Aakash's shared items in Google Reader

How to Automatically Mute Ads on Spotify [Spotify]

2011-07-29T10:00:00Z

It's nice that music-streaming service Spotify offers a free, ad-supported version, and most of the time we don't mind listening to an ad or two for the privilege. But those audio ads can be a serious buzzkill when they interrupt your party music. Here's how to automatically mute ads in Spotify and keep the flow in your playlists.

Windows

Blockify is far and away the best Spotify ad blocker for Windows. It sits in your system tray and mutes Spotify (or your computer, your choice) whenever it detects an audio ad. It'll unmute Spotify when the ad finishes playing.

Better yet, though, Blockify can do more than just mute ads: It also adds customizable hotkeys to Spotify, so you can skip tracks, play, pause, shuffle, and change the volume with keyboard shortcuts. It also allows you to play a substitute MP3 from your Music folder when it mutes an ad—that way, you don't have any empty space between songs. When it detects an ad, it will mute Spotify, play a random MP3 from your Music folder, and then move to the next track on your Spotify playlist when that song is over, which is a really cool little feature.

Mac OS X

On OS X, you can mute ads just by downloading and running Smutefy. Smutefy sits in your menu bar, mutes Spotify whenever an ad plays, and unmutes it when the ad is over. There's no other configuration necessary, though you will need previously mentioned Soundflower installed for it to work. It also has a manual blocklist, so if any do come up, you can block them from showing up again just by clicking an option in the menu bar.

Of course, it's also worth mentioning that the best way to avoid ads in Spotify is to pay for the $5 per month "Unlimited" upgrade. If you're going to block ads all the time, you're probably better off supporting the service, but we understand that sometimes you just want to make it through a playlist without being interrupted by out-of-place music. Use with care!

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

The World's Most Gargantuan Diesel Engine [Monster Machines]

2011-07-20T15:30:00Z

It may shock you that a lot of the stuff we buy is made in China. In order to keep up with the mammoth demand for Snuggies, Shake Weights and other trappings of modern society, the Emma Mærsk makes the trip in four fewer days than the average container ship on a China-to-California run.

Oh, did I mention that the Emma Mærsk is the most vast container ship in the world? At over 1300 feet long, it weighs 170,974 tons and carries 11,000 twenty-foot shipping containers. To move this mammoth vessel at its cruising speed of 31 knots (vs. the standard 18-20), you'll need more than some puny nuclear reactor—you need the 109,000Hp Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C, a 44-foot tall, 90-foot long diesel engine.

The 14-cylinder, 2-stroke TRA96 aboard the Emma Mærsk weighs over 2300 tons and operates at a relatively pokey 102 rpm. Unlike traditional diesel engines, the RTA96-C forgoes the camshaft, chain gear, fuel pumps and hydraulic actuators in favor of common rail technology. Common rail technology uses a high-pressure fuel rail to supply individual solenoid valves rather than a fuel pump feeding injectors. This allows the engine to perform better at low revs and consume less fuel. Still, even with these efficiencies, it still injects 6.5 ounces of diesel in every piston for every cycle.

With 25 engines already in service and another 86 on order, these engines will drive globalization—right into your local Wal-Mart.

[Wartsila - RTA96-C Wiki - Common Rail Wiki - Sodahead]

Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.

You can keep up with Andrew Tarantola, the author of this post, on Twitter or Facebook.

Elements of Happiness: A happy life depicted in diagrams

2011-06-27T10:30:27Z

For several decades, Harvard Laboratory of Adult Development has chronicled the lives of hundreds of men from adolescence through adulthood for "an unprecedented database of life histories with which to view the dynamic character of the aging process." Designer Laura Javier took ten of those cases and visualized them in the Elements of Happiness.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest prospective study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 824 individuals through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. In this book, I've taken 10 representative case studies and visualized their salient character traits, personal timeline, social supports, and physical health to draw conclusions about "the happy life."

The graphics are simple, and the stories are beautiful.

Browse the full book here.

[Elements of Happiness via Infochimps]

A Beautiful Glimpse of the Milky Way From Spain's Tallest Mountain [Video]

2011-04-16T15:00:00Z

Certainly, Norwegian photographer Terje Sorgjerd has a talent for capturing the awe-inspiring. Taken on El Teide in the Canary Islands, this time lapse captures the Milky Way galaxy overhead as sand wafts across the landscape as gold clouds. [The Awesomer]

Ascent - Commemorating Shuttle

2010-12-20T06:18:00Z

To achieve orbit, the space shuttle must accelerate from zero to a speed of almost 28,968 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour), a speed nine times as fast as the average rifle bullet. It takes over a million moving parts, weighing in over 4.5million pounds to work in perfect synchronization to put this marvel into orbit:

This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program.

