Live Writer updated!

[link]

Yay! updates to the Live Writer. The first thing I noticed is the fast startup  . And also, Writer gets its own space for extensions at the Windows Live Gallery. I like the Insert Spaces Emoticon extension. Good job Writer team

later...

Xbox 360 Ad in India

Interesting ad campaign

'Porok' is a sport played in certain parts of rural India. It is weird and wonderful because one has to adopt the stance of a fighter cock and head butt the opponent out of the circle. So we took this sport and blew it out of proportion to denote the power of gaming.

Good job with the gibberish :-)

The spoken tongue in the spot is absolute gibberish. We mixed most of the Indian languages up to get people guessing as to what the language was. The last line actually means "Porok afternoon cock horn, eunuch inside big bangle insect."

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Bubble wrap Maniac

Who doesn't like popping bubble wrap bubbles? It's a nice stress reliever and you can pop bubbles anytime on your system right here. Ah...environmental friendly way of popping bubbles :-) Try the maniac mode!

Update: Linked to available pops

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Temporary Spambox!

[link: Spambox.us]

• You got to download a new app and try it out, but the site requires a registration with email verification...
• You got to read that content of the news site, but the site requires a registration with email verification...
• Yet another forum from unknown, but it requires a registration with email verification...

If you give your email address for verification, there is a chance that your email address will be sold to spammers, else you'll miss out the content in those sites. A big dilemma, a situation I find myself in many a times. Enters Spambox, a service which gives you temporary email address just for this purpose, how much temporary, you decide from 30 minutes to 1 year or choose your own expiry time. I like this, die spammers [insert evil laugh here]

Caveat: How safe is Spambox, what if they sell my email address to spammers? They claim they don't and I guess I'll have to believe them.

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Toshiba joins Dell/Apple in battery recall

[link: BBC]

After Dell's and Apple's 4 million battery recalls, Toshiba joins the band wagon with 340,000 of it's laptop batteries being recalled. I guess the battery manufacturer Sony, is going to take a big part of the loss from all these recalls.

The batteries, used in Toshiba's Dynabook and Dynabook Satellite laptops made between March and May of this year, could lose all their power.

However, Toshiba's doesn't explode!

One of my Dell laptop's affected in this recall and I'm still awaiting the replacement battery, hope it arrives as specified.

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Login/Password for routers

Have you ever been in a situation to reset your router and lost the manual for the default password? Here's Lifehacker to rescue, they point to this page with full of all kind of router's default login/password

Hmm...many people are lazy enough to not change their router's default login/password [insert evil smirk here], seems like a nice way to have some fun on thy neighbors :-)

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Highway Travel Guides

[link: Highway Travel Guides]

Planned out a road trip, you'll be needing backup paper maps even though you're well equipped with the latest high tech gadgets (GPS/Windows Mobile and stuff)  Head out to the link above and print the US/Canada/Mexico road maps! And best of all it is free :-)

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Interesting Ads

Some of the recent HP ads are a head turner, they're cool

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Zune

The official news about it and the buzz and my favorite, J's interview

What more to say? I'm expecting many more products in Zune!

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The Virtual Earth Interactive SDK

[link: VE SDK]

Take out the boring out of reading an SDK, now Virtual Earth's got a new interactive SDK. Check it out!

[I used the Windows Live Writer's Insert Map add-in for inserting the above map. It's so easy, I just love Windows Live Writer :-)]

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Michael Schumacher to quit after this F1 season

[source: BBC]

Seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher will retire from Formula One at the end of the season.

The records Schumacher has set will probably never be broken, and he also established a new standard for F1 drivers with his extreme fitness and commitment.

F1 was one of my favorite watching sports, only because of Michael. We will miss you Michael and I'm sure F1 will not be the same without Michael Schumacher

He will be remembered as one of the greatest, and most controversial, drivers in the history of the sport.

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Media Codecs

In the last couple of weeks, I was rebuilding my laptop couple of times (Vista Beta testing!) and every time I wipe the machine, the media files in my hard disk won't play and the reason is "Unavailable Codec", what the heck this codec is? Well your answer is at about.com

Ok, now you understand what a codec is, with all the codecs in the world, where from you'll get those that are required for your media files. Well, I stumble upon this neat pack: K-lite Codec pack hosted at free-codecs. It contains all the codecs you'll ever need.

Now I know what should I do right after building a system :-)

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Cell phones won't keep your secrets

[source: CNN.com]

We should be careful not to give away phones without wiping them clean of data. Probably, the complete process of wiping out the data should come with the user manual, does it? who reads the manual ;-)

I use Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone and it does come with a clean wipe application which wipes it clean. I'll go ahead one more step and make sure by hard resetting (complicated procedure, sometimes requires 2 people) the device before I pass it over.

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IE Addon - Inline Search

[link]

Ah...better in-page search for IE, it is very easy to use and I'm addicted to it. I always wanted the Google toolbar kind of search but this beats it. I'll be interested if there is an addon which combines the Google feature of buttons for search terms and inline search, it'd be great. For now, I'm happy with this addon.

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Google Image Labeler

[Google Image Labeler]

It's amazing what the guys at Google come up with. Now with Image labeler, they gather image tags from people by letting them play a sort of tag matching game. Interesting!

later...