Technoholik

Not too long ago, Adobe released the first preview of a project code-named Wallaby, which is a tool that can input Flash project files and convert them to use HTML5 and other new web technologies. Google’s latest lab project has a similar purpose, but works in quite a different way.

Visit the Swiffy lab page and you will be asked to upload a SWF file, which their tool will then convert into a version that uses HTML, JavaScript, CSS and SVG; taking advantage of some of the latest web standards. Currently their output will only work on WebKit-based browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Swiffy converts the imported Flash animation into JSON, which is a JavaScript-based plain text data format. This data is read by the pure JavaScript Swiffy runtime, which then renders the animations described by the JSON object as SVG, making use of newer features offered by HTML5 and CSS3.

Last night, a friend of mine asked me for a way to get rid of the not so well received Facebook Photo Theater mode. While I helped him, I thought why don’t share the Facebook Photo Theater pain killer with you guys as well. Get the solution after the break.

If you do your browsing using Chrome, then all you need to do is install the Revert Facebook Photo Viewer extension for Chrome and you are good to go. The extension doesn’t require any interaction from you whatsoever and does its work silently and efficiently.

Facebook Photo Theater View went live in February 2011 and as many of you know lets you view photos in Theater mode which is basically a picture with an annoying black background.

While smartphone consumers are still taking their time to embrace Windows Phone 7, Microsoft appears to be having more luck with developers. The mobile platform has reportedly crested the 25,000 app mark for Windows Phone Marketplace, according to at least one tracker site.

WindowsPhoneAppList puts the number at 25,076 right now, slightly ahead of another app tracker WP7AppList. That’s up from an official count of 11,500 apps announced in late March. It’s a far cry from Apple’s 425,000 iOS apps and Android Market’s 200,000 apps, but it’s a pretty impressive showing for a platform that just launched in November but has struggled to convince users to sign on. Gartner estimated that Windows Phone 7 mustered just 1.6 million in estimated sales to end users in the first quarter.

The new app milestone shows that Microsoft is seeing some results from its efforts to line up developers and make it easy and attractive for them to build apps. Even without a large user base, developers are apparently getting in on the act, perhaps in anticipation of bigger things to come. WP7AppList shows that new apps spiked in late May and early June.

Crysis 2 players will be happy to note that Crytek has released the new CryEngine 3 Sandbox Editor, allowing them to create their own maps, mods, and content for the award-winning franchise.

The crymod.com mod community has also been re-opened, allowing fellow Crysis 2 modders to share and discuss their work. Interested Crysis 2 players should head to mycrysis.comor crymod.com for more information, and to download the package.Giving a fair amount of control, Crytek will be providing additional tools with the package, including plugins for Maya and 3ds Max, Poly Bump, FMOD Designer, and more. For beginners, sample content has also been provided to help build and edit.

Though Facebook was ultimately not in the mix to buy Skype, the relationship is still going strong and will reportedly result in Skype’s video chat service finally coming to Facebook next week.TechCrunch reports  that Facebook’s“awesome” announcement July 6 will include word that desktop Facebook users will be able to conduct video calls via Skype.

Updated. Hulu’s Facebook Connect integration apparently isn’t going as planned. The ability to log in is offline as of this writing, with many people reporting issues with the sign-in option earlier today. According to some, those issues led some users to be signed in to other people’s Hulu accounts, exposing their user account data in the process.

Near field communication, or NFC, allow for simplified transactions, data exchange, and connections with a touch. Formed in 2004, the Near Field Communication Forum (NFC Forum) promotes sharing, pairing, and transactions between NFC devices and develops and certifies device compliance with NFC standards. A smartphone or tablet with an NFC chip could make a credit card payment or serve as keycard or ID card. NFC devices can read NFC tags on a museum or retail display to get more information or an audio or video presentation. NFC can share a contact, photo, song, application, or video or pair Bluetooth devices. The 140 NFC Forum members include LG, Nokia, Huawei, HTC, Motorola, NEC, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, AT&T,Sprint, Rogers, SK, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Intel, TI, Qualcomm, and NXP.

Essential specifications

NFC is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less. NFC operates at 13.56 MHz on ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface and at rates ranging from 106 kbit/s to 848 kbit/s. NFC always involves an initiator and a target; the initiator actively generates an RF field that can power a passive target. This enables NFC targets to take very simple form factors such as tags, stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not require batteries. NFC peer-to-peer communication is of course possible, where both devices are powered. A patent licensing program for NFC is currently under development by Via Licensing Corporation, an independent subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories. A public, platform-independent NFC library is released under the free GNU Lesser General Public License by the name libnfc.

 

Uses

Emerging NFC standards allow customers to quickly purchase products and transfer secure information by touching devices. NFC allows companies to reduce staffing, printing, and point of sale costs. Globally, 100 million people use mobile payment outside the U.S., but only 3.5 million use the technology in the U.S.

Social networking

Those of us who were excited about the Galaxy S II, but weren’t willing to invest so much for a phone, will probably be happy to know that a cheaper alternative is around the corner, and when it arrives, will be much like the Galaxy S i9003 was for the Galaxy S i9000. Spotted for pre-order online over on Swedish carrier, Three, the device is called the Galaxy Z.

