Project Ara: "Immortal" smartphone.......??

by Unknown


Project Ara is the most loved, but "adopted"(from Motorola Mobility), child of Google. It is an initiative by Motorola Mobility and later by Google's Android team that aims to develop a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. Project Ara has a goal to
Do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software.

To make it really simple to understand take it as a LEGO block game. You are free to use different parts of a mobile phone like the camera, RAM, ROM, processor, GPU, battery, etc. in any way and in any configuration and specification you want according to your need and greed. This in turn makes your phone Immortal, as whatever part of your phone dies out can be replaced with a new one.



See Also

Google's "Project Tango" - Future of Smartphones
Now tell me if you are feeling that the processor of your current mobile phone is not powerful enough to play certain games or lags while multi-tasking what can you do? In the current market scenario you have no other option than to get a completely new mobile phone and chuck the old one, which means spending extra bucks when you just need a new processor. This is where Project Ara kicks in. It gives you the freedom to replace the old slow processor(on any other part of the device) with a new one. This in turn saves your hard earned money and makes you feel like Captain Planet as you are also contributing in cutting down on e-waste as well. Ain't that cool?

And here is the even cooler thing, you don't have to just read about Project Ara but you can also be a contributor in its making. Yeah you read it right!
Google is inviting people across the globe to become Ara Scouts. Over the next 6 - 12 months, we'll be doing research to shape the direction of Project Ara. You can help by collaborating with us on special missions.
So you can register yourself over here

Now Google has planned to reach the 6 billion people of which 1 billion are the smartphone users and the rest are basic feature phone users. It has aimed to bring in the first Ara kit at around a price tag of 50 USD.

Now let's see how this Project Ara comes out to be, fingers crossed. 

Gmail now more secure than ever - Fully encrypted

by Unknown


Google announced on their official blog that they will now be using encrypted connections with gmail.
You may believe that they had been using https for quite some time now, but now Each and Every connection that is established when you use gmail will be encrypted both directly and internally on google's own servers.

Starting today, Gmail will always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email. Gmail has supported HTTPS since the day it launched, and in 2010 we made HTTPS the default. Today's change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you're using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet.

This is a great news from google as having encrypted connections everywhere also stops any kind of snooping (ahem NSA).

source: http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of-email-security.html

New in Firefox 28, Youtube 4K video, Web notification

by Unknown

Firefox released version 28
Here are the list of changes with all the details:

VP9 video decoding introduced
VP8 is already used in WebM video formats, commonly in YouTube's html5 video players.
VP9 videos are smaller than VP8 video (because of upto 50% less bitrate) while having the same quality.
VP9 will be used in YouTube's 4K video streaming, so who ever has got that God like internet speeds can check it out.

You can test if your web browser supports VP9 here
http://base-n.de/webm/VP9%20Sample.html

Mac users now have Notification center support for web notifications
Pic from http://9to5mac.com/

Horizontal HTML5 volume control
Firefox 27

Firefox 28



Opus audio codec support for WebM
With VP9 on video, Opus has been introduced for audio. It allows lower bitrate (therefore smaller file size) and lower latency audio.
You can hear the benefits of opus here:
https://auphonic.com/blog/2012/09/26/opus-revolutionary-open-audio-codec-podcasts-and-internet-audio/

SPDY protocol support for version 2 was dropped in favour of version 3

See Also

What does firefox do to secure my browsing?

Developer related changes:

MathML has partial support for mathvariant attribute
MathML allows Web browsers to render Math experssions. MathML is only supported by Firefox.

mathvariant will allow typography such as bold, italic, bold-italic, monospace, sans-serif etc. on the expressions.

Multiline Flexbox support
Flexbox allows a Web developer to clearly organise a webpage layout without any hacks.
Though Firefox supported flexbox from older versions, having more than one rows was an issue.
Firefox 28 will fix that.
Firefox 27

Firefox 28
Full detail and working of flexbox:
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

Security Fixes
https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html

Firefox was going to feature a metro UI for Windows 8 users, but it was dropped few days ago due to the lack of users.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/03/14/metro/

See Also

The best firefox addons to Turbo Boost your browsing this 2014

Drink Until U Livr!!

by Unknown


Update: Livr turned out too good to be true http://gizmodo.com/the-livr-hoax-everybodys-favorite-new-drunkbro-app-is-1538595679
All those people who love to get high and have a time of their lives, but at the same time prefer not to reveal it to their family members, this app is just what you were waiting for.

Named Livr, this app only opens when you are drunk. 

 

Thanks to the help of a mini-breathalyser that plugs in to your smartphone, Livr can only be accessed if user's blood alcohol content scores above a certain, as-yet-undetermined level. Thanks to the help of a mini-breathalyser that plugs in to your smartphone, Livr can only be accessed if user's blood alcohol content scores above a certain, as-yet-undetermined level.

