Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Sunday, April 03, 2011

MsgMe.at Is a Simple, Minimal Reminder Service [Reminders]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787846/msgmeat-is-a-simple-minimal-reminder-service

MsgMe.at is a simple reminder service that helps you schedule quick reminders and emails you when the time comes.

There are, of course, more robust reminder services like Remember the Milk, but if you're looking to schedule a reminder extremely fast and don't require any bells and whistles, MsgMe.At can help you out. All you have to do is enter in your reminder message and schedule a time. Tell MsgMe.At to remind you and it'll send an email your way. That's it. Very straightforward.

UPDATE: If you want a similar service that works with SMS text messages instead of email, check out Betwext Remind.

You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter and Facebook. If you'd like to contact him, Twitter is the most effective means of doing so.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools [Hive Five]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/#!5788337/five-best-desktop-customization-tools

Your desktop is your virtual home, and much like you're real home, customizing it to fit your needs and style can make the difference between between a drab and depressing workspace and one you're excited to work on. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite desktop customization tools, and now we're back with the five most popular tools for the job on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Image courtesy Lifehacker reader 0John0.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Rainmeter (Windows)

Rainmeter is a great tool for tweaking your Windows desktop. This actively developed tool attractively displays all kinds of information on your desktop (like your to-do list, calendar, weather, and a ton more), and from all kinds of sources on your computer or via the internet. You can change its look using themes available from their web site. Rainmeter is widely used and for Windows is a great way to customize your desktop.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

GeekTool (Mac)

If you want to display system information, text files, photos, graphs and other information on your Mac desktop, GeekTool can do the job. By default it ships with only a few plug-ins capable of monitoring text files, launching scripts, and monitoring system information, but used with conjunction with user-created Geeklets (GeekTool scripts), GeekTool can be extended to display any number of sources of information.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Samurize (Windows)

Samurize is another tool for customizing information displayed on your Windows desktop. Similar to Rainmeter, Samurize has many plug-ins that allow you to extend its functionality and the information it's capable of displaying on your desktop. The app itself doesn't appear to have been updated since 2007, but it works with Windows 7, and users are still submitting new plug-ins.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Conky (Linux, FreeBSD)

Conky is a customization tool that allows you to put system and other information onto your Linux desktop. Like many of the other tools featured above, the most popular way to use it is often to display current CPU, memory, and disk usage—but there are hundreds of other system options you can display, including things like email (IMAP and POP3) and currently playing music. Conky allows you to write any type of custom plugins you can think of using the Lua programming language.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Fences (Windows)

Fences is a unique program that's a bit different than the rest of the options in today's Hive. Rather than focusing on the kind of customization in which you add attractive information-focused widgets to your desktop, Fences is all about organizing your desktop clutter. Using the tool, you create boundaries (or fences) around areas on your desktop where you would like wrangle and organize certain shortcuts. These fences organize your desktop and all those shortcuts into a more attractive and manageable interface, keeping those desktop-cluttering shortcuts translucent in the background until you need them.

Now that you've seen the contenders, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite desktop customization tool.

What is your favorite desktop customization tool?customer surveys

Want to add a note about your favorite customization tool and what makes it so great? Let's hear it in the comments.

About the Hive: Every week we ask our readers to submit their nominations for a favorite software or service. The last Hive Five winner was Southwest Airlines for readers' favorite frequent flyer program. Check back on Tuesday for the results of this week's Hive Five: the best desktop customization tools.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools [Hive Five]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/#!5788337/five-best-desktop-customization-tools

Your desktop is your virtual home, and much like you're real home, customizing it to fit your needs and style can make the difference between between a drab and depressing workspace and one you're excited to work on. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite desktop customization tools, and now we're back with the five most popular tools for the job on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Image courtesy Lifehacker reader 0John0.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Rainmeter (Windows)

Rainmeter is a great tool for tweaking your Windows desktop. This actively developed tool attractively displays all kinds of information on your desktop (like your to-do list, calendar, weather, and a ton more), and from all kinds of sources on your computer or via the internet. You can change its look using themes available from their web site. Rainmeter is widely used and for Windows is a great way to customize your desktop.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