With the same design as the Galaxy S II i9100, the Galaxy Z i9103 features near identical specifications, apart from a different, smaller display; a slower dual-core processor; less inbuilt storage; and a lower quality camera.

The device is also not as slim as the SII, wider at its slimmest by about 1 mm, at 9.5 mm. Not shabby at all for a cheaper alternative to the current-gen top-end offering, but of course, a price figure would help that assessment.The Samsung Galaxy Z has a 4.2-inch Super LCD display instead of the S II’s 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus offering; comes with aNvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor instead of the 1.2GHz Exynos dual-core processor; features 8GB of inbuilt storage in place of the 16GB and 32GB offerings; and, has a 5MP 720p HD camera instead of the 8MP 1080p HD camera.

As it has a Tegra 2 dual-core processor, we don’t expect it to retail at the Galaxy S i9003’s price level of course, but enough to become a serious option for potential i9003 purchasers. The Galaxy Z has been announced at an pre-order price of 3995 Swedish kronor (roughly Rs. 28,000). We’ll keep you up-to-date on any further leaks or official announcements.

Happy birthday, dear Global System for Mobile Communications! 20 years ago today, on July 1 1991, the world's first GSM call was made by Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri. The historic call used Nokia gear on GSM's original 900MHz band. Today GSM is all grown up and ruling the world -- connecting 1.5 billion people in 212 countries and serving 80% of the planet's mobile market. GSM gave us a number of firsts. It was the first fully digital cellular system using TDMA to cram more information into less spectrum and provide better sounding, more reliable calls using less power. It introduced the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), the idea of switching handsets at will (something carriers have sought to subvert by locking phones), and the reality of international roaming. Short Messaging Service (SMS) was first launched on GSM networks, along with packet data (GPRS and later EDGE), which made internet access practical on mobile devices. Eventually, GSM expanded to the 400, 800, 1800 and 1900MHz bands and evolved into WDCMA-based UMTS (3G) and later HSPA and HSPA+, followed byLTE (4G) networks. So next time you're at the coffee shop sipping on that latte while uploading that video to YouTube at 10Mbps using your LTE phone, remember to be thankful for that first GSM call 20 years ago -- that's when the mobile revolution really started.

ALL THESE TRICKS ARE WORKING @ ZERO BALANCE, DON'T TRY THEM WITH HIGH BALANCE OR YOU WILL LOST YOUR MONEY

1. Tricks working with airtelfun.com access point (you can try airtellive.com or airtel wap.com if airtelfun.com not works for you)
FreeOpenvpn

1. download FreeopenVPN http://swupdate.openvpn.net/community/releases/openvpn-2.1.4-install.exe

2. download FreeopenVPN config http://www.freeopenvpn.com/download/freeopenvpn.zip

3. Extract freeopenvpn config files to C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\freeopenvpn\

4. Connect with airtelfun.com access point

5. in taskbar click right click on openvpn gui and click on proxy setting 

6. click on manual configuration, click HTTP proxy, write 100.1.200.99 in address and 80 in port and click ok

7. now again right click on openvpn gui and click connect 

8. enjoy free gprs

Screen shots

Social networking has long been Google's white whale. The company has done plenty of dabbling in the space, releasing Orkut, which has failed to catch on in the US, and rolling out Buzz to the relative indifference of its massive user base. Announced today after seemingly endless leaks, Google+ represents a major push for the software giant. The service began showing itself to a smattering of users last night, as a black bar across the top of various of the company's properties. A "+You" button on the far left of the bar currently brings you to the service's landing page, offering a tour of the many features that fall under the Google+ umbrella. Get to know the services better after the break. 

We know what you're thinking -- you like the idea of Google Apps, but the Mountain View crew kind of creeps you out. Well, don't worry, Microsoft has your back. After making its beta debut last year, Office 365 is officially ready to spread its wings and offer its productivity web app wares to the business-minded masses. For $6 per-user, per-month small businesses get access to Microsoft Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync video conferencing and can take advantage of the suite'sintegration with WP7 once Mango lands. Larger, enterprise plans start at $10 per user while adding support for desktop Office products and Lync VoIP solutions as you climb the pricing ladder. Really there's not much more to say except, check out the full PR after the break.

Tumblr, the combination blogging platform and social network, has been growing rapidly of late — so rapidly that it is now racking up about 8.4 billion pageviews a month, according to a blog post from president John Maloney. One of the big drivers for this growth appears to be teenagers, who are using the site as a kind of combination of Facebook and Twitter, to share photos and other Internet “memes.” But will Tumblr ever figure out how to make money from this massive user base? Other social networks have grown just as large and still failed.

Google has recently launched its latest project of social network which is pronounced as Google Plus, Google+’s biggest competitors are Facebook and Twitter, that has already got millions of users availing their services.

Folks over at the University of Exeter have demonstrated what they call the memflector – an optical equivalent of the memristor. Built using advanced semiconductor materials capable of phase-change, the team has constructed a processor that can compute and store data simultaneously. This is quite unlike today’s computers, which have separate components for memory and processing, but is supposedly very similar to what our brains, or biological computers do.

