Site tells the whole story around sending and receiving emails with Google’s mailing service, Gmail. There a lot of videos and pictures embedded throughout the neatly designed web site. Especially how they shred the hard drives that have fulfilled their mission in the data center is quite interesting, don’t miss it.

What really attracted my attention while watching the videos, almost all of the staff shown on them are obese, or overweight at best. Google pays well, apparently :)

Obesity is a serious health issue and I believe companies like Google should care about the overall health of their staff, as much as they do for the environment. I suggest Google management team to Google for “obesity“, as a start :)

After a search, learned that it’s been around since de v11 beta and migrated to the v11 stable after testing. If you are interested in learning HTML and CSS, you should try Firefox’s 3D inspection. You can see how browsers implement the code, in a fun way :)

After I clicked the ad, it redirected me to an executable file named “etype_setup.exe”. Certainly, I haven’t downloaded or installed the executable on my system. But, since these ads are obviously misleading users to an installation file without any proper description and warning, it feels like a stinky situation.

Is creating its own botnet a new business model for Twitpic?

Hit the link for the full page screenshot and click on the image to see a larger version.

Obviously, this is not a surprise. But, it is also probably the most important update for the company since their “Social Search” implementation.

With on-by-default social search, Google literally forced site owners to create Google+ profiles for their businesses and for themselves. And, since Google highly values “+1″ interactions on both its search engine and third-party sites, this new feature gets late adapting webmasters attention to optimize for Google+ and adopt +1s, too.

Because Google is still dwarfing all the competition, I believe the soon to be released third-party commenting system of the company will also be welcomed with mass adoption rates. Comments will be indexed by Google, most probably with their +1 values, and this will bring the SEO power on the most powerful search engine of all times.

Unless Google somehow manages to ridicule itself, no one will miss this.

This is what I see when I open an item belong to the Wired Gadgets RSS feed on Google Reader. After they became more annoying, disturbing and interrupting with every day, online ads are finally holding the throne.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

Because I always delete files with shift+delete combination, there have been several occasions in the past that I needed to un-delete the files which I mistakenly made disappear. In fact, once I deleted a directory containing all my close-to-finish PhD studies – years of work has gone in a blink of an eye! Thanks to Dropbox, which is a real life saver by the way, I was able to recover them all.

You probably know that files still remain on the filesystem in a masked state, even if you think you permanently deleted them. That in my mind, I always have a recovery software installed on my computers in case of an emergency.

An old version of UFS Explorer was installed on my PC when my brother asked me to recover his photos, and it certainly was my first shot. However, it wasn’t even able to find the deleted files on the memory card. Then I thought that I might need something newer, something more modern this time and tried FileRestore Professional. Although FileRestore was able to see the deleted files on the filesystem of the card, it can only read photos in a garbled form, which was useless.

It was obvious that the photos on the card were malformed somehow and I need to find something specific for photos. Something can carve the data from the memory card and turn it into a human readable state. While searching for such tool, I stumbled upon to TestDisk & PhotoRec suite. Instead their outdated latest stable, I downloaded the v6.12-WIP (beta) version. With that, I was able to recover all digital images from the memory card in a few moments with PhotoRec, without any errors.

TestDisk & PhotoRec suite is free (open sourced, GPL v2) software. It’s Windows version is actually a Cygwin port and it runs in command-line. But, don’t let that scare you, its usage is pretty straight forward. Before wasting your money on propriety software, give TestDisk & PhotoRec suite a chance. It worked flawlessly for me, probably will work for you too ;)

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.