GeekTool (Mac)

If you want to display system information, text files, photos, graphs and other information on your Mac desktop, GeekTool can do the job. By default it ships with only a few plug-ins capable of monitoring text files, launching scripts, and monitoring system information, but used with conjunction with user-created Geeklets (GeekTool scripts), GeekTool can be extended to display any number of sources of information.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Samurize (Windows)

Samurize is another tool for customizing information displayed on your Windows desktop. Similar to Rainmeter, Samurize has many plug-ins that allow you to extend its functionality and the information it's capable of displaying on your desktop. The app itself doesn't appear to have been updated since 2007, but it works with Windows 7, and users are still submitting new plug-ins.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Conky (Linux, FreeBSD)

Conky is a customization tool that allows you to put system and other information onto your Linux desktop. Like many of the other tools featured above, the most popular way to use it is often to display current CPU, memory, and disk usage—but there are hundreds of other system options you can display, including things like email (IMAP and POP3) and currently playing music. Conky allows you to write any type of custom plugins you can think of using the Lua programming language.

Five Best Desktop Customization Tools

Fences (Windows)

Fences is a unique program that's a bit different than the rest of the options in today's Hive. Rather than focusing on the kind of customization in which you add attractive information-focused widgets to your desktop, Fences is all about organizing your desktop clutter. Using the tool, you create boundaries (or fences) around areas on your desktop where you would like wrangle and organize certain shortcuts. These fences organize your desktop and all those shortcuts into a more attractive and manageable interface, keeping those desktop-cluttering shortcuts translucent in the background until you need them.

Now that you've seen the contenders, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite desktop customization tool.

What is your favorite desktop customization tool?customer surveys

Want to add a note about your favorite customization tool and what makes it so great? Let's hear it in the comments.

About the Hive: Every week we ask our readers to submit their nominations for a favorite software or service. The last Hive Five winner was Southwest Airlines for readers' favorite frequent flyer program. Check back on Tuesday for the results of this week's Hive Five: the best desktop customization tools.

CCleaner Gets Even Better, Adds Firefox 4 and IE9 Support [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/#!5788333/ccleaner-gets-even-better-adds-firefox-4-and-ie-9-support

CCleaner Gets Even Better, Adds Firefox 4 and IE9 Support Windows only: Only a month after its last update, one of our favorite Windows utilities, CCleaner, has released a new update that now adds full support for Firefox 4 and IE 9 (both released last month) as well as several other improvements.

Per its change log, CCleaner v3.05 adds, among other things: iTunes cookie management, new environment variables for user documents (e.g., %MyMusic%), registry cleaning for Windows Services, and cleaning for additional applications—notably, many IM and chat programs including Skype, AIM, and Pidgin.

Though it's not a major upgrade, it's an important one, since CCleaner now supports Windows users who have the latest browsers, whether you've switched from Chrome to Firefox 4 (like Whitson has) or are playing with IE9's new features. Of course, CCleaner still supports Chrome, Opera, and Safari too. (Given the Piriform developers' always-speedy improvements, no doubt as soon as new versions of those browsers come out, CCleaner will also update to support them.)

If you haven't tried CCleaner yet, consider this free system optimization, privacy, and cleaning tool for your Windows machine. Also, don't forget to schedule CCleaner for automatic system maintenance.

CCleaner | Piriform

Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/02/qualcomms-1-5ghz-dual-core-msm8660-destroys-the-competition-in/

Take the 1GHz Scorpion core residing in Qualcomm's current flagship Snapdragon, the MSM8x55, duplicate it, overclock the resulting pair by 50 percent, and give them improved graphics in the form of Adreno 220. What do you get? A barnburner by the unsexy name of MSM8x60. Yes, the 1.5GHz Mobile Development Platform Qualcomm loosed on the world at CES earlier this year has found itself prostrate on a test bench, where it has produced some of the finest graphical performance scores yet seen on a mobile device. The taxing OpenGL ES 2.0 test you see above shows the new Snapdragon doubling the frame rates churned out by Motorola's mighty Atrix 4G (which admittedly has to work harder thanks to its higher-res display) and completely embarrassing older generation hardware like the EVO 4G. That's a theme carried on throughout AnandTech's benchmarking, which you may explore in full at the source link. If you're wondering when this world-beating dual-core chip will be coming to market, the answer is that it's already inside HTC's imminently upcoming EVO 3D and Pyramid devices, albeit running at a tamer 1.2GHz. Exciting, eh?

