2006 Unplugged

Looking back at the year gone by…

Another year has flown past. For the tech world, 2006 will go down the almanac as a chapter entitled Lage Raho Munna Bhai, not Dhoom 2. It was a year in which: Wireless technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth made it as household vocab. Microsoft finally delivered a long awaited offspring, IE 7. Cell phones trilled to the sound of music, grew gobs of memory, and delicious displays to slay the iPod; but couldn’t. Intel actually appeared in the sanctum santorum of the Mac. Firefox 2 chugged in as promised and chaffed the competition. Shiny new Apples with fresh cores blossomed forth…

Furthermore, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), led by Skype (with its over 120 million users), could be heard loud and clear. Sony PS3 powered in to stun. LCD panels wrestled plasmas and their own price tags to capture eyeballs. YouTube and Google Video enriched our online lives as video sharing became a runaway hit. MySpace and the blogsphere flourished and matured. Nintendo Wii began winding itself around non-gaming hearts. And the much delayed, eagerly anticipated 100-tonne gorilla, Microsoft Vista arrived... well almost.

Yet, perhaps the single biggest advent of 2006 was the proliferation of multicore processing. Over five years after IBM gave us the first dual-core processor, the multicore species began to swamp the computing world in 2006 from all directions. Led by thousands of Windows PCs and hundreds of Apple Macintosh machines running Intel plural pacemakers (Core 2 Duo), followed by the Microsoft XBox 360 (with three-core processors), and chased by Sony's PlayStation 3 (powered by the Cell processor with an eight core design)... Keeping in mind Moore Law (the 1965 observation/prognostication by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits on a chip doubled every 18 months), this is obviously just the beginning... A sign of impending times and future thingies to come.

On another front, maybe the most thrilling strides—maturation, frankly speaking--came about in the realm of cyber space with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of architecture, application development, and services available on the World Wide Web that has let people move towards collaborative computing and information sharing online. This is giving users a richer and more interactive computing experience that is getting akin to software applications rather than merely providing simplistic and static Web pages of the first era. Web 2.0 has led to a burgeoning of web service APIs, AJAX sites, web syndication, blogs, wikis… Yeah, there is something new out there every hour. Where is all this headed? Towards mass publishing, global interaction, social networking... And where are we headed? Towards that oft heard destination: The Global Village.

So as you bid adieu to an eventual year, “graze” upon these unique samples of the brave new Web ahead. Cheers!

24 Eyes
www.24eyes.com
A personal web portal.

3form Free Knowledge Exchange
http://3form.org
A collaborative problem solving website.

Fleck
www.fleck.com
Allows you to add info to any web page.

Librarything
www.librarything.com
An online catalog for your books, connector to like-minded readers.

MediaFire
www.mediafire.com
A free, unlimited file host.

Mousebrains
www.kennieting.com/mousebrains
A “thought starter” for advertising creatives.

Podesk
www.podesk.com
An integrated tool for video blogging.

Properti
www.poperti.com
A desktop POP3 client the plays MP3s from your Gmail account.

Quotiki
www.quotiki.com
A social quotes site.

Yedda
http://yedda.com
A community knowledge exchange.

Unsung Heros

A peek at an assortment of ten interesting but unknown free programs.

This week, a very random assortment of some fantastic freeware that I have had the good fortune to find tucked away in the trenches of terra incognita over the years, but not found the occasion or opportunity to write about.

Yankee Clipper III
http://www.intelexual.com/products/YC3/
If you’re tired of XP’s measly clipboard, please switch to this clipboard extender pronto. YC3 chomps up over 200 text and RTF, 20 BMP and metafile, and 200 URL clipboard entries—with no size limits. It saves and re-uses "boilerplate" clippings. Hot-key driven, drag-drop enabled, it can also “float” on top of other applications for quick pastes. You’re a chronic copy-paste champ you’ll wonder how you ever managed without something like this.

