How to Run Google Talk in Firefox Sidebar...

Recently, Google has launched a new way to use your favorite instant messaging software, Google Talk. Yap, you guessed it right, I am talking about the Google Talk Gadget - a web-based module that you can add to your Google Personalized Homepage. The Google Talk Gadget is clearly more usable than the stand-alone GTalk desktop client or the floating AJAX version in GMail. But you will be thrilled to know that you can even put your Google Talk client in your Firefox sidebar so it always stays in the foreground no matter what website you are on currently.




In order to add Google Talk in your Firefox sidebar, you have just to do the following simple steps:

1. First, open this page with your Firefox Browser, then Right click on the following link and select ‘Bookmark this Link’: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

   
   

2. Now click on Bookmarks button from your Firefox menubar and then select ‘Organize Bookmarks...’ - your Firefox Bookmarks Manager window will be popped up.

   
   

3. Navigate to the link, you have just bookmarked in step-1, from the right pane of your bookmarks manager, select it and then click on the Properties button at the top of the window.

   
   

4. Now tick the checkbox from the properties window that says ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ as shown in the following screen-shot:

   
   

- Just open your created Bookmark whenever you want to run your Google Talk client in your Firefox Sidebar and enjoy chatting with your Google Talk buddies while surfing in the net using Firefox.

Sony Develops Film-Thin, Bending Display

In this photo released by Sony Corp., the company's new 0.3 millimeter (0.01 inch) display is shown at Atsugi Technology Center in Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo May 21, 2007. In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all, a razor-thin display that bend like paper while showing full-color video. (AP Photo/Sony Corp., HO)


(AP) -- In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all - a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.

Sony Corp. released video of the new 2.5-inch display Friday. In it, a hand squeezes a display that is 0.3 millimeters, or 0.01 inch, thick. The display shows color images of a bicyclist stuntman and a picturesque lake.

Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that's so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough.

Sony said it has yet to decide on commercial products using the technology.

"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."

Tatsuo Mori, an engineering and computer science professor at Nagoya University, said some hurdles remained, including making the display bigger, ensuring durability and cutting costs.

But he said the display's pliancy is extremely difficult to imitate with liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels - the two main display technologies now on the market.

"To come up with a flexible screen at that image quality is groundbreaking," Mori said. "You can drop it, and it won't break because it's as thin as paper."

The new display combines two technologies: Sony's organic thin film transistor, which is required to make flexible displays, and organic electroluminescent display.

Other companies, including LG. Philips LCD Co. and Seiko Epson Corp., are also working on a different kind of "electronic paper" technology, but Sony said the organic electroluminescent display delivers better color images and is more suited for video.

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi has said a film-like display is a major technology his company is working on to boost its status as a technological powerhouse.

In a meeting with reporters more than a year ago, Chubachi boasted Sony was working on a technology for displays so thin it could be rolled up like paper. He had predicted that the world would stand up and take notice.

Some analysts have said Sony, which makes Walkman portable players and PlayStation 3 video game machines, had fallen behind rivals in flat-panel technology, including Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea and Sharp Corp. of Japan.

But Sony has been marking a turnaround under Chubachi and Chief Executive Howard Stringer, the first foreigner to head Sony, by reducing jobs, shuttering unprofitable businesses and strengthening its flat TV offerings.

Cheap laptops project for poor countries draws big competition

A program to provide millions of low-cost laptops to students in poor countries is set to start production in September even as commercial competitors prepare to offer even cheaper models.

The idea from Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, who proposed the project at the World Economic Forum in Davos two years ago, has moved closer to fruition.

Negroponte sees the computers, to be sold in bulk to governments of certain countries, as a linchpin of education and development.

The non-profit organization he formed -- One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) -- attracted support of leading businesses and institutions and will start production later this year, Michail Bletsas, chief connectivity officer at OLPC, told AFP.

The laptop is being made by the Chinese firm Quanta: the goal is for Quanta to manufacture 40,000 laptops a month beginning in September, then step up production to 400,000 per month by the end of the year.

"OLPC would like to manufacture at least three million units in the first round of production," he said.

But OLPC could not say which countries were planning to order the laptops, spokeswoman Jackie Lustig said.

Volume shipments to developing nations were planned for later this year, she said.