P.S. - Do take note that the Qualcomm dev platform was plugged into the wall during these tests and was not subject to any power management software that may have otherwise restrained its performance as on the retail chips under test. Moreover, the Egypt benchmark can only run at native resolution, which is what's causing some seemingly aberrant results such as the iPhone 4 (960 x 640) ranking below the iPhone 3GS (480 x 320).

Continue reading Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run

Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Apr 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell achieves AMD Fusion, announces Inspiron M102z notebook

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/02/dell-achieves-amd-fusion-announces-inspiron-m102z-notebook/

Dell gets its Fusion on, announces M102z notbook

After so many ages of waiting the Fusion devices are upon us, and here's Dell's entry. It's the M102z, rocking an AMD E-350 processor at 1.6GHz and Radeon HD 6310 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and an 11.6-inch display managing 1366 x 768 -- not bad for a little guy priced at $699. If that's a little too rich there's a 1GHz model with half the memory and slightly lower spec graphics for $599. Or, if you really like watching commercials, step it up to the $759 model with a built-in TV tuner. All are said to be available now abroad and should be hitting these shores soon, so if you had your finger hovering over the "Buy Now" button on an HP dm1z you might just want to hold off for a little while.

[Thanks, kamarul]

Dell achieves AMD Fusion, announces Inspiron M102z notebook originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Apr 2011 12:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony CEO casually mentions he's supplying cameras to Apple

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/02/sony-ceo-casually-mentions-hes-supplying-cameras-to-apple/

We were tempted to call it an April Fools' joke, but it seems the story's true: Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer reportedly let slip that his company is producing cameras for the next batch of iPhones and iPads during a public interview with the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, Apple's sourced its sensors from OmniVision, including the delightfully backside-illuminated 5 megapixel CMOS unit you'll find in the iPhone 4, but since Sony too has BSI tech and OmniVision has reportedly encountered delays, your next portable Apple product might house a Sony Exmor R sensor like the one we admired on the Xperia Arc. Mind you, that may not end up actually happening, because of the context in which Sir Howard revealed the news -- according to 9 to 5 Mac, he said that the factory producing sensors for Apple was affected by the Japanese tsunami. Oh well.

Sony CEO casually mentions he's supplying cameras to Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Electronista | source

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9 to 5 Mac, Wall Street Journal | Email this | Comments

Friday, April 01, 2011

Why Does This Crazy Router Look Like a Wind Turbine? [Wtf]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/#!5787750/why-does-this-crazy-router-look-like-a-wind-turbine

The Japanese company Logitec, not the same company as Logitech mind you, is releasing this crazy router called LAN-WH450N/GR that has an antenna that looks like wind turbine blades. What the hell? The three antenna design supposedly lets the 802.11n router hit network speeds of 450Mbps.

Yeah, whatever Logi-no h-tec, I ain't buying it. So why did they release such a thing? Some theories:

• One is better than none, two is better than one, three is better than two. No one counts to four.
• It'll ideally be placed next to a window to generate power for itself
• It's a quadrocopter missing a limb
• It can be used as the claw
• I scratch your back, you scratch my back, router scratches all our backs
• It probably makes for a good iPad stand!
• Their router looks like the PS3 fat and they needed something to throw Sony Legal off their trail.
• Logitec just needs to make crazy shit so people don't get 'em confused with the Logitech everyone already knows.

Or maybe it does exactly what Logitec says it does and is completely necessary. Who really knows! $230 or ¥19,000. [Logitec via Oh Gizmo]

James Cameron's Next Plan To Reinvent Cinema [Blip]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/#!5787970/james-camerons-next-plan-to-reinvent-cinema

James Cameron's Next Plan To Reinvent Cinema First it was digital projection. Then, 3D. And now James Cameron has set his sites on a more subtle—but possibly more important—innovation in film: frame rates. While the industry has been stuck at 24fps since the Roaring 20s, Cameron believes that by bumping that up to 48fps, or even 60fps, Hollywood can dramatically change our cinematic experience.

