Redefining Technology

Google Announces Country-Specific Blog Censorship

Pushpendra Pal — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:25:31 +0000

After Twitters announcement to selectively block tweets on a country-by-country basis, now its Google’s turn to use this trick to avoid global content censorship. Google unveils its plan to block BlogSpot blogs on country bases. Google will now be able to block access in individual countries following a legal removal request. This way Google can meet local laws without blocking content at a global level.

These changes are applied in Australia, New Zealand and India, but Google plans to roll it out globally. Under this new system, blog visitors will be redirected to a website address using a country-specific top level domain. Suppose you visits xyz.blogspot.com blog, then the automated system will redirects you to xyz.blogspot.com.in (for Indian visitors). Readers will be redirected to sites with their own country’s domain name when they try to visit blogs recognized as foreign, as determined by their IP addresses.

In recent days Indian government forces Google, Twitter, Facebook and some other web portals to filter their content as per government guidelines. this country specific content censorship strikes a good balance between free speech, legality and practical issues for end users.

But Google give you freedom to browse the web as it is without censoring. Visitors can see blogs as it is available to global users. They just need to add “/ncr” (No Country Redirect) after web address of blog. Google will then show international version of that blog. Adding /ncr places a short term cookie in your browser that temporarily prevent geographical redirection.

Firefox 10 Arrives with Powerful New Developer Tools

Pushpendra Pal — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:03:24 +0000

Firefox is the most loved web browser because of its great add-on compatibility. Web developers loves its highly powerful developer tools like Firebug, Web Developer toolbar and many more. Now with the release of Firefox 10, Mozilla adds a new web developer tools in Firefox core and makes other handful of improvements. with this built in toolbar developers change the look and feel of websites in real-time.

With new Page Inspector, developers can peek into a page’s structure and layout without having to leave Firefox. This means they can quickly navigate between page elements and view the HTML document structure for the page. This works similar as Firebug add-on does. Inspect Element has two basic inspector, one is HTML Inspector and another is CSS (or Style) Inspector.

Style Inspector makes editing the style of websites even easier. Now developers have quick access to CSS properties and can view or change values for their website within Firefox. Scratchpad now uses the Eclipse Orion code editor to provide syntax highlighting and other features that make it easier and simpler to write JavaScript.

With improved Element Inspector Firefox introduces the Mozilla Full-Screen API and Web applications. This Full Screen API allows developers to build Web experiences that leverage the entire screen. Developers now create full screen games, immersive video experiences and rich presentation sharing.

Page Inspector Features Video:

WebGL, that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software is now introduced in Firefox. With WebGL’s Anti-Aliasing, Firefox now allow developers to create objects that blend together and move smoothly. Firefox also supports CSS 3D Transforms, which lets developers animate and transform two dimensional elements into 3D using HTML5 without the need for third-party plugins.

With these new features Firefox also improves some other features. A minor adjustment to the browser’s navigation bar is the biggest user-facing change in Firefox 10. The forward arrow button is no longer persistently visible by default in the navigation toolbar. It will only appear when the user navigates back a page.

Microsoft is Working to Implant Kinect on Windows Powered Devices

Pushpendra Pal — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:55:06 +0000

Microsoft is working on implanting its motion sensing technology, Kinect into Windows operating system. Recently ‘The Daily’ got a look at Windows 8 powered Asus laptop which has an array of small sensors at the top of screen near webcam. If Kinect technology implemented on Windows systems then we may soon be able to control programs with the wave of our hands.

According to Wikipedia “Kinect is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.”

Kinect was made to compete with the Wii Remote Plus and PlayStation Move with PlayStation Eye motion controllers. The Kinect sensoris a horizontal bar connected to a small base with a motorized pivot and is designed to be positioned lengthwise above or below the video display. The device features an “RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software”,which provide full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities.

There are a lot of possibilities of Kinect technology for software developers. Imagine swiping your finger in the air to switch between windows or applications. You may control your song playlist or media player without having to be right at the keyboard. These laptops would also offer additional control for disabled users.

Microsoft may release Kinect for Windows on Feb 1, 2012. Microsoft’s plan to get the Kinect out of the living room and into other devices seems to be picking up momentum every day. The tech giant will probably not be making in-house devices but give Kinect license to hardware manufacturers. Kinect for laptops is under development, get ready for potential new ways to interact with your laptop.

