Healthy Bytes
Freeware muscle for the health conscious. May be you know this, maybe you don’t. Our spinal cord is less then two feet in length and has diameter of a finger, but contains over 10 billion nerve cells. Our nose can detect 50,000 different smells and our eyes can detect more than 10,000,000 different colors. Our stomach produces a new lining every 3 days to avoid digesting itself in its own acid--acid that is strong enough to dissolve razorblades! Our sneeze can exceed 100 mph; our eye muscles can contract in less than 1/100th of a second; our thighbones are stronger than concrete; and our brain cells can hold 5 times more information than Encyclopedia Britannica… With 100 trillion cells, 35 million digestive glands, 5 million hair follicles, and 60,000 miles of blood vessels, the human body is an amazingly complex creation. To mind, monitor and minister this astounding formulation of organs, tissues, bones and multicellular eukaryote that we are made up of, here is a smart little set of freeware apps for the health conscious. Blood Pressure Trackerwww.soundtells.com
Designed in accordance with American Heart Association guidelines, this uncomplicated programme allows you to maintain an accurate record of your blood pressure levels. The program automatically saves systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, and time of measurement and provides all historical data. Functions include the ability to add comments, data export, and compatibility and syncing with mobile devices. Exertrackwww.exertrack.com
This exercise performance management system allows you to create your exercise sets and schedules, update and modify these routines, and track your progress. It connects to the Exertrack Network to update your information, periodically analyse your performance, and get you advice on how and when to change and tweak your training to achieve optimum results. First Aid Basicswww.healthp.info
A nifty little programme that provides basic information on first aid—from CPR, infarctions, pains, bites, stings, fractures, disjoints, to hypothermia and frostbites. There is a section on bandages, plasters, medicines and what to stock in a first aid kit. A segment on prevention details how to avoid injuries and infections. A video presentation on how to perform CPR and a glossary of common terms and links to useful websites is also included. Food Filewww.foodfileonline.com
This is actually an online food database and calorie counter. The nutritional information here has been compiled by the US Department of Agriculture, Nutrient Data Laboratory. Select a food; the proportion of fats, proteins and carbohydrates it contains are displayed, along with total calories and more detailed nutritional information. Also available: Food facts for people following low fat, low carb (Atkins/South Beach) or low sodium diets. Glucose Trackerwww.soundtells.com
An essential one for sugar daddies who need to keep track of their glucose levels regularly. Along with the glucose level the proggie automatically saves the relationship to your meal and time of measurement. The tracker can prove to be an excellent tool for longitudinal trends analysis of glucose levels in the long term and associated drug dosage adjustments. KiloCalchttp://kilocalc.inobe.qarchive.org
If you are on a food regimen, you need to count your calories constantly. KiloCalc connects you to multiple food databases on the Internet and helps you build and maintain a large, precise and complete nutritional database for yourself and your family. You can find and add nutritional values of food items as you please. A slider let’s you adjust food weight and recalculate nutritional values. Recipe Managerwww.nutritionanalyser.com/recipe_manager/recipe_manager.htm
This helps you organise your recipes and food and assists in analyzing nutritional values of your food, recipes and meals. It contains a 6,000 ingredient database for customisation of recipes and over 30 nutrient (micronutrients, minerals and vitamins) values for analysis. No butter chickan or vada paus of course. Recipes 3000www.yourfamilysoftware.comAnother one for the belly, though nothing really scrumptious. Here you can browse, print and search some 5,500 free recipes along and add and edit your own creations. You can create an unlimited number of recipe books and also import concoctions you find on the Net. The Runner's Logwww3.telus.net/public/whumeniu
Fond of jogging? Try raising the bar for your lower limbs further with an easy to use running log keeper like this one that provides a quick overview of your running. Highlights include multiple runs per day, up to five weeks at a glance of your runs, training schedules, distance (in km as well as miles) and shoe-usage tracking. Weight Trackerwww.soundtells.com
If you need to chart you weight loss/gain stats, download this. With oversized numbers for easy data entry, it displays the average and maximum weights day by day. Comments (like sickness etc.) can be easily entered via dropdown. All data can be exported to a text file or CSV file (comma delimited text file) for mailing, backup, archival, and editing.
