April 30th, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in Tips N Tricks
iSnooze is a small and simple Windows application that lets you use your iTunes as an alarm clock. Just download the exe file and install in your Windows machine and you can start setting up your wake up times. The program will sit nicely in your icon system tray and features Spacebar activated snooze, configurable snooze time, gradual volume increasing, multiple alarm schedules, playlist selection, temporary pausing when you reach your computer to give you time to shut it off.
Alarm Clock 2 is for the Mac OS-X users. It functions pretty much the same as iSnooze with some differences in features and keyboard commands. It also utilizes Mac features like the Apple Remote. The Alarm Clock 2 features: Wake up to any song, playlist or podcast in your iTunes libaray, wake up peacefully with “easy wake” – a configurable option that slowly increases the volume of your alarm over time, Can wake your computer from sleep and hit snooze with your apple remote.
Wix is an online application that you can use to create and publish Flash-based websites without any programming knowledge. I was very curious to see what they are offering and when I got an invitation from the Wix team to test the app, I immediately took the plunge.
The Wix Editor is a flash based drag and drop tool which makes it easier for anyone to add, remove and arrange objects in the webpage project. Adding a page element like buttons and borders can be done in just a couple of clicks. Adding a new page and linking them together will not require you to place href codes, you can just click the image of the page you want an object to link to. Linking to an external page however will require you to place the URL of the external link, which is the only coding part of the website making process that you will ever encounter when using Wix.
Different forms of media like videos (from YouTube), music and pictures (from Flickr, Wix or your hard drive) can be easily inserted in the project. Widgets like photo albums, media player and mini pages are also available as enhancements. What is even more interesting in the editor is that the editing is not only limited to using the buttons and menus in Wix. You can also use keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+X for cut and Ctrl+V for paste and other keyboard shortcuts. The right click mouse button can also be used when editing which is rarely seen in flash based applications. There is no undo function so one must be careful in deleting elements, instead use the cut command.
Once you have completed a website or a page, you can choose to publish it publicly which will be available to the Wix community and will be indexed by search engine or you can choose the private mode. An embed code is also provided so that you can place your work in social sites and blogs. You can also use the email option which can be useful if you to use the flash page for marketing or company brochures.
In conclusion, Wix is a powerful web app which can do wonders for anyone who wants to create a website without going to the process of coding. The user friendly and eyecandy user interface makes website design an enjoyable experience. The service is still in private beta and If you want to check out the cool app, just visit their site and sign up for an invitation. Check out a simple website that I made using Wix. I have provided an embedded version below. Check out the full size here.
Presdo is a simple, but has the potential to be an extremely and useful and interactive, online scheduler that lets people input natural language to set up meetings. By using the text-based interface, Presdo lets people say as much or as little about the event as they want when creating events.
To use the service just enter a natural language text related to your meeting and schedule. For example, you can input “Monday morning with Martin,” Presdo will assume that Monday is tomorrow provided that today is Sunday and will suggest the best time in the morning for a meeting. If it conflicts with a schedule you already set up, you can get suggestions for the best time or enter your desired time.
The next step is to advise the person you are setting the meeting with. Just enter the email of the person and a notification mail will be sent to the person or group of people involved. You can also add a location or use a suggestion list (or map) powered by Google Maps for the invited person to choose from. Pretty cool? It gets even better when the invited party receives the invitation. A link to Presdo will be provided for the guest where he (she) can automatically reply if he (she) can make it or not by pressing a button. The guest can also suggest a better time if he (she) is not available at the time that you (the sender) have suggested. When everything is set, both parties can save their schedules in their calendar of choice. Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Yahoo! Calendar and of course Google Calendar.
This takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. You can use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend.
How many times have you searched Google or Yahoo using a phrase or a sentence and returned a search result of a page with just a bunch of keywords related to your search and not the real context that you want? Sometimes you’ll end up browsing the second or third page of the search results just to find what you are really looking for. This is why most people agree that the Google page ranking system is losing its relevance. Given this, most people still use the first page of Google search results as their primary resource of information. Low ranking pages with relevant content still loses the battle in the page ranking system Google has devised. Google’s reliance on keywords in their search algorithm doesn’t entirely mean that all the search results they are providing are totally irrelevant. Sometimes it just takes more time to find what you are really looking for in the Google search pages, especially for novice and average users.
Soon, a new search engine called Powerset will emerge and will change how people search the web. Powerset is a natural language search company that is building a transformative (learning) consumer search engine. Unlike traditional keyword search that only indexes the keywords that appear on a page, Powerset indexes the meaning of the sentences in each page. By matching the meaning of the query against the meaning of sentences in their index, Powerset promises to often return better, more accurate results and even return results that aren’t possible with traditional keyword search.
The Powerset technology is still under development and there is no official launch date yet. If you must try it out, you can register for an invitation in PowerLabs, a community where users can interact with demonstrations of Powerset’s technolog. You can try out their Wiki Search Sneak Peek demo. It offers you a chance to play with an early application of Powerset’s technology based on an index of Wikipedia. You can also take part and give feedback to help improve their natural language indexing, and suggest ideas for the ideal search engine. This is another great example of user interaction towards the development of new technologies and products.
WordPress just released another update since a major one last month (ver 2.5). The new version 2.5.1, includes over seventy bug fixes including security fixes. Check out the full list of fixes made in 2.5.1 here.
As for added security, all is advised to place a secret key in their wp-config.php file. If you can’t come up with your own secret key, you can let WordPress generate a random secret key for you by clicking the “visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key” in their blog post. Just copy the entire line of code and paste it into your wp-config.php file (or overwrite this line if it exists: define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase).
Reminder: To update, just copy everything to your host EXCEPT the wp-content folder. Copying the wp-content folder to your server will delete (overwrite) your currently installed themes and plugins. Always remember to backup.
WordPress just released another update since a major one last month (ver 2.5). The new version 2.5.1, includes over seventy bug fixes including security fixes. Check out the full list of 