The team is calling their advancements a large step forward in computing, potentially leading to much faster, cheaper, and more power efficient computers. The work is also a big step toward achieving another milestone in the field – ‘brain-like’ computing. The memflector-based processor demonstrated synaptic-like functionality, with each phase-change cell mimicking the “integrate and fire” mechanism of a neuron. The processor is also capable of reliably executing the four basic arithmetic functions.

From being just a fad, Facebook has grown to the point where users are being afflicted with FAD (Facebook Addiction Disorder). And children are as vulnerable as adults.

A standard nine student of a reputed city school had to miss a term because he was in depression. He would make up excuses to miss school, grew listless and would spend a lot of time locked up in his room. Concerned by his behavior, his parents took him to a psychologist and that’s when he divulged the cause of his angst. They found out that his depression was not due to academics, but because his friends from school had taken to teasing him about his weight on a social networking site. After sessions of counseling, coupled with intervention on the part of the school teachers, he finally came out of his depression.

A matter of great concern was that he was targeted on a social networking site, which is a public forum. This is not a one-off occurrence; many such incidents have come to light in recent years on social networking sites, and looking at the ever increasing number of kids signing up at social networking sites, it will be a serious issue in the coming years.

Memristor! Well, erm... what's for dinner?

We get it, that will be the primary expression for most of you. So before we start with what's what, let's take a brief overview about Memristors.

If you are familiar with any of the terms- resistance, capacitance or inductance then you know they are the three properties which an electric circuit is bound to have. In the late 60's last century, a prediction was made for yet-another circuital property, then dubbed as Memistance.IEEE confirmed the property renaming to memristance (and the circuital element showing the property are called memristor) in 1971. The invention was revolutionary for some reasons (which we will explain afterwards), and memory chip makers are drooling over it since.

Android is leading the pack in global mobile phone sales for two quarters in a row -- roughly one in three smartphones sold in Q1 2011 were Android phones. Why shouldn't they be, allowing customers to buy handsets at virtually every price segment? But all isn't well, according to a study conducted by WDS: Android phones also have a higher tendency of hardware faults compared toBlackberry, iOS, and Windows Phone devices.

Most of you will have a desktop PC or laptop just lying around simply because it’s either too old for daily use and the resale value is too low for you to bother with it. Why not convert it into an HTPC (home theater PC) for use in your living room or bedroom? You don’t need any large capacity hard drives, high-end graphics cards or even an expensive operating system for the HTPC conversion. All you would need is your bank of media files either stored on the hard drive, external storage or on a DLNA/UPnP compatible NAS.

US videogame giant Electronic Arts (EA) on Friday revealed that hackers had looted user data in "a highly sophisticated" attack.

HTC's new tablet, the Flyer, is the latest iPad competition in India. It will launch today at a relatively high price point of Rs 39,890.
 
Disappointingly, the 7-inch 1024 x 600 resolution tablet does not run on Google's tablet specific Honeycomb OS but on Google's mobile OS Gingerbread skinned with the latest version of HTC sense instead.
 
A 1.5GHz single core processor powers the Flyer. It also features HTML 5 and Flash 10 support. This is a deviation from tradition in a tablet market dominated by the NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz dual core processor. It offers 32GB storage and 1GB of RAM.  The back of the device houses a 5MP camera and the front has a 1.3MP camera for video chat.   
 
Uniquely, the tablet allows the use of a stylus-like pen to draw and write. With the pen, you can take notes, sign contracts, draw pictures, or even write on a web page or photo. There is no way to stow the stylus in the device itself, but you could use the provided carry-case. It is easy enough to lose styli even when housed inside a phone or tablet, and without a good stowing mechanism you might have to buy a new stylus more often than you like.
 
The HTC Flyer tablet also introduces HTC Watch, HTC's new video download service.  The HTC Watch service enables on-demand progressive downloading of High-Definition movies from major studios.
 
The Flyer seems like a well-built device, but does it justify the price tag of Rs. 39,890? Stay tuned for the compete review, coming soon. 

The iPhone 3GS, 8GB version, will now be available for just less than Rs 20,000. It will be unlocked and come with an Indian warranty.

ust few days back, the renowned Taiwanese laptop makers Asus has launched its U36 model in UK, which is the world’s first thinnest ultraportable laptop to use a standard-voltage processor.

The Asus U36 ultraportable laptop which is designed to be ultra-slim and powerful, features:

Intel Core i5-460M (2.53GHz) Processor, 13.3″ HD 16:9 (1366 x 768) LED Display, 4GB DDR3 1066MHz Memory, 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive, NVIDIA G310M 1GB DDR3 + Intel GMA HD Graphics Card, and USB 3.0.

The above mentioned hardware of the machine is housed in a magnesium alloy body that is just 19mm thick. Surprised? Not only this, but the machine is also impressive enough to run for almost 10 hours because of using the Super Hybrid Engine Battery Conservation Technology, which means despite being thin, the Asus U36 manages to provide a longer battery life.

Asus U36 with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit is available both in stores and online for only £699. You can watch the video of the laptop below: