. Read on.

The point is, that the security system circuitry (like a lot of end-consumer appliance electronics) is single threaded. Let me illustrate this with an example. When I turn on the engine of the car, after a short delay the security system auto-locks all the doors. Point is, if I turn on the engine and immediately start to reverse, the reversing siren sounds off. Now while the reverse siren is sounding, the short delay timeout of the AutoCop system expires and the doors lock. However, just at the time that the doors lock, the reverse siren skips a beat, because the siren can’t sound during the short period of time that the doors are being locked. Like I said, single threaded.

Now, I just need to use this fact to my advantage to halt the lock/unlock sound in it’s tracks. The AutoCop system has a button on it’s remote labelled ‘C’ for check. When you hit the ‘C’heck button, the lights of the car start to blink in a rhythm; the idea is that you can find your car in a parking lot full of cars of every variety; or if you don’t remember where you parked it.

Just like I illustrated with my earlier example, when the AutoCop system is in blinking the car lights, if I hit the lock/unlock buttons during a blink, the operation happens without any sound.

Problem solved.

Next unsolved problem? How to get the AutoCop security system to not auto lock the car after a timeout when it’s in an unlocked state. This is actually a security hazard because one can easily get locked out of the car with the keys inside!

A lot of times, my AutoCop car security system has given me problems. Especially when I’m trying to sneak in/out of my building without waking up the neighbours, at night. One big relief is that I’ve got a switch that cuts off the reversing siren, which I most conveniently use when I’m reversing out of my building in these situations.

However, there is one sound the security system makes which until now defied any sort of control. Every time I lock or unlock the car, the security stem makes a loud single or double beep, respectively. I’ve finally figured out how to stop this sound from occurring. Read on.

The point is, that the security system circuitry (like a lot of end-consumer appliance electronics) is single threaded. Let me illustrate this with an example. When I turn on the engine of the car, after a short delay the security system auto-locks all the doors. Point is, if I turn on the engine and immediately start to reverse, the reversing siren sounds off. Now while the reverse siren is sounding, the short delay timeout of the AutoCop system expires and the doors lock. However, just at the time that the doors lock, the reverse siren skips a beat, because the siren can’t sound during the short period of time that the doors are being locked. Like I said, single threaded.

Now, I just need to use this fact to my advantage to halt the lock/unlock sound in it’s tracks. The AutoCop system has a button on it’s remote labelled ‘C’ for check. When you hit the ‘C’heck button, the lights of the car start to blink in a rhythm; the idea is that you can find your car in a parking lot full of cars of every variety; or if you don’t remember where you parked it.

Just like I illustrated with my earlier example, when the AutoCop system is in blinking the car lights, if I hit the lock/unlock buttons during a blink, the operation happens without any sound.

Problem solved.

Next unsolved problem? How to get the AutoCop security system to not auto lock the car after a timeout when it’s in an unlocked state. This is actually a security hazard because one can easily get locked out of the car with the keys inside!


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