Enable, Disable and Delete Posts Revisions in WordPress

Pushpendra Pal — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:44:20 +0000

Post Revisions are automatically created revision content for your posts. Whenever you save a post or a page, the old version is retained so you can revert back at any time. Older revisions are never deleted so you always have a full history of all page changes. Automatic posts saving feature will be helpful when your post deleted accidently. You can revert to previous version of post any time you want. However every revision requires a separate row in WordPress’s posts table and perhaps multiple entries in the postmeta and term_relationships tables. Removing older revisions will free up disk space and ease MySQL’s processing burden.

Disable/Enable Post Revisions:

By default WordPress enables post revision settings. But you can disable or re-enable it any time. Simply follow these simple steps:

Login to your hosting account and open File Manager.
Go to your sites WordPress installation directory and open wp-config.php file.
Now add this code in this file:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
Save the changes.

Post Revision feature is now disabled permanently. To re-enable it simply replace “false” with “yes” in above code.

Delete Old Post Revisions:

If you have previously published articles then they should contain revisions. To free up some disk space and sql database follow these steps:

Caution: Please Backup your database before running any SQL query.

Log in to your account on hosting provider and go to phpmyadmin.
Now select the database from which you need to delete post revisions.
Now go to SQL tab and run this query
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
Press Go button to execute this query. Click OK if you prompted for permission to execute query.
You will receive confirmation message that your query will executed successfully with the number of rows deleted.

That’s it.

WordPress.com Brings Site Stats to Dashboard

Pushpendra Pal — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:14:17 +0000

You worked hard, invested your time on blogging and want a rise in your blog visitors. To help you track blog visitors WordPress.com offers ‘Site Stats’ feature. With Site Stats you can view and analyse blog visitors from a single post to whole blog and from the day you start blogging to present.

The stats dashboard has always been one of the most popular admin screens. Last week WordPress presents Read Blog feature on Dashboard and now its time to merge Site Stats in to Dashboard. On Dashboard your stats are available under ‘My Stats’ tab. Stats will also continue to be available by clicking on the sparkline in the admin bar at the top. This new dashboard is updated with a new look by by making panels regularly spaced, using rounded gravatars for your commenters, and giving it an overall lighter feel. WordPress working on adding country stats of visitors.

The best feature of site stats on Dashboard is that you can view stats by from all of your WordPress blogs associated with the account you are logged in. This dashboard can provide stats from your WordPress.com blogs and other self-hosted blogs/websites.

All blogs on WordPress.com get Stats as a free feature and self-hosted blogs can install Jetpack plugin by Automattic which contains a bunch of free plugins along with site-stats. Every time a visitor views a URL on your blog, the visitor’s web browser loads a small smiley-face image from WordPress stats system. The action is logged and the logs are summarized every few minutes to update the statistics, graphs, charts, and lists.

Schedule an eMail to be Sent Later Using Bloomberg

Pushpendra Pal — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:25:22 +0000

Going for holidays today without carrying your laptop or smartphone (or no internet connectivity) and want to inform your boss next day. Gmail and some other popular mail clients does not offer email scheduling. But here is a solution for this too. Boomerang for Gmail is a free Firefox and Google Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive emails. Bloomberg gives you capability to write an email now and set to sent that on a scheduled time in future.

Boomerang is a plugin that fits beautifully into the default Gmail UI. The plugin is also available for the smartphones like iPhone, Android phones and Blackberry. You can try the app on you smartphone by going to this link m.boomeranggmail.com from your mobile device. This will lead you to download page and after downloading it will install in your smartphone.

First download and install Bloomberg add-on on your Firefox or Chrome browser or on smartphone. Bloomberg needs your permission to access your Gmail account. Simply gave account access permission to Bloomberg to use this feature. Now reload Gmail on your browser. Bloomberg adds ‘Send Later’ button next to send button on compose mail page. Just write the message as you normally would, then click the Send Later button. Now Select the time you want to send the message from the drop-down menu or you can even enter your date in normal language. Boomerang will understand phrases such as Tomorrow at 12PM or Next week. Click Confirm when you’ve entered the time you want.

You are done. Now you are ready to schedule your Gmail messages for future.

Bloomberg also offer a follow up reminder service. If you want a cleaner inbox, but don’t want to lose track of important messages? Use Boomerang to take messages out of your inbox until you actually need them. Just click the Boomerang button when you have an email open, and choose when you need it again. Boomerang will archive the message. At the time you chose, Bloomberg bring it back to your inbox, marked unread, starred, or even at the top of your message list.

Bloomberg also remind you if you don’t hear back. There are times you need to make sure you follow up within a specific time frame after sending a message. You can select to only be reminded if nobody replies, or regardless. This way you won’t let messages slip through the crack and will never forget to follow up with people.