Star Gazing
Surfing the best astronomy sites to unravel the mysteries of Deep Space. “Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on a map…”--Vincent Van Gogh, 1880
Some 126 years and eons of technological advancements hence, we are still asking ourselves the same question. And mind you, astronomy is one of the oldest sciences known to man. Even when humans roamed the earth as nomads, they read the stars--to tell time and the seasons, to move their herds and plan their harvests. Centuries before Columbus sailed the Blue guided by the Pole Star, ancient peoples of the Old World—Mediterranean civilisations, Babylonians, Egyptians—as the earliest seafarers on Planet Earth gazing at the heavens learnt to make it their principle navigation aid. This study and obsession with this Grand Majestic Clockwork of the Spheres and Celestial Space that surrounds us has resulted in much research, many tomes, and multiple websites. This week, nearly 400 years after Galileo first observed the heavens through a telescope, let us whiz by some of the best remote explorations of the cosmos that cyberspace has to offer. HubbleSitehttp://hubblesite.org
www.spacetelescope.org
Synonymous with the most incredible images of universe, the 11,110 kg, bus-sized, solar powered Hubble Telescope is the world's first space-based optical telescope. It hurtles past us every 97 minutes at a speed of 28,000 kmph (8 km/sec) in a low-Earth orbit (569 km altitude). Launched into outer space from the Discovery space shuttle in 1990--and named after astronomer Edwin Hubble--the telescope has a mission duration of 20 years. To savour some of the amazing images the Hubble beams home in the last three years of its lifetime, loads of exciting information (decanted from the 120 GB it transmits every week), and an understanding of the many mysteries of the universe, check out this wonderful site run by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Exploratorium - Top Tenwww.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/cool/astronomy.html
A mother lode site that leads you onto some of superb historical webpages about outer space research. Probe deep and you will come upon sites like NASA Jet Propulsion Labs quest for another Earth, PlanetQuest(http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm), Amazing Space Explorations (http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/index.shtml), Solar Folklore (http://solar-center.stanford.edu/folklore/folklore.html) and lots of fascinating information on phenomena, myths and legends. Spacewww.space.com
Our universe was born a “big bang” some 13.7 billion years ago. Scientists believe that if all the events in the history of the universe until now were squeezed into 24 hours, the Earth wouldn’t form until late afternoon and humans would have existed for only 2 seconds. You’ll learn about all this as well as space flights, space views, night skies, space tech etc. at this awesome site. Bookmark it as a must visit--even if you are just a wannabe space buff. Astronomy Blinklistwww.blinklist.com/tag/astronomy
A super duper listing of the newest hottest, and most happening astronomy websites. You find links on everything astronomical--from Sunita Williams adventures aboard the space shuttle, to what doomed the Mars probe, to current dope on meteor showers, to animations on the formation of the galaxies, to websites on black holes, to astronomy software and online ware and planetariums, to some neat astro blogs. Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006
A collection of beautiful space imagery on astronomer, teacher, lecturer and all-around science junkie, Phil Plait’s blog. The images have been scoped from NASA (www.nasa.gov), APOD (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod), the ESA (www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html), BAUT (www.bautforum.com), and dozens of professional and amateur websites. Other pages on the site are devoted to “airing out myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics”. Will help rub star dust out of your bewildered eyes. What is out there? Where did it come from? What does it all mean? Point you’re your little browser to these get a hint of the astounding cosmic concert playing all around us. It is quite coherent, yet quite incomprehensible. Like this little piece of verse by a little 10-year old called Marvin Mercer:My heart trembles like a poor leaf,The planets whirl in my dreams.The stars press against my window,I rotate in my sleep.My bed is a warm planet. Other Great Lodestarshttp://socrates.berkeley.edu/~akerr/astrowebsites.html
http://www.worldbestwebsites.com/science.htm
http://www.astronomylinks.biz/
The Innovation Mantra
Adapting, evolving, innovating… Freeware grows up. Ever heard of the term “bat walking”? Well, it is a nocturnal activity indulged in by bug-eyed humanoid insomniacs and batty naturalists scouting for bats (those nasty looking winged mammals of the Chiropetra order). Instead of binoculars, the bat walker breed carry high-frequency listening devices to monitor their subjects' echolocation activities. I find myself congenitally very similar to bat walkers in my nocturnal routines. Only I equip myself with a high-bandwidth Internet locomotion contraption to get a fix on the IP location of innovative and adaptive technological coding activity across various latitudes. Here are a few of my recent discoveries… Democracy Playerhttp://participatoryculture.org
www.getdemocracy.com