Don’t miss the awesome detail on some of these clips- the “docucam” for documentaries and that awesome shot of the sun behind the SRBs @ 34:45- amazing photography. I could watch this for hours. :-p

Must watch if you are a shuttle-head: Worth every minute of the 45minute collection.

Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs | Source: Jalopnik

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Speed-flying at Chamonix

2010-12-18T19:13:00Z

Source: Gizmodo

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The Intricate Choreography of Flight

2010-11-30T04:56:06Z

Shared by Aakash
http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/flight/index.html#ch1

5,000 airplanes are in the United States skies every hour. 63 of those planes were filmed for this time-elapse video showing the intricate and beautiful choreography of take-offs and landings. Watch it. It's worth two minutes.

If you want to see how the video was created and get more information on aviation, planes, and flight paths, then be sure to head over to the GE Aviation team's site. [GE]

Video: Magnetic Twister Erupts on Sun

2010-11-27T15:42:22Z

Shared by Aakash
217,000 miles tall!! :-/ http://spaceweather.com/swpod2010/28oct10/twister768.gif?PHPSESSID=gb5e4mmh7d3c360j415eniia07

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an enormous plasma twister erupting on the surface of the sun Oct. 28.

The explosion was triggered by a tangled coil of magnetism that suddenly untwisted, acting like a loaded spring and hurling solar matter into space. At its peak, the twister towered more than 217,000 miles above the surface of the sun.

Luckily, the fragments of plasma flung into space were not headed toward Earth, where they could have caused a magnetic storm. Now that the twister has relaxed, it probably won’t erupt again — though other sunspots are gathering energy and could produce medium-sized solar flares.

Via spaceweather.com

Image: NASA/SDO

Visualize your GMail!

2010-11-22T21:09:00Z

A very simple chrome extension lets you graph your gmail inbox for some very interesting insights to your mailing habits. Install Graph Your Inbox for Chrome here.

Another cool gmail related web-app I’ve used recently is called FindBigMail. It automatically searches your inbox for large emails and sends out a very concise summary of the largest emails- automatically labeling them for future reference and deletion when you are running out of gmail space.

I buckled to my online storage needs this last weekend and bought 20gb of Google storage for $5. Not bad given the amount of data I store on their servers.

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Antimatter Trapped For the First Time [Video]

2010-11-17T22:40:00Z

Get ready for that warp drive spaceship, because we are now one step closer to it. After creating antihydrogen in their antiproton decelerator, scientists at CERN have been able to trap antimatter for the first time in history.

This a big step. First, it gets humanity closer to understanding one of the biggest mysteries of the Universe: What happened to all the antimatter that was created during the Big Bang? In theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal parts during the Big Bang. However, the latter disappeared shortly thereafter. Or at least, we can't seem to find it. The spokesman for CERN's ALPHA experiment—Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, Denmark—says that trapping these atoms was a bit of an overwhelming experience:

What's new about Alpha is that now we've managed to hold on to those atoms. We have a magnetic bowl, kind of a bottle, that holds the antihydrogen [...] For reasons that no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter. It is thus very rewarding, and a bit overwhelming, to look at the ALPHA device and know that it contains stable, neutral atoms of antimatter.

CERN created the first nine atoms of antihydrogen in 1995, and then started to produce atoms in large quantities in 2002, as part of the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments. This is the first time that scientists have been able to trap antihydrogen atoms for a long enough time to study them, keeping them at 9 degrees kelvin (-443.47 degrees Fahrenheit, -264.15 degrees Celsius), suspended in a magnetic field inside this Ghostbusters-style machine.

The other reason why this is an important step is its potential to solve our need for unlimited energy. When antihydrogen touches matter—as shown in the image above—it releases a huge amount of energy. Many scientists speculate that antimatter may be the key to provide unlimited power capable of driving machines that are unthinkable right now. Eventually, it could be the stuff that could power new engines capable of taking us to the stars at near-light speed.

The energy per unit mass (9×1016 J/kg) is about 10 orders of magnitude greater than chemical energy, about 4 orders of magnitude greater than nuclear energy that can be liberated today using nuclear fission, and about 2 orders of magnitude greater than the best possible from fusion.

The reaction of 1 kilogram of antimatter with 1 kilogram of matter would produce 180 petajoules of energy or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 50 megatons, which required the use of hundreds of kilograms of fissile material. Wikipedia

Or maybe we will just manage to destroy the world in one big honkin explosion of strawberry and cherry goo. It can go either way.

