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Hello dear reader!

I wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year 2008!

Mohan

[tags]new year[/tags]

Hi all,

I’ll be back home tomorrow, to my own sweet domain, from the perilous clutches of a hostel… Expect my next post tomorrow…

Until then,
Adios amigos,
Mohan (aka Neo Garfield)

Hello all,

I’ve often been asked which was my favourite AV player. Five years ago, I used to respond with "Winamp" or "Power DVD". But now, I should say, my opinions have changed. And thats why I laugh when people say that their favourite player is Real Player, or QuickTime. Right now, after having used most of the available audio/video playing software, I have formed a few of my favourites. And I thought that I would share them with you…

# 1 – Mplayer

Mplayer – an audio/video player for Linux, comes in as my all time favourite AV player. It can play as many video or audio clips as you want simultaneously. It has never crashed for me. It can play semi downloaded files, files with the wrong extension, and once, it has even played a zipped file! Any file with an audio or video track can be played with Mplayer. On Windows, you need to do a manual install, with a Send To shortcut to make it work. It does not have a GUI, but its amazingly powerful. Visit the Mplayer website for more information. Information on how to install and use Mplayer in your Windows system coming up in my next post.

# 2 – VLC Player

Almost as powerful as Mplayer, with a neat GUI, ladies and gentlemen, in second position comes VLC Player. Cross platform support and freeware – 2 words which make VLC magical! It can, like Mplayer, play isolated DVD files, all sorts of music and video files. But sometimes, especially in case of a defective DVD video file, your system hangs. If you like power, and no fancy stuff, but still a GUI, go in for VLC Player.

# 3 – Windows Media Player 11

Stylish and hot, WMP 11 creates a whole new AV experience for Windows users. Free to install for "genuine" Windows users, this awesome looking player is a complete package for any home user. Vista looks, audio/video tweaking, library feature, sync with music players, stable performance etc. are the main features of WMP 11. It comes in as # 3, even above iTunes, because of its fast and stable performance, cool looks, and easy to use sync feature. You can download WMP 11 from the Microsoft website.

Yes, thats my top 3. I hope that you’ve found this post useful. And no, Real Player, QuickTime etc. are not among my favourites. In fact they feature at the end of my favour list… Just below my top 3, comes DivX, iTunes, Powe DVD etc.

[tags]top 3, audio video players, audio players, video players, audio software, video software, av software, top 3 audio video players[/tags]

Hello all,

Facebook, the popular social networking website, has introduced a new type human verification system – using phone numbers to verify your "humanness" ( ) permanently, rather than using a CAPTCHA every single time.

Earlier, like in most other websites, you needed to enter a CAPTCHA code (an image verification system) for every single "questionable" action you took. This could get to be quite annoying, as a person will have to strain his eyes to read the scrambled text displayed by the image. And it also takes away precious time. Thus, an alternative had to be brought in soon.

Facebook has seemingly pioneered this alternative. They have introduced verification by phone. i.e. Instead of the CAPTCHA, you can confirm your phone number, and get rid of CAPTCHAs on Facebook for ever.

You’ll be asked to enter your mobile number, along with your country code. A message containing a verification code is SMSed to your mobile phone, which has to be entered in Facebook. And voila, bye bye CAPTCHA!

V

V

I don’t know how long this system has been existence, but it sure wasn’t there a couple of weeks back. This is a pretty good alternative to CAPTCHA, but gives rise to questions about privacy.

Also, the question arises – why can’t CAPTCHA be one time? If phone verification can be one time, why not CAPCTHA? The idea behind CAPTCHA at every step is to prevent bots from being unleashed after a human sign up.  Now, with phone verification, a bot creator (Homo sapien sapien) could sign up, verify using his mobile phone, and let loose the bots of hell! Facebook will have to look into this factor.

Anyway, most of the Facebook users will opt for the mobile verification, since it get rids of CAPTCHA permanently, a great relief while posting URLs or adding friends.

[tags]facebook, captcha, verification, mobile verification, phone verification, sms verification, verification code, captcha alternative[/tags]

Hi all,

I was a bit late to catch up on this news, but Google is planning to release a Wikipedia-Squidoo style social content website. Christened "Knol", Google calls this a "tool" which will "encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it".