PowerPro
http://powerpro.webeddie.com
Mitely but mighty! This efficient and versatile launch bar cum menu cum tray icon facility incorporates a whole gamut of useful functions-- hot keys, mouse actions, menus, timer, scheduler, program window controls--to help you dominate your OS. It lets you send keystrokes to programs, run commands when windows first open, manage virtual desktops, extend your clipboard, create keyboard macros, manage folders, sounds, wallpapers, and screensavers etc.

Wink
www.debugmode.com/wink
A natty tutorial creation proggie ideal for demoing how to use software. It let’s you capture screenshots, record mouse movements, bung in other images, record audio/voice-overs, type-in explanations for each step, create a navigation sequence—replete with buttons, delays, titles etc.--to create a pro looking self-running tutorial or presentation. Wink output formats include Macromedia Flash, HTML, standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML etc. Need we say more?

Nvu
www.nvu.com
Pronounced N-view, this is a freeware web authoring system running the FrontPage and Dreamweaver lane. It provides first class integrated web file management and good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing capabilities. An uncomplicated interface, decent publishing controls, tabbed editing, spell checking, etc. are some of its true virtues. Newbies, please note.

Keynote
http://sourceforge.net/projects/keynote/
Keynote is a powerful, flexible, multi-featured, tabbed notebook with a tree-based interface. A file can contain any number of notes which appear as separate tabs--and each tab can hold its own tree of subnotes! So you can create only one file, jot multiple notes inside it and make it a three-dimensional notebook; i.e. multi-level, nested pages within a single note. Keynote supports rich formatting, hyperlinks, images, macros, and even Blowfish or Idea encryption. Wah!

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
www.ultimatebootcd.com
UBCD4Win is a bootable CD download bristling with software that can help you repair/restore/diagnose most computer glitches. It contains a mind blowing assortment of tools and utes for almost every conceivable Windows requirement, ranging from applications and antivirus software to tools for disk and partition management, diagnostics, compression, recovery, network, passwords, shell features, system information, and stress test/benchmarking etc. All software included in UBCD4Win is based on a "pre-install" CD environment.

Crypt Edit
www.woundedmoon.org/win32/ce/cedit.html
A rather ancient multi-document word processor with enhanced cryptography features. It saves to several formats, encrypts/decrypts binary files with compression, creates desktop shortcuts for documents, inserts OLE-objects and pictures. It includes an e-mail client with an address book, spelling checker, built-in clipboard viewer, various converters, character map, autoformat tool and all kinds of jazz. Most thrilling replacement for WordPad if nothing else.

MP3Gain
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net
Sick of thumbing the volume buttons each time you play a load of MP3s? Get an MP3 normaliser like MP3Gain. This adjusts MP3 files so that they all play at a more or less even volume. Allegedly, MP3Gain does not reply on peak normalization, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. No re-encoding is involved, the adjustment is lossless and there is no drop in audio quality. Whoopie!

Loopnote
www.loopnote.com
It is a new discovery and I haven't spent time with it. But it sounds interesting so you can sample it along with me. Loopnote is multi-channel notification service over four communication mediums--RSS, e-mail, SMS, and IM. Seems a neat way to keep people in your circle "in the loop" about events, happenings in your life, and other info you want to feed your friends and associates--selectively or en masse.

JDiskReport
www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html
A very handy way to glean what is eating up your hard disk. This tool analyses your disk and presents stats in the form of easy to understand overview charts and tables. It provides different “perspectives” about your disk drives: Absolute and relative sizes, size distribution, distribution of modification dates, and distribution of types. Each perspective has a pie chart, a bar chart, and a details table. It also collates a list of 100 largest, oldest, and newest files.

Gaming Secrets Revealed

How to cheat in games.

This week I am going to play a Narad Muni cum Shakuni Mama cum Chugglie Chacha. That is, slip into the choga of a conniving old bad baba, do a bit of idhar-ki-udhar by carrying tales, and tell you dirty secrets that shouldn’t be told. That’s right, I am going to be the devil’s advocate and reveal a few clandestine details about Windows gaming and teach you how to cheat.

Gaming cheats are hidden codes that enable you to fraud your way through in a game—and make winning easier. And yes, almost all games have cheat codes. To activate these codes, you need execute a sequence of keystrokes, commands and/or special moves. They are usually built into the game by the game developers and are always hidden. The real purpose behind cheat codes is not to make winning easier for the player but to help game developers and beta testers “jump” certain levels while testing. These codes are not officially documented and disclosed to the aam janta. Generally, they are either surreptitiously “leak” out, “cracked” by avid gamers, or intentionally disclosed by developers themselves---especially when a newer version of the game is on the shelves. Now and again bugs in a game also permit players to exploit loop holes and attain “supernatural gaming abilities”.

If you are looking for the dhokha kunji to a particular game, you can go Googling. Or mail me. Over here, we’ll make a full disclosure on some Windows XP’s default games. But first heed this: I am issuing a spoiler warning right here, right now. Game cheats ruin the pleasure of gaming. Forever. If you are stuck at level or can’t solve a game, hunt up some tips and tricks, or even download a “game trainer” to hold you hand. Avoid cheats as they quite wreck the challenge, entertainment value, and sheer gleeful satisfaction of gaming. Believe me, it takes a lot of will power to play a game without deploying a cheat code once you know the easy way out. So if you don’t want the fun of your games to be eternally blighted, don’t read on (and condemn me to eternal damnation thereupon). Mogambo-minded and other badmash log, don your sly look, grin forth and follow me...

FreeCell

• Want to try a couple of secret game modes in FreeCell? In the game menu, first choose Select Game. Then key-enter “-1” or “-2” (without the quote marks) to activate these two hidden game modes.
• Fed up of a game and think there is no solution in sight, use this magic mantra for instant victory: Hold ++ down during the game. When you are asked if you want to “Abort, Retry or Ignore?”, pick Abort, and then move any card. Its winabad all the way!

Pinball

• To run Pinball in test mode, key “hidden test” in at the start of a new ball. You won’t get a notification for this but you can now left-click the mouse button and drag the ball around and explore the landscape. Good one for newbies.
• Here’s superb little skillful trick to keep your scoreboard ticking. Launch a ball partly up the chute, past the third yellow light bar so it falls back down and bag 75,000 points each time. (Sigh... Wish we could find something like this for the Indian cricket team as well.) The six yellow light bars along the chute are worth the following:

First: 15,000 points
Second: 30,000 points
Third: 75,000 points
Fourth: 30,000 points
Fifth: 15,000 points
Sixth: 7,500 points

• Havaldar, instant promotion mangta? Type “rmax” (no quotes) in a new game to go up the ranks.
• To activate the Gravity Well, type “gmax” at the start of a new game.
• You can get extra balls and prolong your pinballing by typing “1max” at the beginning of a new ball.
• To pocket an unlimited set of balls, type “bmax” at the start of a new ball. You won’t get any notification to the effect though each time you lose a ball, a new ball will keep materializing till kingdom come from the yellow wormhole. One catch: If you activate this cheat, no other trickery will work.
  

Solitaire

• Frustrated with you game and still yearning to win? Press ++2. And win instantly!
• If you are stumped in Draw Three game and want to cheat your way to success, press ++ while drawing a new card. Instead of drawing three cards you will only pull out one.
  

Bhai saab (and your sister folk), all these are tried and tested (and re-tested) cheats. So don’t hurl your gaaali-galoch my way. If something doesn’t work for you, seems your PC is protected from the dark forces of cheating by a lucky charm/divine blessing/version mismatch/ham-handedness/your pudden-head (tick all that apply). Desist therefore and detour the wayward walks of wickedness, my child. Go chew on goodie-goodie gum drops instead…

Exploring XP

Capers and conjurations with the worlds’ best known OS.