But remember Boomerang allows only 10 free scheduled e-mails per month and requires a subscription beyond that limit. If you want to send frequent mails then purchase a premium version of this add-on.

[How to] Download YouTube Video on Android Phone

Pushpendra Pal — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:38:46 +0000

Everyone like watching videos on YouTube, its a fun time pass. You are away from home (or computer) and liked a music video while browsing YouTube on your Android phone. There are many software and online tools available to download YouTube videos on your PC, but what about Android Phone. you like a video and want to download it on your Android phone. To short out your problem, here is an Android app to download videos from YouTube; named as TubeMate.

TubeMate app makes it super easy to download any video from YouTube or any mp3 audio file from any YouTube video. There are quick access buttons to download, share, replay and search YouTube videos. App has the ability to share videos on YouTube directly through the app via email, MMS, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other apps you have installed on the phone that allow the ability to share via app.

After starting TubeMate YouTube Downloader app it will load and present you with a hybrid look of YouTube web version and mobile version. You can search for videos like normal or select any of the featured videos that appear when the app is loaded. When you click the play button to begin the video a dialogue box will open up and ask you whether or not you would like to download or watch the video. If you select Downloading then it will save the video to the SD card or internal memory on your phone.

TubeMate App Features:

Fast download mode (with multiple connections)
Save videos as mp3
Download video in different resolution from flv to full HD (depend on your device support).
Downloading in Background and Multi video download
Share video & Share TubeMate with your friends via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and any other social network.
Playlist as video/audio.

Supported video Resolution to Download:

320 x 240: Runs almost on every smartphone
480 x 270: general devices
640 x 360 (FLV player required)
854 x 480
1280 x 720 (HD): High-end devices
1920 x 1080 (Full-HD): GalaxyTab, PC
Download as MP3 version.

Tubemate is ad supported and available as a free download app. Due to some unknown reasons Tube mate app is temporarily off the Android Market, so use the link at the bottom of this post to download the APK file.
Download Link: <Click Here>

10 Websites to Watch Hollywood Movies in High Quality

Pushpendra Pal — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:19:17 +0000

Everyone love watching movies in theaters, but don’t have much time for Theater or Television. There are so many websites to watch legally and illegally Hollywood, Bollywood and regional movies. But if you want to watch movies in High Quality and cost Free yet legally then there are some websites I am going to tell you. These are top and very best sites that will deliver great video right to your desktop.

1. Hulu:

Hulu’s mission is to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it. Hulu offers free, ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, FOX, and others. Hulu provides video in Flash Video format in a higher resolution and bit-rate than YouTube, but lower than standard-definition television, though many films are available in 480p. Hulu is currently available in few countries including United States, so you can only watch movies if Hulu is open for your country or region.

2. Joox:

Joox.net is a great site for watching both the Bollywood and Hollywood movies online. It has different categories of movies, like Animation, Documentary, Cartoon etc. All of the movies present in Joox are in Divx format, which provides you the best quality. You will need to install the DivX Plugin to watch movies. Joox offers download links of movies.

3. Veoh:

Veoh.com allows users to find and watch major studio content, independent productions and user-generated material. Veoh was founded by Dmitry Shapiro. Veoh is one of the largest, most populer and easiest to use free movies websites on the internet, it has huge archive of movies, 100% free of charge.

4. Watch Movies:

Watch-Movies.net is a great resource site to find the latest Hollywood movies, Bollywood movies, movie trailers and other video stuff online. They provide users with reviews and user feedbacks on the movies, along with providing users with several links to watch or download the movies.

5. IMDB:

IMDB.com, also known as the Internet Movie Database, has added free full length movies and TV shows to its’ already large and informative site. IMDB is the best known source to know all about a movie, cast, director, rating, images, reviews and trailer. There are one hundreds of movies available on IMDB; however, they are all hosted on the site and in good quality.

6. ThePirateCity:

ThePirateCity is a new website where you can watch movies online without downloading. You can search for movies, browse them alphabetically or by category such as Action/Adventure, Drama, Children/Family, Horror/Thriller, Comedy, Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Others. The website lists plenty of popular movie titles.

7. OnlineWatchMovies.net :

This website provides all Hollywood, Bollywood, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi movies and more. And if you have some problem in understanding the dialogues of hollywood movies, then you can also watch the dubbed english movies. You can also download some movies to your computer. This is new but with a huge movie database.