"OLPC is in talks with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Nigeria, Thailand, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda and many other countries -- but nothing definite just yet," she said.

The new computers will not carry the symbolic price tag of 100 dollars, at least not right away. The first models will cost 175 dollars and OLPC hopes the price will come down to 100 dollars by 2009.

Negroponte wanted to have an innovative, specifically tailored laptop -- called the XO -- that would be very small, hardy, user-friendly and use the free Linux operating system, not Microsoft's Windows, which dominates the world market.

Sponsors of the project include chip maker AMD; RedHat, which is supplying the operating system; Google, eBay, and NewsCorp.

OLPC dropped plans for the laptop to have a manual charger to cope with any lack of electricity, but has built in several features such as a camera, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections, and a one gigabyte of memory.

The association just distributed several hundred of the laptops to students in Nigeria, Thailand and Uruguay with the hope of eventually shipping millions to the countries. However, no orders came.

The sharpest critic of the project is the world's leading chip maker Intel, which has dismissed the XO as a "gadget" and launched a rival commercial product.

Intel's "Classmate," manufactured in Taiwan, costs 285 dollars and the price will drop to 200 dollars at the end of the year, Intel spokeswoman Agnes Kwan told AFP.

Several thousand units have been shipped to Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria, she said, and the target is 100,000 laptops by December. And Pakistan has ordered 700,000 for 2009, she noted.

Aghast at this commercial rivalry, OLPC's Negroponte said recently that "Intel should be ashamed of itself." He accused the US microprocessor giant of selling the laptops below cost to destroy the XO, a charge Intel has denied.

Soon OLPC will have to contend with even more aggressive Indian competitors. The group Novatium just brought out a basic "NetPC" for 80 dollars.

The market for the poor has become so enticing that Microsoft is preparing to launch a scaled-down software bundle of Windows and Office for three dollars for qualifying governments.

A bright spot for OLPC is UNICEF, the UN children's fund, which is putting its education content on all the laptops shipped.

On a sunny spring day in New York last week, two UNICEF officials were outdoors testing several of the small green-and-white laptops.

"If millions of these are in kids' hands, it will be a very good way to develop our info for them and to hear back from kids in the developing world to know what their needs are," said Erica Kochi, a spokeswoman.

UNICEF is sending 94 teens from several countries to Heiligendamm, Germany, on June 1 to use the XOs to prepare proposals to present to the leaders of the Group of Eight leading nations meeting there, she said.

"We are using the XO during the summit because these machines connect between them even if there is no Internet," she explained.

Google launches search translation service

SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Wednesday launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue.

A beta version of Google's "cross-language information retrieval" feature is online at http://translate.google.com/translate_s.

The service "in effect, will make the Web universal", Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet search giant's campus in Mountain View, California, last week.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages," Manber said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."

Google's new software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches of the Internet and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese. The service is to eventually be expanded to include other languages.

"Here at Google, part of our mission is to make the world's information universally accessible to our users, regardless of differences such as language," the company said in a release.

"We are happy to announce the arrival of a new cross-language search feature that allows users across the world to find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own native language."

Google revamps its Internet search

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California : Google went live on Wednesday with a revamped Internet search engine that integrates video, books, maps and news into "universal" results to online queries.

Google spent two years transforming the architecture of its search engine to broaden results to include web pages that one had to previously seek out in separate search categories such as "photos" and "news."

"It's all the stuff on the web," said Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer.

"The assumption is that if it is there and it is findable on the web we should get it."

The "Universal Search" platform delivers more comprehensive results and raises the profiles of Google features such as online books and video, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

"In a way it is a doubled reward because it gives more exposure to our other features such as books," Brin said after the launch was announced at the company's campus in Mountain View, California.

"It's a little bit of a shame that until now they were under-utilised." Mayer announced the search engine overhaul at a one-day "searchology" conference focused on Google's evolution since it launched in 1998 and some of its plans for the future.

"We certainly feel we are Number One and are broadening the gap," Brin said when asked about how Google was doing against rival Internet search firms.

"We are very happy with the progress we have been making."

Navigational links atop search-result pages let users "drill down" to particular types of information if they wish to focus exclusively on specific categories such as news, according to Mayer.
- AFP/de

Check out Google's latest ideas

Google on Wednesday also launched a website where Internet users can peek at features the world's most popular online search engine is experimenting with.