Life would be much easier if we had its source code… And we could tweak and tune it according to our whims and wishes. Yet, most of us are always so much in awe of our PCs and its operating systems that we accept anything and everything exactly the way it is dished out to us. Shouldn’t be that way. We must learn to twist things around to suit your needs and temperament. So let’s try a few capers and conjurations in the computing worlds’ most popular OS, Windows XP.

Squeaky Clean Desktop
Two kinds of homo sapiens populate this earth. People who like to live life with a cluttered Windows desktop. And freaks like me who like to keep it squeaky clean. In fact, I don’t even let the four ubiquitous system desktop icons--My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places and Internet Explorer—mask even a pixel of my desktop’s Malika Sherawat wallpaper.

A little bit of tweaking is all it takes to make this bunch disappear (or appear). To add or subtract these icons from your desktop, right click on your desktop and select Properties. Then click the Desktop tab followed by Customize Desktop. Go to the General tab, check the appropriate boxes for the icons that you want visible on your desktop. Uncheck the boxes of the ones you want removed. Click on OK, once-twice… You want to trash the Recycle Bin as well? Write to me…

Now you are wondering how I manage to quick access the aforementioned icons when required, nahin? Well, I use a little magic genie called ObjectDock (www.stardock.com/products/objectdock) to open these, or launch other) thingies. Give the free-wala a dekko.

Upload-Download Speed Checks
If you’re always doing soch-vichar about the actual speed of your Internet connection at any given moment, here is a neat little site which let’s you can check your download and upload capabilities. Just zip across to www.speedtest.net and give your dabba an online velocity and drag test.

Squawking about this online business, do you know how to keep a tab on how long you have been online? Very simple haiga: Simply peer at the Windows Taskbar and double-click on the network connection icon roosting there. A pop-up window will display the duration of your current call/connection.

Lost Passwords
First let’s tackle how to cope with a forgotten/lost admin password. Reboot in safe mode by re-starting the computer and repeatedly pressing F8 as your PC starts up. In safe mode, click on Start and then on Run. In the Open field, type "control userpasswords2" (minus quotes.) This will give you access to all the User Accounts, including the administrator’s account. Click on Administrator under User Name and then on Reset Password. Type a fresh password in the New Password field, confirm it, and click on OK.

If you have lost or forgotten a user account password, life is even simpler. Log in as the computer administrator. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > User Accounts and reset the password for the required systems user account.

Quick Reboots
You have just installed a new app or upgrade. A pleasant looking pop-up pops up and orders you to restart you PC. You snarl and mentally mutter/audibly mumble an unmentionable expletive. Gaawd no, do I have to? Well, there’s no getting around that. But maybe next time you could try and remember this easy trick to speed up the entire reboot process. Click on the Start and then on Shutdown. Select Restart, hold the Shift key down, and then hit OK. This will get Windows XP restarted much faster.

Taskbar Tango
Here are some simple time and effort saving Windows taskbar tweaks meant to tweeze and squeeze more productivity out of your workings. Try ‘em and take what you like.

• If you want to quickly reset the time and/or date on you PC, double-click on the clock displayed in the Windows taskbar and reset as required.
• Need to clear the Documents list in the Start menu and records of other recently accessed gunk? Right click on the Windows taskbar and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. Select the Start Menu tab, click on Customize and hit the Clear button.
• If you want to use every square nanometre of your desktop, you can Autohide your taskbar and reclaim a narrow strip of real estate. Right click on the taskbar, select Properties and go to the Taskbar tab. Here, tick the Autohide box and click on OK. The taskbar will now disappear from the screen in normal viewing and only slide in when you move your mouse pointer to the edge of the screen.
• No devtas have ordained that the taskbar has to squat at the bottom of the screen for eternity. You can always dock your taskbar to the left, right, or even the top of the screen. Just drag and drop it to the side or top of the screen and see how it works for you. Sides are the best as you can view many more open apps at a glance. Try to karo…