8. QuickSilverScreen:

QuickSilverScreen (QSS) is an online video streaming service where you can stream movies, TV Shows, documentary movies and lots of other video content for free. QSS also lists dozens of regular TV channels, i.e. MTV, ESPN, CNN, AlJazeera, BBC, NBS, and so on. The best feature of QSS is that most of the videos are in DivX format.

9. MoviePlanet:

Movieplanet.com is an Online movie website that aims to give everybody the possibility to choose the best online movie stream links. MoviePlanet has good quality streaming links and checks regularly for dead links.In order to ensure that both quality and availability, the site has detail reviews and photos about the movie.

10. FreeMoviestheatrer:

Freemoviestheatrer.eu is an excellent website for watching Hollywood movies online; the video files indexed by FreeMoviesTheatrer include the whole movies, not movie clips or trailer, so you don’t have to jump from one clip to another after every few minutes. Moreover, you can download the movie from FreeMoviesTheatrer to your computer if you want to play it later.

But before watching movies from these sites, make sure that you have a broadband connection with good speed. 2 MBPS broadband will be much better. If you have know some more websites that provides watching online movies legally, then you can write them in comment box provided.

Google Shuts Down 6 more Services Including Picnik & Sky Map

Pushpendra Pal — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:53:54 +0000

In the process of spring cleaning Google shuts down few more products. Some less popular products will be merged as a feature in other stabilized products and some goes open-sourced. Google acquired these startups by paying a lot of money and when these services failed to achieve the promise they hoped for, Google shuts them. There is a comprehensive list of this 2012 Google cleanup.

1. Picnik:

Google acquired Picnik, online photo editor tool in 2010. The goal of this purchase is to allow Picasa users to edit and save their photos online. Picnik will be retired on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. Google made Picnik premium service is free to everyone until it shuttered. All the premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.

2. Google Sky Map:

Sky Map was created by half a dozen Googlers at the Pittsburgh office in 2009. This product is initiated to show off the amazing capabilities of the sensors in the first-generation Android phones and offer a window into the sky. Google doesn’t going to shut it down but opens it for open-source community to make it more diverse.

3. Google Message Continuity (GMC):

GMC is an email disaster recovery product for enterprise customers that use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. This service was started in Dec, 2010. The aim to backup data over cloud is offered within cloud storage services using Google Apps hence there is no need to use another service with same features. Current GMC customers will be able to use GMC for the duration of their contract and are encouraged to consider using Google Apps as their primary messaging and collaboration platform.

4. Urchin:

Urchin, an online analytic product, was acquired by Google in 2005, that became the foundation for Google Analytics. Analytics helps businesses of all sizes measure their websites visits, stats, demographics and online marketing. Google now focus on this online analytics service rather then Urchin which was client side application. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.

5. Social Graph API:

Social Graph API is a developer side app which stores information about public connections between people on the web. This app failed to gain exposure and will be shuttered down on April, 2012.

6. Needlebase:

Needlebase is a less known Google product, even I haven’t heard its name before today. Needlebase is a data management platform which was acquired from ITA software. This technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives.

Google acquires new initiatives that attracts Google’s mind as a high prices. Google tweaks these product and make them available within Google’s already existing services. Some services boost Google’s reputation and attracts mass but some failed to gain exposure. Time to time Google shut down less popular services or make them open-sourced.

[How to] Upload YouTube Videos of More Than 15 min Length

Pushpendra Pal — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:46:13 +0000

YouTube has biggest range of online videos from different categories, different languages and different geo-locations around the world. YouTube videos are uploaded by users. But there is a problem when you upload video of more then 15 minutes of length. Your video will be uploaded to YouTube servers but when you open that video, an error occurred which says ‘This video has been removed because it is too long.’

This problem occurs with the unverified YouTube users. Unverified users can only upload videos of length up to 15 Minutes. So to bypass this limit, you need to have a verified YouTube account.

Follow these steps to verify YouTube account:

1. Log in to your Google or YouTube account and click Upload link to upload video on YouTube.

2. Clicking on ‘Select files from your computer’ will let you to upload files from your pc, but limits you to a video of maximum 15 min. So if you want to remove this limit your have to Verify your account .

3. YouTube requires your phone number to verify account authority. Fill your mobile number and press submit button. Google send you an auto generated SMS which contains a verification code.

4. In second step, you have to enter verification code send to your phone number. Fill this code and press Verify. If you enter correct code then Google automatically remove video upload length limit from your account.

Now you can share video tutorials, trip videos or other fun material on your YouTube account without limit.