Tour-de-France tracked by Google Street View

Tour-de-France, made popular in USA by Lance Armstrong's multiple wins, is now being tracked by Google by using Street View this summer. Check out the news here

GPS on a commercial flight

Ok that's me on a commercial flight with my GPS on. Notice the PDA is on flight mode, so it's legal and responsible, I guess.

Chatting with God online !!

Ever wanted to have a tete-a-tete with God and never got around to doing it. Here is your chance to get online with him and do it right now. He is waiting to hear from you here

The Flip Ship, actually flips !!

The FLIP (FLoating Instrument Platform) Ship actually flips to study wave sciences. It studies the way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals are just a few of the subjects studied using the amazing FLIP.

The living quarters are designed to work vertically as well as horizontally as can be seen from the pic above. Check it out here..

Secret of eternal happiness !!

Underwater treadmill. What next !!

Some freak company called Hydrophysio dreams up an underwater treadmill for the hydrophiles. Not only does this contraption give you the extra exercise it purports, but also gives the much needed wash to your smelly socks.
Check it out here

Capitol Buzz Words

Have you ever wondered what they are talking about on the Capitol today. No more. Check out the latest buzz word on the Capitol here

Dailymotion, the French 'Youtube' wannabe goes HD

Dailymotion announces capability to add High Definition videos on their YouTube like service and pips YT at it.

Wonder how much bandwidth the Video sites will gobble up in the years to come. Check it out here

Phoenix finds some pepsi and coke on Mars!!

Phoenix Mars lander finds some evidence that there is Pepsi and Coke warring on Mars, in a pit of ancient ice. The picture included proves (above) that there has been at least one incident of Pepsi and Coke dueling on Mars in the last 38.3 Million years. The report says that there could be a slight error in the year and it could be within 3 days off mark from 38.3 million years...

This is being cited as one of the most earth shattering....errrr..... Mars shattering dicoveries in recent times and Martians are sending their armies, emails and text messages to the Phoenix crew of '0' to show their compassion for the Earthlings and their soda wars.

On it's further leg of the journey, Phoenix is moving on to Jupiter to look for traces of chewing gum and used underwear.

Yada Yada..

Such a waste of effort....really....

My first flower pic

Here is a picture of a flower I took at home using the camera, and it is almost decent, isn't it? Spy the camera shy fly, hiding behind the stamen..

Given the fact that I never got round to owning a decent camera, I finally did manage to get my hands on a prouser Canon SX100 IS, with 8 MP and 10X zoom and a macro of min 1 cm.



And here is another one I took using time exposure of some candles on my table. Would you say this is cool or what...

Check out the originals here

SD or SDHC, what's the difference?

Difference is that while SD cards specify the top speed, SDHC cards specify the guaranteed, consistant speed, and the difference is akin to the PMPO and the RMS values in Music Systems. This chart here lists the performance of some commonly found cards.

Jumbo Electronics Experience in Gurgaon

Today, I walked into a Jumbo store to pick up a battery charger for my Digicam. They had a Sony charger and it was marked at Rs. 975/-. It suited my purpose and I decided to buy it. Wait. Not yet.

The attendant asked me to pay up, which I did with 2 crisp Rs. 500/- notes I got from an ATM recently. I waited for about 10 minutes for 3 different attendants who fidgeted with the register, and probably did not know how to operate the machine. One of them then ran to the other and then another and finally (Phew !) they came up with a bill. Thank god for that, and for my good mood. That was not the end, since they had only Rs. 20/- change and could not find another Rs. 5 they owed me. They frantically searched their pockets and made me wait another 5 minutes before one of them disappeared and reappeared with the change, and with no apology for making me wait.



It was then that they realized that they needed to give me some kind of a 'bag' to carry the merchandise. So now the 3 attendants started searching for a 'bag' and finally came up with one that was big enough to carry a 25 inch LCD , and all I had was a small, pocket sized battery charger.

No 'thank you', no 'sorry to keep you waiting', no nothing.

I don't blame the 3 attendants, since they seemed very young and probably untrained or under-trained for the job.

Later I searched on the net and found the same charger on the 'Sony' website and the charger was in fact Rs. 975/- MRP. Wow!! I didn't know malls still sold at MRP; I thought they sold way below MRP because of the volume discounts they got. I didn't feel cheated, or looted, just unimportant as a customer for 'Jumbo'.

I hope someone at Jumbo Electronics, Ambiance Mall, Gurgaon reads this post and takes corrective action.