In short, Google is trying to chase an area, in which Wikipedia currently rules the roost. With a big difference – Google will be commercializing Knol. Which means that a user can opt for an advertisement, Google Adsense of course, on his/her article pages, and he/she gets a "substantial share" of the revenue.

(click to enlarge)

Now the debate raging throughout the web is whether Google will give unfair advantage to pages from Knol on their search results.

Extract from the Official Google Blog

"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

I hope that Udi Manber, the writer of this post in the Google blog means what he said in a positive sense.

Anyway, experts argue that the Google brand will give value to these Knols, which will encourage users to link to Knols, and thus organically increase the ranking of Knols. This is again a far cry, since this same image and reputation exists even for Wikipedia. Ok, so Google is set to earn profit for Knol, unlike Wikipedia, but does that really matter?

Meanwhile, I’ve contacted a couple of my friends, well placed at Wikipedia, to try and get invites to Google Knol. Hopefully, they might succeed, and give me an insider review.

Now, bloggers are opining that Google is going a step too far with Knol. To be exact, Duncan Riley of TechCrunch. He’s given quite a comprehensive insight into how Google could do foul play with Knol, but then, Riley is known for his hopelessly ridiculous What-If posts (not that his intuitions are not accurate, but sometimes, when he plays with the "hot" of the moment, he gets carried away; otherwise, his reviews are excellent).

"He’s right. Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself. Of course Google in response would argue that it is simply facilitating user generated content (like with Blogger), that ultimately they are the host as opposed to the creator, but it still competes with existing content providers, many of whom rely on Google search results for their living. Which takes us to question of search results.

(TechCrunch)

Well, pretty true that Google is moving towards being a content provider, so what? So whats the big deal? If Google doesn’t cash in unethically, then why the big hue and cry?

Well, I guess we’ll wait and see…. And then we’ll decide to knol, or not to knol…

[tags]google knol, knol, knowledge, social content, wikipedia, squidoo, advertisements, make money, write articles[/tags]

Interactive Souls Engine – Virtual Tarot – reads your mind…

In other words, a perfect way to split your friend’s psyche and make him/her start worshipping all forces of fate, luck, and God.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I had the most curious of experiences today, when I thought that I was in a highly spiritual domain, but was in fact ’sucked’ to the core. It all started with me walking quite unnecessarily into the college Internet lab. There, I found two of my friends in an overly excited state ogling one of the computer screens with as much ‘oomph’ into their ogle as they’d seen a very beautiful and attractive girl. Needless to say, there WAS a girl sitting in between them, with a smug self satisfied expression on her face.

The trio invited me to a highly spiritual experience – I saw that they had the site called Peter Answers open. The girl typed in a petition (Peter, please answer:) and a question (Who just walked in?). I was like the all-in-all geek and dismissed the whole thing with a haughty wave of my hand, when to my utter astonishment, the words on screen formed "Mohan". I was digging my sub consious mind for all that I’d learned about iterations and random selections, when she asked what I was wearing to ‘Peter’, who promptly replied with my exact costume.

To find out what was amiss, I myself tried it out, and found that "I didn’t believe in spirits". The three musketeers told me that the phenomenon was true to only a select few. I tried the game a couple more times, and by lucky coincidence, the words on screen and my thoughts and feelings matched once. I fell into deep contemplation, and later undisturbed prayer. I started thanking all Gods for having achieved this state above Maslow’s Self Actualization – Transcendental stage! I started spreading the word to all my friends, till the logical me decided to look into the source…

The Source took me to a few lines of Ajax. "Ajax is God!" I reflected and continued looking… Hmmmm… Fishy…. Something extremely fishy… I decided to appeal to the God of the Internet, the master who controlled all what came in, and kicked out all which had to be out, the undisputed king of the entire Internet – Google. With a few references, and a closer look at the source, revealed a fantastic trick hidden beneath those spiritual theological layers.

An excellent way to trick your friends, like I was buffooned into this!

But before I continue, check out the site and give it a couple of tries.