But fear not, we are not there yet. At this stage, scientists are still trying to comprehend how antimatter works. This is one more—although very important—step in this quest. [CERN]

This Is the World's Fastest Rollercoaster In Action [Video]

2010-11-21T06:04:00Z

Shared by Aakash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGnQnce_SsQ

We knew the world's fastest rollercoaster was a Ferrari, but we never saw this 150mph crazy ride action. Here it is, shown by Ferrari Formula 1's pilots Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa. Zero to 62mph in two seconds. Terrifying. [Thanks Perico!]

Why You'll Give Up Gmail for Facebook Mail [Facebook]

2010-11-12T16:30:00Z

According to Techcrunch's sources, a full webmail client integrated with The One and Only Social Network will debut next Monday. This is why it may become your favorite webmail service.

If I were Google, Yahoo or Hotmail, I'd be very nervous. Facebook Mail could be a killer not only because of its potential instant size, but because of its natural advantage at making mail more useful.

That's the important thing for Facebook users and everyone else. This may become the only 100% useful mail service out there, only showing you the emails you are actually interested in. To me, if they have the right user interface, that's enough reason to switch from Gmail.

Why use Facebook for email?

Facebook has 500 million active users. Gmail is estimated at 170 million registered users, while Yahoo has 303 million and Hotmail is still king of the hill at 364 million. Of course, not every Facebook boy and girl will jump on its mail bandwagon, but chances are that a huge percentage of you will. In fact, it's not a crazy assumption that almost everyone will, even if that means having yet another mail account added to your computer, phone or tablet.

The fact is that it may be just too convenient to ignore. Facebook users are already used to its internal messaging system. For many, this will be a nice upgrade that will let them add these messages to their mail boxes. Remember that Facebook's mail is rumored to have external mail client access as well as its dedicated webmail interface. It will be easy to have it in every single gadget you own.

But, most importantly, Facebook's users would probably jump in because the social nature of Facebook fits perfectly with the social nature of mail. The irony here is that their mail system could be a raging success because of what many people criticize: Facebook tracks all your moves.

Your playground

Since Facebook knows how you interact with all your contacts, they would be able to perfectly separate what is important from what is not. Having used Gmail's Priority Inbox for a while, I have the feeling that Facebook could do much better at given all their data and some clever, but not overly complicated logic.

Moreover, it's not only about separating what is important and what is not. Their data tracking and analysis could allow them to do many other things. For example, they just have to analyze who is tagging you in photos, who is with you in those photos, to know who are your real friends, and categorize mail accordingly. They can automatically classify mail from the person who just became your fiance or lower the priority of that ex who keeps mailing you. The possibilities of using your social interactions to enhance the mail experience are endless. I have no doubt that Facebook will exploit this information to your advantage—and theirs, I'm afraid.

Ultimately, that's what people—especially younger generations—like about Facebook. It's always prioritized communication, a closed playground where only your friends and contacts get to interact with you. If they can provide a mail system that will allow the controlled entry of external people while keeping the playground fun, clean, and safe, they'll have a winner. [TechCrunch]

Statistics & Time

2010-09-16T04:35:00Z

Checkout this infographic that maps world/US statistics to time:

Thanks for sharing @Ilona Alekseenko !

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

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Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations

2010-08-14T16:11:00Z

Radial Engines

Radial engines are used in aircrafts having propeller connected to the shaft delivering power in order to produce thrust its basic mechanism is as follows

Steam engine Principle

Steam engine once used in locomotives was based on the reciprocating principle as shown below

Sewing Machine

Maltese Cross Mechanism

this type of mechanism is used in clocks to power the second hand movement.

Manual Transmission Mechanism

The mechanism also called as “stick shift” is used in cars to change gears mannually

Constant Velocity Joint

This mechanism is used in the front wheel drive cars

Torpedo-Boat destroyer System

This system is used to destroy fleet in naval military operations.

Rotary Engine

Also called as Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine has a unique design that converts pressure into rotating motion instead of reciprocating pistons

The Beauty of the Power Game - Video Feature

2010-08-27T22:56:39Z

Shared by Aakash
Thanks for sharing @Rochana

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/29/magazine/womens-tennis.html

A video gallery of the top female tennis players — in slow motion. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/29/magazine/womens-tennis.html

Vapor-Metalized Plastic

2010-08-26T23:55:41Z

A piece of plastic goes in, a piece of metal comes out. At least, that's what vapor metallizing seems to accomplish, at least to our immediate senses. It's gilding, except it's been updated for the electronics age. And it's everywhere.

