An excellent video released by Disney. Although I’m not sure it’s allowed to be on YouTube. The very reason Google has been asked to hand over all our personal information to Viacom.

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Very useful widget that combines the calendar, to-do, clocks, notes and events. Makes it easily accessible too.

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Computers and Technology specific magazines like Digit, Chip and Skoar have become more or less irrelevant these days. Gone are the days when we used to wait eagerly for the magazine to arrive, as part of the monthly subscription, at the doorstep. Those were the days of dial-up connections and bandwidth capped broadband connections.

We needed these magazines for the Linux distributions and downloads that you couldn’t afford to download on your limiting internet connection. The magazine was and still probably is just a well bound booklet of advertisements with content conveniently placed in between, content that you might find useful once in a while. The reviews may not always be right, the 30 day/24 hour reviews always seemed to be manipulated content added to fill pages at the last moment but the products were usually well known enough for them to be highlighted on the cover page.

They always managed to look like well funded groups with a lot of products to review, but they never managed to maintain a quality standard you can still find on cnet and engadget. And with the evolution of web media, these magazines have become rather obsolete. The free stuff that they bundle with them shall always remain the most interesting bit, because you can Google the other stuff and find it before you flip the pages.

9.9Media has bought Digit and Skoar from Jasubhai and I doubt they can do anything to make them better. With the coming of RSS Feeds, I don’t think people really need to subscribe to any form of print. Time Magazine has a paid online subscription that a lot people I know have preferred to subscribe to because its cheaper and arrives before it gets printed.

Interesting read. No this isn’t a funny article on Windows but is a serious one listing the mistakes Microsoft made.

He quibbled over the meaning of the simplest words (”compete” and “ask” were real stumpers). And on the occasions that he remembered e-mails he authored, he denied knowing what he meant by them. The same detail-oriented, driven genius who created the world’s most valuable company–and a GDP-size fortune of his own–was seemingly out to lunch.

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Joy of Tech’s tribute to Bill Gates. Microsoft and Bill Gates, always controversial. I wonder whether how that pie on his face tasted though.

Do you go through all the cleaning hassles I go through when I stay at home? I always tend to dirty up my house further in the process of cleaning it. Temporary stains become permanent, small ones become bigger and they also appear where they were non-existent. Cleaning carpeted floors is a big pain if you want to do it with your hands but using a regular vacuum cleaner may cost you more than you would want to pay just with the monthly energy consumption. You not only feel guilty about not having cleaned your home properly but also about managing the environment-unfriendly sky-high costs involved. It’s still not late to start saving, it’s still not late to start the cleaning that you’ve been postponing. It’s time to clean with a conscience.

You’ve probably heard about DirtDevil’s AccuCharge cleaning systems - most specifically - the Stick Vac and Hand Vac cordless systems that help you save 70% of the energy other systems would consume. What helps it save 70% of the energy? The innovative AccuCharge system monitors the unit constantly until the charge voltage is reached and reduces power just to maintain the charge which results in the less energy wastage. This innovative cleaning system is the first system to gain the Energy Star certification which further strengthens the reason you should buy one for your home.

It comes with a 3 year warranty to ensure that it works as promised during it’s lifetime and charges almost twice as fast to reduce the time you would have to wait between uses. But don’t get addicted, cleaning is the only thing you might end up doing the whole day.

Initially not sure about my purchase, I was very happy when I got my Refurbished iPod Nano from the Apple Store for only $99. The iPod Nano comes with a new part number and is restored to the condition in which it is when a new unit is purchased. My hunch is that refurbished iPods are a way of clearing all returned iPods(either within the 30-day return policy or units that come back for replacement under warranty).

The gallery above will give you a good idea about the excellent cardboard packaging which gives it enough cushion to be pushed in checked-in luggage that comes all the way from Virginia to New Delhi in pristine order. I bought this iPod nano as a replacement for the iPod mini that I have because replacing the mini’s battery would have cost me just the same.

If I find that my savings with Apple Certified Reconditioned Products are enough to be worth talking about as a blog post, there’s no reason I wont go in for one. I’ve saved a good $50 over the original cost, and the product is no different from what you would get paying a hefty Rs.7000 in India.

Dave is the same guy who wrote Spam Karma for WordPress and he has one of the most interesting ABOUT ME pages I’ve come across. It’s in the form of a list.

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The urlbar, as Firefox calls it in it’s internal configuration is no longer just a URL Bar. It lets you search within a URL, the titles of browser history and of course auto-completes the URLs previously visited. This is an excellent feature if you forgot the website you visited but remember the title of the page or what it was about. But for anything else it requires too much of mechanical effort for comfort.

We’ve been using address bars, navigation bars, urlbars on so many browsers, for so many years. Trying to re-invent something of this scale requires tremendous work and a little rethinking as well. After using this somewhat confusing navigation bar, I seem to enjoy using it. I usually type out the whole URL for websites I visit often even if it’s they are bookmarked or on my history so the new bar doesn’t really make a big difference to me. The auto-completion of URLs are prioritized depending on the number of times you’ve visited that page.

If for example, you type xabhishek and wait for it to complete itself, you wont be happy with the results if you’ve somehow visited a particular page on xabhishek.com more than the root URL itself. This is quite possible in case you’re tracking changes on the page of a website, something most of us do very often. I’m not sure this is a great thing, because I see most of the people at home complaining about this strange new address bar. Given the choice they would go back to using Firefox 2.0 which has better buttons and a neater design.

A few things that should be added along with the address bar is a triple-switch to choose between searching URLs, searching titles and auto-complete URLs. Either that or a combination of them that may be activated with 2 clicks(without having the user go and change browser settings and options).

On the transition to Firefox 3 looks just like a transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard would. I wouldn’t say Windows XP to Windows Vista like many others would, because Windows Vista is much much better than Windows XP, when you help meet it’s requirements.

Unrelated: While reading the WinSuperSite Firefox 3 review, I noticed how easily Safari was ridiculed. It’s probably not got the Windows-touch, looks more Mac-like but it is still has one of the most beautiful browsers I’ve seen on Windows.

and counting… 8 million on Download Day. Impressive.