Once the users have made past this biometric safeguard, or in other words their BAC(blood alcohol content)  is way past the legal limit, the app and the social network opens providing a wide number of features at your disposal. And now the fun begins....



  • Users can start things off with a crowd-sourced "Truth or Dare game", where strangers post up challenges and reward others with points for completing them or even find more like-minded boozers with a map of other users.
  • With "Drunk dial", the app puts random Livr users in touch with each other. How cool is that getting drunk and then babbling with another one whose as drunk as you are, no issues.
  • The "Hot Spots" feature is a map that shows nearest bars and clubs. 
  •  "Bar specials" and "After hours" some some more of them to go with.
  •  And now comes the main attraction, 

a “Blackout” button that will “completely erase all evidence of what you’ve done that evening”.

A "Morning After Report" can be sent to other users showing off any antics from the previous night. Photos are only uploaded to the app and can only be seen by other drunk people.
People get a little wild, people do stupid things, but Livr encourages it's users to be who they are and not censor themselves. It's intended mainly for entertainment purposes.

 Have a look at how it goes, here:

Clover 3 Brings Chrome tabs to Windows Explorer

by Unknown

About every OS out there has a file browser with tabbed browsing... except, well, Windows.

If you have never used tabs in file explorer, you don't know what you're missing.
Clover is an extension for the Windows Explorer, to add multi-tab functionality similar to Google Chrome browser. After installing Clover, you will be able to open multiple folders within the same window, and you can also add folder bookmarks.
All Clover does is that it adds chrome like looks and tabs to Windows Explorer and Voila!


It behaves and feels just like Google Chrome, lets you open folders in new tab with a middle click, set bookmarks, drag tabs around...
Now instead of switching and getting confused with similar looking windows, you can have everything under one window.

Note that clover does not change Windows Explorer's functionality, the clover window runs a completely unmodified Explorer inside the tab.

Shortcuts

Clover also uses chrome keyboard shortcuts.
  • Ctrl + T is New Tab
  • Ctrl + W is close Tab
  • Ctrl + D is bookmark

Themes

It also has theme support! That too google chrome's!
You can download crx file for google chrome themes and then apply it on clover.
You can get themes here:
http://www.themebeta.com/
http://www.chromethemes.org/

Bookmarks

Clover also introduces a bookmarks bar. Unlike the favourite menu, bookmark bar also allows you to store files. Which then can be opened with a single click.
It can be very useful if your working on some files that you need to frequently access.


Clover also has some useful settings


Clover is one of those apps that have good reasons to install and never ever remove.

Get Clover 3

Google's "Project Tango" - Future of Smartphones

by Unknown


Google announced Project Tango, an Android-based prototype 5 inch phone, designed with aim to make our mobile devices function in 3D that contains customized hardware and software with 3D sensors to sense and capture the world around you. This experimental project is being developed by Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), Motorola unit which Google didn't sell to Lenovo.
The goal of Futuristic Project Tango is to give smartphones a human-scale understanding of 3D space and motion and build a visual 3D map of space, revolutionizing the GPS maps
The device is equipped with standard 4MP camera paired with a special combination RGB and IR sensor , motion tracking camera at the rear, integrated depth sensing that could help the visually impaired "see" in front, a Movidius's Myriad 1 vision processor to bring Kinect-like computer vision to the smartphone,  advanced 3D sensors plus usual components like as gyros and sensors, that are found in most smartphones. The combination of these hardware with advanced computer vision techniques can take 250,000 3D measurements every second and creates a real-time 3D map of phone's surroundings. Project Tango's application in future technology could be endless.

This phone will have applications ranging from 3D modeling to assisting the visually impaired

Imagine how cool it would be to have a 3D map of your house, and integrate this map as a backdrop into game development.

3D mapping of a room with Tango smartphone
These prototypes, of course, runs on Android and include development APIs to provide orientation, position,  and depth data to standard Android apps written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine.

Things as you can do with this phone  

  • Google and ATAP is closely monitoring developers interested in developing: Applications, Games, Algorithms and Something Else using the prototypes.
  • You can have indoor mapping of the your place before heading out to buy furniture to see how   a furniture would look and fit before buying it, which could make shopping trips easy and effective.
  • You can use 3D mapping to get directions inside a building or structure and avoid bumping on wrong doors as well as confusing 2D paper maps.
  • 3D visual-effects world could be build and modelled in record time with little efforts.
  • Think about mapping your real walls in-game textures onto  would be the game you'll love the most
  • Google says that indoor as well as outdoor mapping, single/multiplayer games which use physical space, new algorithms for processing sensor data could be hot topics to pursue.
Now its upon developers to innovate and think what to do with this phone. Google hopes to unlock new kinds of smart, vision-based applications based on its 3D sensing and vision technology that it has built into the phone.