Vapor metallization is a solution to a common industrial problem: Plastic is easily moldable, lightweight and above all, cheap to make. On the other hand, "nice" metals are tougher to work with, and more expensive. So, for the same reasons ancient Greek artisans pressed thin layers of gold leaf to statues, countless factories around the world use vapor metallization treatments to turn plastic into, well, not-plastic. They metallize your laptops and your phones, your mirrors and your car bumpers. You can take it either as a clever manufacturing tool or a terrible mass fraud, a cynical technique to make customers pay for The Metal Lifestyle, only to live with plastic. Your choice! Either way, here's how it works.

What it Means: From Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design: A process in which a thin coating of metal—usually aluminum—is deposited from a vapor onto a component. The vapor is created in a vacuum chamber by direct heating or electron beam heating of the metal, from which is condenses onto the cold component. (Note: The process is often called Physical vapor deposition.)

What THAT Means: Ignoring the hard science of vapor metallization for a minute, here's what happening, basically: Hunks of plastic, or unfinished metal, are marched into large machines called vacuum metallizers, or liquid metallizers, or sometimes sputtering systems. These can look something like 50s vintage iron lungs, built around large, sturdy-looking tanks and festooned with all manner of tubes and wires, or in more modern incarnations, featureless, room-sized boxes.

The inside of the vacuum metallizer is a bit like a sauna, with industrial components in place of paunchy, leering old men. And rather than humidifying the air with occasional puffs of steam, liquid metallizers vaporize bits of metal into an ultrafine mist. Where sauna-goers strut from behind the curtain glistening under a thin coat of water, vapor-metallized plastics emerge coated with an extremely fine, even layer of real, actual metal. Here's what the whole process looks like, from the outside. (Those are headlight mirrors, by the way):

Of course, vaporizing aluminum isn't as easy a ladling water onto a bed of semi-decorative rocks, and what's going on inside this giant mystery box is quite a bit more complicated. And the steam analogy doesn't hold for very long: the steam in a sauna in comprised of molecules of water, floating through an atmosphere filled with various gases. In a metal vaporizers, the vapor is made purely from atoms of the vaporized material, heated either atop a ceramic plate (because metal heaters could produce small amounts of vapor of their own) or by means of a freakin' cathode ray, and spewed into total vacuum. (All the gasses in the air we breath would interfere with all the aluminum atoms floating around.)

This is the reason vapor metal treatments are so desirable: the film they create, though it can be as thin as a few microns, is deposited on the target surface atom by atom, which gives it an atomically (literally!) smooth finish.

Of course, this means that fresh out of the vaporizer, treated plastics are hideously shiny. This makes the technique perfect for turning plastics into mirrors, or creating low-cost chrome-style highlights. But since they're now covered in a superthin film of actual metal, they can be buffed, sanded or blasted into a less offensive sheen. It can be tasteful or tasteless, sort of like spray tanning. Actually, let's go with that: Vapor-metallization is spray tanning, for stuff.

This has been Vocab Lesson, Gizmodo's weekly column on words—the ones you've heard, but can't quite define, or the ones you haven't, but might like to hear about.

If you'd like to hear more about a strange tech word or phrase, send a request along. We'll look it up for you! Probably.

Original art by guest artist Chuck Anderson. See Chuck's work at www.nopattern.com and follow him on Twitter.

Bob Hates Casual Friday

2010-08-26T02:44:47Z

Shared by Aakash
Sapient makes it to.. #Photobomb ??! :-/ next pic in series at http://goo.gl/387U

Submitted by: Omar

All the tropical prints and the leis and the fake tans just remind him that he forgot to take his two weeks of vacation before the year rolled over. – Ms. Fix-It

Cloud Time Lapse

2010-08-24T03:12:00Z

This video was shot a little over a year ago on a windy day in Atlanta from a window sill at work. I wasn't carrying a tripod or I would have angled this to get a much better view (such as cropping out the parking lot, angling the camera to the side to get more perspective and avoiding the reflection). This was a 10 minute exposure in sepia tone with no preparation. Just discovered the original on an old memory card I was about to throw away today! :)

The 650 meg file converted to 18MB of high speed camera trickery. I know this can be improved in so many ways- just didn’t want to delete the file without making something out of it. The music is "are y0u awake" by kevin shields - the song that I had playing at work that afternoon.

Click here to view on YouTube.