The website at www.google.com/experimental shows tests Google is doing with services such as generating time-line charts and maps to put search results into chronological or geographical context.

People are able to sign up to take part in the Google experiments, Mayer said. [Mayer is Google's vice president of search products and user experience]

Google said "very soon" it will launch software that translates queries from any of a dozen languages into English, scours the Internet for relevant web pages and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

"That, in effect, will make the Web universal," Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing the "cross-language information retrieval" feature.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages. The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."

Google held firm that it is vigilant about respecting copyright material such as books, music and video and that it is keeping general, not personal, search data stored to protect the privacy of users.

And while Google is working to better organise the world's knowledge online, it insisted it is still leaving room for creative disorder.

"I think chaos is important in the right proportions," Brin said. "We have always run our company with about 20 percent chaos."
- AFP/de

Windows XP Service Pack 3.0: Wait no more…

We need Windows XP Service Pack 3.0 badly now. When you install a new XP system, after installing Service Pack 2.0, you will find over 60 more updates to install now. It was predicted that Service Pack 3.0 would be out sometime in 2006! But we are now almost at 2007 mid-year. Most of the ‘XP Service Pack 3.0 predictions’ were based on statements from Microsoft executives and the Windows Service Pack roadmap available on the Microsoft Site.

Microsoft initially hinted that XP Service Pack 3.0 could be released before Longhorn but very soon, Windows Vista became the top priority and Service Pack 3.0 development was pushed further back.

Service Pack 3.0 was planned as a regular bug fix release with no new features though there were rumors that Internet Explorer 7.0 and Windows Media Player 11.0 could be bundled with XP SP3. Unfortunately, nothing of this sort happened and Microsoft finally pushed XP Service Pack 3.0 to first half of 2008.

Now the next big question – “How to keep track of various security patches, updates and hotfixes that have been released by Microsoft since Windows XP Service Pack 2.0” debuted in August 2004?

While you can install Windows XP Service Pack 2.0 from the CD, connect the computer to the internet and turn on Windows Update so that all patches are automatically downloaded and installed, this is certainly not the best approach - imagine when your net connection breaks or you have to build 10 computers or you don't have internet at all??



Well, here's an easy installer package that will install every single Microsoft update on your XP Service Pack 2.0 computer. The program is called Autopatcher for XP and maintained by a group of Windows enthusiasts who update this program every month embedding new fixes that Microsoft released in the previous month. Like other standard Windows installers, Autopatcher also features a slick looking GUI and can be customized to install as much or as little as you please.

The most remarkable part of Autopatcher is that you don't have to restart your Windows machine after every update. With AutoPatcher, you can install critical patches offline, eliminating the risk of getting infected while using Windows Update.

More resources: Autopatcher Help , Autopatcher FAQ.

Disabling the ability for a computer to download

This tip is very useful for internet cafes and companies that need to set up computer terminals that don't allow customer to download any file from the Internet.

Follow the following steps :-
1) Click start Menu>Run
2) Type "Regedit" and press Enter
3) Go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre nt Version\Internet Setting\Zones\3
4) Double Click at "1803" and Change "Value Data is 3" then press OK

How to protect your computer from hackers

The internet in this day and age is fraught with all manner of dangers for your computer-there are viruses and worms to worry about, as well as all manner of spyware; there are identity thieves and con artists-but the most publicized danger on the internet has always been the hacker.

Hackers seem to be everywhere-at least, if you believe the advertisements-but there are a few simple steps that you can take to keep yourself safe from most of their attentions. They're not foolproof, by any means, but by following these steps, you can greatly reduce your vulnerability.

First, have a fully updated antivirus program-the well-known ones are Norton and McAfee, but a company called AVG has a good one that they'll let you have for free. While it doesn't specifically protect against hackers per se, many hackers have been known to look for infected computers to exploit for their own purposes.

Second, have a firewall. If you run windows XP, the built-in firewall may be enough. You'll want to restrict as much as you can, leaving only the openings that you absolutely need to use for your programs that communicate with the internet. A firewall will prevent a hacker from accessing many of the usual avenues used to exploit your computer.