According to the LA Times:

He used a number of cinematic techniques in the footage to illuminate what he called the gravity of the gap between, say, 24 and 48 frames. One scene set at a dinner table included a number of panning shots, so the crowd could see how a 24 fps shot caused the image to "strobe" — which is when an image looks blurry, almost as if it is appearing in slow motion, seeming out of sync.

While even the filmmaker admitted that he was only able to notice a slight difference between a 48 fps and 60 fps, the audience audibly reacted to the increase in quality between 24 fps and 48 fps. The footage shown at 48 fps was far clearer and also had a much more realistic tone to it. That might be an issue for some filmmakers, Cameron acknowledged.

Most projectors are already capable of handling higher frame rates, and Cameron plans to shoot his Avatar sequel at at least 48fps. [LA Times]

Intel posts a short film about SSDs and the folly of not using them

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/intel-posts-a-short-film-about-ssds-and-the-folly-of-not-using-t/

Intel cares about you. It cares that your data is safe and secure in a sturdy storage silo of the solid state variety. In order to enlighten you on the dangers that old and dusty magnetic hard drives pose, it has kindly fashioned out a short film detailing graphically the fate of your 1s and 0s when they're kept on an HDD that suffers an unexpected impact. It's atmospheric, thrilling stuff, which we dare not spoil for you here. We'll just say it ends on a pretty hilarious note and point you to the video below.

Continue reading Intel posts a short film about SSDs and the folly of not using them

Intel posts a short film about SSDs and the folly of not using them originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nanogenerators produce electricity by squeezing your fingers together, while you dance

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/nanogenerators-produce-electricity-by-squeezing-your-fingers-tog/

It's been a while since we last heard about nanogenerators -- you know, those insanely tiny fibers that could potentially be woven into your hoodie to juice up your smartphone. Dr. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology has reported that he and his team of Einsteins constructed nanogenerators with enough energy to potentially power LCDs, LEDs and laser diodes by moving your various limbs. These micro-powerhouses -- strands of piezoelectric zinc oxide, 1 / 500 the width of a single hair strand -- can generate electrical charges when flexed or strained. Wang and his team of researchers shoved a collection of their nanogenerators into a chip 1 / 4 the size of a stamp, stacked five of them on top of one another and can pinch the stack between their fingers to generate the output of two standard AA batteries -- around 3 volts. Although it's not much, we're super excited at this point in development -- imagine how convenient to charge your phone in your pocket sans the bulky battery add-ons. And that's only one application of this technology. Yea, we know.

Continue reading Nanogenerators produce electricity by squeezing your fingers together, while you dance

Nanogenerators produce electricity by squeezing your fingers together, while you dance originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

EurekAlert | source

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American Chemical Society | Email this | Comments

LG's dual-core Optimus 2X superphone now available from Expansys

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/01/lgs-dual-core-optimus-2x-superphone-now-available-from-expansys/

The world's most adored across-the-pond mobile retailer has just received its first batch of LG superphones, a gem by the name of Optimus 2X. As you well know by now, the company's playing this up as the planet's first dual-core smartphone, and while we'd hoped that the Tegra 2-based device would be everywhere by now, at least it's sticking to its scheduled release date over in Europe. Those interested in picking one up can get a SIM-free version headed their way for £449.99, while a free-on-contract affair can be had with T-Mobile, Vodafone and a host of others. Your credit card's been awful naughty of late -- dish out a little punishment by visiting the source link below.

[Thanks, Robert]

LG's dual-core Optimus 2X superphone now available from Expansys originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Awesome branding opportunity - Google Blimp Ads, launching in May, get it before they sell out (pics) click here - http://bit.ly/gpJ7Ek

Google is hiring Autocompleters - limited spots available at Mountain View HQ - http://bit.ly/gpJ7Ek

Awesome branding opportunity - Google Blimp Ads, launching in May, get it before they sell out (pics) click here - http://bit.ly/gpJ7Ek

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