DP is a new wave desktop app for watching internet TV. A free and open source programme, it improves and enhances the video over the Internet experience by letting you subscribe to video RSS feeds, podcasts, or video blogs, or explore free Net TV channels. It allows you to download and save video from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video etc. You can watch your video downloads full screen, one after the other by arranging them in a playlist in a single app. Touted as the only player you need on your PC, DP plays QuickTime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID etc. formats. It permits you to browse and organise your video collection as well as generate playlists. Wah bhai wah! Everything—including the interface—is quite hunky dory, but watch what the narrow nostrils of your bandwidth permit! Hamachihttp://www.hamachi.cc
If you want to set up a personal little Virtual Private Network of your own, this is it. (A VPN is a private network that employs public telecommunication infrastructure but maintains privacy via protocols and security procedures.) An awesomely tidy piece of code, Hamachi sits unobtrusively in the background and manages secure (AES-256 encrypted) connections between a group of PCs that you approve. Available for Windows XP, 2000 and Linux. Remote desktop dalliances, file sharing fellowships, global gaming… that’ll be a good VPN beginning. Surprisingly, you don’t have to get your noddy neural noodle in a twist with gibberish like IPSec, SSH, SSL, PPTP while setting this up… Hamachi requires virtually zero configuration and is up and running in minutes! The graphical user interface is easy to use and a first-timers wizard explains how to get things done. Go man, go… StrokeItwww.tcbmi.com/strokeit
Nope, this is not about petting your fur-faced (Tommy, Tipsy, Tipu?) canine companion. StrokeIt is “mouse gesture” recognition software. Mouse gestures are uncomplicated symbols that you "draw" on your computer screen using your mouse. This software identifies the gesture and performs the "action" associated with that gesture, thereby providing you shortcuts and saving you the time/effort (and the carpal tunnel syndrome) of wading-clicking through menus. For each gesture recognised, StrokeIt executes a user-defined set of commands within the active application. It is pre-programmed with over 80 gestures for the more ubiquitous programs like Photoshop, Firefox, Internet Explorer, WinRAR etc. But trust me you can easily train it to recognize mouse gestures for any software—as well as customise it to your suit your needs. Songbirdwww.songbirdnest.com
Find that an odd name? Then what say you for its developer’s moniker--Pioneers of the Inevitable! But that’s beside the point. Songbird is a rather radical desktop Web media player, browser cum jukebox. It integrates your local and Web music libraries into one amalgamated audio player. Yes, you can play audio files directly off the Web and add them to you playlists as well. Some of you will find it quite akin to iTunes, but it is much more mature and much faster. Some of you will find it quite akin to Winamp in supporting extensions and skins (or should we say feathers?), but it is in quite a different league. Just try the search-and play-on-the-spot feature and you will love it. Gripe zone? Stability.
The Coolest Gadgets of 2006
Nintendo DS Litewww.nintendo.com/channel/dsEven as heavy metal gaming consoles like the Xbox and the PS3 begin to smother our sense and sensibilities, the sleek and diminutive Nintendo's DS Lite stands out and stands tall. With its handheld portability, WiFi-enabled gameplay, touch screen interface, a wide array of games, Game Boy Advance backward compatibility, dual screens, and in-built microphone, the NDS is sure the coolest gaming doodad ever to ensconce in your pocket. And what with an Opera web browser in the offing, you'll whistling Dixie in cyber space soon as well with this one. Logitech Wireless DJ Music Systemhttp://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/US/EN,crid=2653,contentid=11828This amazing little thingie allows you to stream (and control) the digital music squatting in your PC to your stereo, sitting virtually anywhere your house. MP3s, WMAs, iTunes, Internet radio waves, podcasts jabber—whatever. Its “long-range remote” abilities let you browse through your PC’s entire music medley on its backlit LCD screen--even see what's playing, or lined up for the ear drums. And no, it doesn’t require a network snaking across your home to twiddle with the play, shuffle, volume or mute buttons on this one. Creative’s Zen Vision:Mwww.creative.com/products/mp3/zenvisionmWith all ears and eyeballs trained solely on the iPod, it is but natural for most of us to play possum to the Zen Vision:M. But hark this, here’s a very able MP3/video playing competitor to the Apple’s zing thing. Cos the 2.5 inch screens plays almost any type of video to throw at it, it makes great sound, shows excellent video, squeezes out more life than the iPod from its juice pack, plus features an FM tuner.. PDA functions, voice recording, big screen entertainment with a video out connection—yeah, it does all that too. Nokia N95
www.nokia.com/nseries/index.html#homeIt is very tough not to be intimidated by Nokia’s current flagship. A unique two-way slide form factor, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss optic, auto-focus cam, DVD-like quality video, WLAN, 3D stereo sound, 4GB hard drive of internal storage, TV out, 60 MB of RAM, a microSD card slot for expansion. The acronyn alphabet soup support includes: HSDPA, 3.5G, 3.6Mbps download speeds, UMTS, GPRS, DGE, SIP, GPS... Obviously there is Bluetooth, infrared, USB connectivity. Total KO. No adjectives required. Sony PlayStation 3www.playstation.comThe ultimate next-gen gadget for hi-def gaming. It plays Blu-ray movies alongwith standard DVDs, does WiFi, figures a 60GB hard drive, has a PSP-like user-friendly interface, no external power supply, HDTV support, built-in memory card readers, is backward-compatible with PS2 and PS1 games, online play is free, Bluetooth support for wireless controllers and accessories is acomin’. At almost 50,000 INR you may need to break quite few piggy banks to own this. But look at it as just collateral damage.