Third, make sure to have the latest security updates distributed by the manufacturer of your operating system. It's often a hassle to have to keep updating the operating system, sometimes weekly, but it's necessary if you want to keep your computer properly safe; most of the ways that a hacker can get into your computer are through those same areas that the updates are used to patch.

Fourth, make sure to practice safe internet use: don't accept files from strangers; don't directly connect to anybody you don't already know and trust-direct connections reveal your IP, the 'address' of your computer, which is needed for them to know how to break in; don't run any programs that you aren't sure of the source. Use common sense, and this step shouldn't be too difficult.

Finally, if you have a friend who's adept with computers, see if you can have their help securing your computer, and checking up on it now and then to ensure that you have everything you need to keep your computer safe.

No computer is ever entirely safe from hackers-but you can take steps to keep the dangers to a minimum. All it requires is some common sense and some vigilance, making sure to keep up-to-date with all the news as it happens.

How to hide computer files that you don't want people to see

If your Windows Operating System is using NTFS file system, there is a more secure method to hide files, then setting the File Properties to Hidden.

This method hides a file by storing it in a stream file, and it works with any file type. Remember... to do this your hard drive must be formatted with NTFS, not FAT. To hide the file you will need to access the command prompt.
Windows 95/98/ME
     Start->Run->command
Windows 2000/XP/2003
     Start->Run->cmd

Let a.exe be the original file, and you want to hide it in b.txt
In your command prompt:
     type a.exe > b.txt:a.exe

This command types everything from the executable into a stream in b.txt called a.exe. The text file can be blank, and it will show up as 0 bytes. If anybody clicks on b.txt, it will appear empty, but the hidden file is there.

To get the file back type this:
     b.txt:a.exe > a.exe

This will take the hidden file out of the stream, and into a file called a.exe. There is no way anybody can find the file, unless they know which file it is hidden in, and the name of the stream you have hidden it in.

How to make money with your Ipod

Maybe you're listening to your iPod right now while surfing the net but that's not really very profitable, now is it? Who knew that the little piece of plastic you bought from Apple that keeps skipping and locking up actually has potential for putting some fun extra cash in your wallet.

#1 CREATE A PODCAST Got something on your mind that you think people want to hear about? Turn your iPod into a digital recorder with a universal Mic Adapter. If it's cool enough, maybe you'll get some sponsors or sell ads on your site.

#2 RECORD AN ALBUM Crank out the hottest new lo-fi indie record. You could use the line in on a mic adapter or plug into Belkin's new TuneStudio into using your iPod to record an album.

#3 BECOME A PUBLIC SPEAKER Pitch your project or give seminars by using your iPod for PowerPoint presentations using the software product ipresent it.

#4 DJ AT A CLUB OR HOUSEPARTY Well, it's not exactly DJing in my book since you aren't mixing but dueling iPod mixers have been around for awhile now and if you think you can bring the house down then by all means, shake your money maker.

#5 BE A BARTENDER Make the swankiest new martini or the perfect Long Island by downloading Pocket Bar & Grill and have instant access to 750 mix drink recipes.

Oh and chin up if you can't write a song or speak in public if your life depended on it. I suppose you could always sell your iPod on Ebay, Craigslist or to your funky smelling emo neighbor!

Windows Vista and XP Complete Codec Pack

I got numerous enquiries from people about audio and video codecs for Windows XP and a few for Windows Vista. Sometimes finding the right codec for a particular file can be tricky, and there are hundreds of dodgy codecs out there laced with malware. It's not safe out there!

Over on the MSFN forum, there's a download that contains a massive selection of codecs for Windows XP and Vista (32-bit and 64-bit versions). This package is very comprehensive and after installing it you shouldn't need to download another codec. You can download this massive codec package from one of these mirrors:

File Forum Beta News
Major Geeks
SoftPedia

It does not contain a media player, and it does not associates filetypes. With this package installed you will be able to use any media player (limited by the players capabilities) to play DVD's, movies and video clips such as quicktime, realmedia, avi, mpeg, Flv, swf, wmv, etc. Streaming video is supported in most web browsers. By default, you should not need to make any adjustments to enjoy your media content immediately.

Users have the ability to choose what is installed using the public redistributable and after an unattended install, you can select to remove specific portions without removing the entire package. Future releases will recognize previous releases and perform upgrade installations.