The trick is simple enough. The "Petition" field is a farce. Hit the "." (period) and type – you’ll find text appearing out of nowhere. Whatever you type after hitting the period will be the text intended to appear. Put in the answer to your question here.

Now type the question as if nothing happened in the "Question" field. And moment you hit "?" the text you typed in in the Petition after the dot will appear! Voila! Abracadabra! Wingardium Leviosa! (woops, wrong one )

So how can it be used? Simple enough again. Get a few friends together, and tell them that you’ve reached self actualization, and that you could communicate with the netherworld. Ask you friends to ask the questions. If they know the answer, tell it out loud. Or if its an opinion, like in "Does she love me?" and stuff, just form the most witty answer yourself. Hit period and start typing the answer in the Petition field, and the question as normal! Enjoy

[tags]peter answers, fun, peter, answers, trick, trick friends, interactive souls engine,psychic answers[/tags]

Hi all,

The Online Games blog has listed a very good list of the top 10 3D Linux based games in a blog post which came up today. Typically, like these Top Blah Blah stuff get top clicks in socially promoted content, like in Digg, reddit etc., this Top 10 also got featured on the Digg front page. Owing to the fact that he/she’s hosted on Blogger, ths site hasnt crashed yet. The images are on flickr, so we can expect the blog to withstand the Digg effect.

Anyway, the reason why I point to this post is that, unlike all other Top 10 stuff, this post seems to be written with more than one aim.

• One aim is definitely to get onto Digg and receive a lot of Digg Juice
• Another aim, which I feel is relevant, is that everyone was downtrodding Linux for the fact that Linux didn’t have many good games to play. This seems like a plea from the heart of a hardcore Linuxian that Linux isn’t all bad.

The post was an eye opener for me. I, like many others, had believed that Linux didn’t sport many good games. But after seeing games like America’s Army and Nexiuz on the list, I’m forced to change my opinion. I never knew that these were available for Linux!

Ok, so I’m not a certified Linux geekie. I love my Photoshop and Dreamweaver and Flash and so on and so forth. I can’t part with all these… And GIMP is a substitute for MS Paint, not Photoshop!

But I don’t have anything against Linux, and I have Ubuntu on dual boot back home. But still, I never knew that there were such good games available for Linux.

So by this post, this guy got on the Digg front page, and enlightened 20,000 Digg visitors about the best games available on Linux. Keep up the good work buddy!

[tags]linux games, 3d games, 3d linux games, games, linux[/tags]

Hi all,

I just noticed that I had got my Google PageRank back. Well, not exactly back, but I’m now better off than 0. I had a PR of 4 before, until Google started penalizing blogs for displaying paid links which did not have the "nofollow" tags. I was advised by a Google contact of mine on what to do, and now I’ve got a PR of 2 – which I attribute to my inactivity.

Steps to recover your PageRank if you’ve been penalized by Google –

1. Remove the paid links
2. OPTIONAL : Append rel="nofollow" to all hyperlinks in your site to "shifty" webpages
   eg : <a href="http://the page here . html" title="Page here" rel="nofollow"> Link </a>
3. Go to Google Webmaster Central and sign up, if you haven’t already
4. Log in and click on "Request Reconsideration"
5. Select your site, check the checkbox, and explain in the text box truthfully about what happened, why it happened, how you got to know the Google guidelines only now, what actions you’ve taken, what all you’ve removed, and that your site now complies with all Google guidelines. After all this, hit the button which says "Request Reconsideration". You’re done!

Now wait for a couple of weeks (2-4 weeks). If your case is genuine, and you’ve been honest, you’ll get your Google PageRank back. Thats what happened to me, and many others. I wish you luck!

[tags]five steps, get back pagerank, google pagerank, google pr, google, pagerank, blog pr[/tags]

Hello,

Many of us would have wanted to shift from Blogger to Wordpress. But you must be put off by the fact that you would have to start all over again – visitors, feeds, Google PR, advertisers and so on… I’ve seen very many posts on the technical details on how to make the shift. A week back, my friend Amit from Digital Inspiration posted a blog on how to make the shift from Blogger to Wordpress without lasting damage in terms of visitors, RSS readers, and so on.