Dev kits will be  handed out this 14th March to around 200 developers, hand-picked by Google and the ATAP team themselves, interested in creating applications for the device. With futuristic combination of hardware and software, developers can create applications that simply weren’t possible before.
Via Google 

Here is ATAP’s introductory video of Project Tango

Chrome Extension of Week | OneTab - Speed up Chrome by reducing physical memory usage.

by Unknown

OneTab for Chrome.
Reduce tab clutter into a single tab of bookmarks with unique URL and can share as public web page.
I can't say about you, but I keep a lot of tabs open in my web browser (Google Chrome) and each and every time you open a new tab, it hogs a little RAM. We have a solution Onetab which converts all of your opened tabs into a list in a single tab when OneTab icon is clicked. So you can free up the memory used by the Google Chrome tabs upto 95% (claimed by OneTab's makers) that gives the more speed for the browser as well as your system will not slow down and will run bit faster.

Make your Chrome browser run faster by suspending tabs and restore them all with a click.

OneTab's makers claim this can offer a 95% memory reduction. To put that to the test, I opened 7 tabs ( shown in above snapshot) in Chrome and took a snapshot of the Task Manager (there are more processes running than tabs opened because of various background processes such as adblock,  ghostery and WOT etc ).

Applied OneTab extension and took another screenshot show below.


Here, "closed" tabs are still consuming memory, but not as much as they were previously.The total physical memory usage (fitted with 4GB of RAM) dropped from 70% to 41%, CPU usage dropped from 26% to 11%.

Suppose, you've been shopping online for your friend's b'day gift, and you want to share all your findings with another one. Instead of copying and pasting all the URLs and sending, you could just create a OneTab Web page with unique URL and send that single link.

Keep memory savings aside, it offers much more with all those open tabs such as:

  • you can delete unwanted tabs
  • drag and drop tabs reorder them
  • right click on any tab in browser and add it to OneTab
  • tabs stored in OneTab will not be lost with chrome restart
  • export a list of the tab URLs so you can access it later
  • OneTab also provides a way for creating and sharing a set of websites with its own unique URL

OneTab only takes few seconds install, and it's easy to remove. OneTab is a nice little extension for sure that does what most people need with only two clicks (one to create a tab, one to restore). And did I mention that it is free as well as ad-free?

Appear.in: Video chatting doesn't get simpler than this

by Unknown

Video chat is great way to connect with people.
The main problem with video chat is that
Everyone is on a different network!

Lets say you want to video chat with some friends, but you don't have a Skype account. He is not on google hangouts, some are using Facebook, utter chaos!
It gets more unpleasant when you just want to talk a once and have to create a new account on some other network.


Appear.in has a brilliant solution

  • Just go to https://appear.in
  • Enter a chat room name (or just go with the automatically generated one)
  • Share link
  • DONE!
This is everything that is required! No sign-up, nothing to install.
It even allows up to 8 people to chat together!


Support

Appear.in uses WebRTC to start video chats, which is available on
  • Desktop PC
    • Google Chrome
    • Mozilla Firefox 22
    • Opera 18
  • Android
    • Google Chrome 28 (Enabled by default since 29)
    • Mozilla Firefox 24
    • Opera Mobile 12
  • Google Chrome OS
Only problem with this is the lack of support of Safari, so iOS users still have to wait till WebRTC is available.

Visit appear.in

Extension Of Week | Boomerang for Gmail - Smarter Email Management

by Unknown


Boomerang For Gmail helps you schedule your emails to send and receive for a later time.

See Also

Chrome Extension Of The Week | Google Dictionary - View definitions easily as you browse the web
In addition to scheduling of your emails, you can also snooze your inboxed mails and track responses to mails you've sent. Boomerang works only with Gmail and Google Apps accounts and doesn't support any other email clients like Yahoo, Hotmail etc as yet. I've recently started using Boomerang which is a great asset in managing my Inbox.

Boomerang allows you to do various useful tasks as:

  •    Write an email anytime and schedule it to send it later.
  •    Receive your incoming mail anytime you need it
  •    Remind you if you don't hear back on your important emails
  •    communicate with people over different time zones
  •    Schedule B'day mails to wish on exact time
  •    Get reminders on the go
  •    Remembers to pay bills 

See Also

The best Firefox add ons to Turbo Boost your browsing this 2014
      GIF shows some features of Boomerang

      Boomerang has been a very useful tool in managing my Gmail Inbox. I hope you'll find it useful and productive as well.
      Download: Get easy email reminders for your browser and hand-held gadgets.

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