Mazda's Motonari 2057

If there is one car which will probably make you rise from your grave, it's got to be this one. When, or rather, if you ever get the chance to get into this Mazda mean machine, you will be given a special suit that will help you to feel the road. It uses millions of tiny actuators that will ultimately provide electric stimulation to different muscles depending on road conditions. All that we hope is not to get into a high-speed collision! Now that's expansion of thought into the fiction world, but yes we are getting there..

Phew, finally Honda Hybrid's in India

Finally, and not too late, the Honda family decided to bring the Civic Hybrid to India in the 1.3 L avatar. Not bad for a start, and I see the whole industry following suit soon. Check out the news here

Fake bills at 'Custom Receipt Maker'

If you are an honest person and still need to make some bills for the sake of making bills, please go ahead and do so at www.customreceipt.com , and while you are at it, check out the rest of this blog and leave a comment or two. :)

Online bubble-wrap for the addicted

If you have an addiction for puncturing bubbles on a bubble wrap sheet, don't despair, there is hope for you yet here

100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Digital Data Storage Disks using Nanotech

Have you ever dream of 100 terabyte of data per 3.5-inch disk? New patented innovation nanotechnology from Michael E. Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation, makes it real.

Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals, which offers the possibility of controlling and manipulating light within a UV/Deep Blue frequency of 1 nm to 400 nm. Read on here

Undiscovered, unfound, uncontacted, untouched tribals

This tribe of Indians of the Ethno-Environmental Protected Area along the Envira river, in the Brazilian state of Acre, were photographed during a flight in May 2008. They are challenging the chooper from where the pic was taken with their bows and arrows and have their bodies painted red. Quite a topic for channels like discovery and national geographic to make a documentary on.. Check it out here and here

Apple iPhone 3G coming July 11

Smarter, Faster and half the price at $200, it is the talk of the town once again. Comes with 3G, onboard GPS and Microsoft Exchange, GPRS, GSM, EDGE, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, UMTS and also be able to allow 3G video talk with your friends. Now is that a killer or what? Check it out here and here

"It`s the first time I`ve really changed my career since I was 17 years old,"

Thus spake Bill Gates as he officially announced his retirement from a Full-Time role at Microsoft at the annual Microsoft TechEd conference.
His talk was mainly a relatively stoic, standard Gates keynote that included references to how much the industry`s changed since he co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen more than 30 years ago. Read on here

That kind of makes me want to repeat the famous 11 rules of life he recited at a school speech some time back. They go like:-

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

If you can read this - Thank a teacher.

Google Launches Gmail Labs

Google has just launched Gmail labs and if you are on Gmail then you might have probably noticed a link right on top which says 'New! Gmail Labs'.

Log in and check it now, if you haven't already.

And what you need to do to get to the labs is go to settings and click 'labs'. And now you can try some features which are not robust enough to go online yet.

Have a ball.

Linkedin hit by 419 scammers, Social Service message

Be Warned !! 419 scammers are those people who send you mails about transferring large amounts of money they either found in an unclaimed bank account, or their 'deposed' uncle left in their custody.

In either case, it is a dangerous scam and some people have been hounded and even killed. It's simple, they work on your greed. If you fall for the trap, then that is it. People from many countries are known to be 419 scammers but the term originated from Nigeria where there is a penal code or something numbered 419 for embezzlement. Probably hence the term. Read about 419 here.

Now Linkedin, the famous professional networking site is facing threat from 419 scammers as warned here
" Users of the professional-oriented social networking site LinkedIn are being warned that scam artists are using the site to nab lucrative bank account information from naive victims, say security experts." by this news article here

Drivemocion - Telling the tail gater

A display device to communicate with those trailing you on the road, with the middle finger sign taking included. Check it out here

Anti-gropers Jacket packed with an 80 KV jolt.

The No-Contact Jacket is a wearable defensive jacket created to aid women in their struggle for protection from violence. When activated by the wearer, 80,000 volts of low amperage electric current pulses just below the surface shell of the entire jacket. This exo-electric armor prevents any person from unauthorized contact with the wearer's body. If an assailant were to grab hold of the wearer the high voltage exterior would interrupt their neurological impulses which control voluntary muscle movement. The jacket is non-lethal and I would recommend one for all those women who use public transport and have to deal with perverts. Check out the website here.

Google Android Demo by Steve Horowitz

if Android is any where close to what this demo shows, I am getting it for sure. Already drooling over the I/O.