I found it quite useful, but since I didn’t have any more Blogger blogs (atleast none with a huge visitor count and stats) I couldn’t test it… It might turn out to be very useful for you. I reccomend this article as a MUST READ for anyone planning to shift from Blogger to Wordpress.

Check out Digital Inspiration.

Cheers

[tags]blogger to wordpress, shifting, blogs[/tags]

Hi all,

I was planning up a few reviews to start off my new blogging spree, but today morning, my curiosity was questioned by a very particular spam mail which formed part of the few hundreds I get every day, thankfully filtered by Gmail. The reason for me checking the mail out before clicking "Delete All" was that it was addressed to my college email id.

On checking it out, I found that the ’spamsters’ were getting better at their trade! Of course, the story line was the usual one – stash of cash found, deposited, want your help to retrieve, 40% of the cash for you… But what was interesting was that they had quoted the BBC for the source of cash, and had given a link to a BBC news report in 2003.

He said that he had found $650million from Late Mr Saddam Hussien’s home. The incident was for real, though BBC hadn’t reported that it came from Hussien’s home (which must be a farce anyway!).

The BBC article quoted was http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm .

And the mail is as follows -

Hello, My name is Jean Malik, employed to work in Iraq as a language translator. I am attached to 1st BN, 68th Amour Reg, 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry as an interpreter. As you aware, we were being attacked everyday by insurgents through hostile fire and car bombs.

SOURCE OF FUNDS: In April 2003, I and some other crew members in my team discovered $650M USD in Saddam Hussein’s palace. In the process of cross-checking the funds, I and my unit head managed to move away a total sum of US$12 Million dollars cash out of the $650MUSD, mostly 100-dollar bills and was quickly flown out of the war zone as a military cargo. The cargo was later disguised and declared as personal military effects before it was flown to Europe where it is now deposited in an undisclosed FINANCE, SECURITY & TRUST COMPANY. You can as well click on the site below for more details about the source of the funds. The site will give you a bit of idea of our operation and how I came about the fund though the security & finance company where the cash consignments are deposited is not aware of all this information. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm Unfortunately, my colleagues lost their dear life through hostile fire from the wicked Iraqi insurgents.

I therefore seek your partnership in claiming and receiving the cash consignments from the finance and security firm where the cash consignments are deposited for safety for possible investments on viable businesses of mutual beneficial interest. I will take 60% while you are going to be entitled to 40% for your participation and assistance. I wish to inform you also that it is my fervent wish to leave the United Kingdom as soon as we successfully and smoothly conclude the transaction. Upon your response, I will send you the full details of the Security & Trust Company in whose custody the funds are lodged as well as the modalities of claiming and receiving the cash consignments. But you must assure me and demonstrate it that you can be trusted as I need your unwavering assurances. I am presently in the United Kingdom where I am presently receiving treatment due to injuries sustained after our convoy came under heavy fire in a suburb area of Baghdad.

Please reconfirm your full names, address and direct phone number immediately so that I can submit the information to the finance firm where the cash consignments are deposited for change/transfer of ownership in your favour to enable you claim and receive the funds. I promise you that there is no risk on both sides as far as you follow my instructions and take my advice. The transaction will be concluded under a legitimate arrangement. Please reply to ||||TEXThidden|||@yahoo.fr Respectfully yours, Malik

Interesting isn’t it? They thought that by quoting a real BBC article, he could get out of the spam filter and actually force an idiot to send them an email with all his/her details. But the moral of this post is that, we should be more careful. If they can quote reliable sources like BBC, they can very soon change the storyline to something we haven’t yet encountered. And if they use a verified email address, then Gmail won’t be able to track it. Nor will other spam filters. Which means it could reach out inbox, and convince us.

So best thing to do to guard yourself is to not trust anything which does not come from people you know. If strangers ask you for details, never comply. Even if your friends ask you to send your personal information to a unknown email address, without ample reason, refuse to do so, since the friend’s email could very well be the work of a virus or a bot.

Cheers to a great weekend… Uh, Sunday….

[tags]spam, BBC, advanced spam, spam quoting BBC, protection, spam protection[/tags]