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License Plate FAIL

2010-08-13T15:13:59Z

Shared by Aakash
LOL! From http://failblog.org/2010/07/30/license-plate-fail-7/

Inside AT&T's National Disaster Recovery Batcave: Who AT&T Calls When the Death Star Explodes [At&t]

2010-08-02T17:00:00Z

When the World Trade Center collapsed, it took out a critical AT&T switch, crippling service. It was restored in 52 hours—including the time to drive a caravan of eighteen-wheelers from Atlanta to a lot in Jersey City.

***

It's hot, and muggy, like it usually is in Georgia at the end of July. There's no AC in this warehouse, a concrete desert with a tin roof, lit by strips of undying fluorescent lights and streaks of the sun flooding in from the open bay doors in the back. A single industrial-sized fan is blowing, almost like someone's idea of a practical joke. It's a vast industrial space that feels utterly empty, even with dozens of 18 wheelers lined up, a convoy waiting for a calamity. The only signs that humans work here are a basketball hoop and a climbing rope. I was hoping for a more Batcave-y Batcave.

This nondescript warehouse, in an even more nondescript town outside of Atlanta, is home to AT&T's National Disaster Recovery program, one of six depots scattered around the country. When an AT&T central office or other piece of critical networking infrastructure, is wiped off the face of the earth, NDR is what makes shit work again.

***

The World Trade Center came down on top of a node in tower number two and took out a switch for voice calls in the adjacent building. The 52 hours it took NDR to restore service included not just the time it took to drive a caravan of eighteen-wheelers straight up the East Coast, but picking up stranded workers all along the way. (The FAA had grounded all flights into NY.) The trailer city became AT&T's de facto office in New York for three months. That's what NDR is, effectively—AT&T on lots and lots of wheels that can set up anywhere and assimilate any function of a "smoking hole" office. It's like the Super Star Destroyer from Empire, after the Death Star is blown up.

I guess the simplest way to think about NDR is in terms of the fleet: over 300 trailers nationwide, loaded with networking equipment. The warehouse I'm standing in houses around 40 of them. When AT&T's Global Networking Operations Center, located in New Jersey of all places, declares that a disaster has ensued—an office destroyed, a switch crushed or something else that majorly crimps the network—a convoy is dispatched. On average, it takes 20-40 trailers (think eighteen-wheelers) and about 96 hours to replicate an office, depending on the kind of service they're trying to restore.

The guts of AT&T, vis-a-vis the microcosm of a tractor-trailer, are what you'd expect, almost mundane: a lot of cables and switches and wires. Trailer after trailer, the hallways, lit by cold fluorescent lights, are straight out of your more claustrophobic nightmares of Area 51. But disappointingly, without dripping goo. They're almost like giant routers stretched across a hallway. Super duper routers, really, since the newer trucks have the capacity of an OC-768 line (38.486016 gigabits a second), or 80,000 voice circuits. And in the back, man-sized modular batteries that last for up to a decade.

And then there's the "Home Depot on wheels." One of the things that AT&T's learned about disasters like Katrina since starting NDR in 1991 is that if you need something, bring it with you—with thousands of crazy people running around, it's probably not going to be there. The trailer is a full workshop, with enough saws, hammers, power tools and materials to build a small fortress or seven. It smells like a toolshed should, the dirt and grime and plywood a nicely organic contrast to the yellow plastic and blue cables lining the surrounding networking trucks.

When an NDR team lands in the middle of a shitstorm, first it looks for somewhere to setup. It needs space, and if possible, access to fiber. For the WTC, Manhattan wasn't an option. So it investigated three vacant lots in New Jersey, all located near troves of "dark fiber," masses of inactive fiber that's already been laid down, making it easy to jack into the network. (Preferably, it can just plunk down next to the dead office, like in Galveston, post-Rita, where it spliced in via manholes.) Trailers are then set and leveled off. Phone lines established; then power is jacked in and grounded; networking and optical lines between the trailers are hooked up; and finally tech people start flipping switches to start rerouting everything where it needs to go. A weekly data backup is made for each office—Lucent merges the tape with configuration data to establish all the circuits correctly. All of this is what happens in the course of 4-7 days.

***

We're back in the conference room, where the morbid business of disaster planning takes place. A map of the US on the wall is filled with red pushpins, looking like it has a weird case of the measles. It's where they've held training exercises, which happen once every three months, since actual disasters don't happen quite that often. A weatherman appears on the TV hanging overhead, blathering about the latest on Tropical Storm Bonnie, and where in the Gulf it might head next. My AT&T escorts look up, briefly fixated on the map he's gesticulating toward. He might be telling them where they're headed next.