@Astro_TJ, as Flight Engineer TJ Creamer is known on Twitter, posted the first live update about a day ago while in orbit, saying:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Using a Nasa software upgrade on the international space station, astronauts now able to update their Twitter feeds themselves. Using a new, high-powered wireless connection which has been established between orbiters and groundlings, international space station astronauts can post tweets directly from their spacecraft.

Previously astronaut’s tweets have had to be emailed to ground control and then posted to astronauts’ accounts by Nasa’s administrative team. The new powerful web connection, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station, allowing astronauts to browse and use the web.

This development will enhance the astronaut’s personal lives during long missions, easing the isolation associated with life in a closed environment. According to Nasa, astronauts will follow the same internet use guidelines as government employees on Earth.

Astronaut Mike Massimino, a.k.a. @Astro_Mike, may be credited with the first tweet from space, but technically it was “assisted,” and hence not live. Move over @Astro_Mike, @Astro_TJ just sent the first real-time tweet from space.

Here’s how NASA describes the new technology and what it means:

“This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment.

During periods when the station is actively communicating with the ground using high-speed Ku-band communications, the crew will have remote access to the Internet via a ground computer. The crew will view the desktop of the ground computer using an onboard laptop and interact remotely with their keyboard
touchpad.

Astronauts will be subject to the same computer use guidelines as government employees on Earth. In addition to this new capability, the crew will continue to have official e-mail, Internet Protocol telephone and limited videoconferencing capabilities.”

By making this possible, NASA Extends the World Wide Web Out Into Space

Ever wondered from where on earth the short and smart URLs coming from, specilly while reading tweets on Twitter like social networking websites? And yes, It does makes sence to shorten your URLs when there is a limit set on the total number of characters for a tweet.

Twitter allows you to add a website URL up to 40 characters without any problem. Say I wanted to tweet “Check this! DigitalPercept has shared a new article today http://www.digitalpercept.com/2009/12/avatar-an-audio-visual-treat-with-3d-technology-and-a-story-told-from-the-heart/” this will show an error stating the number of “extra” characters. That means you need to shorten the text. Here you cannot link text in your tweet, thus you just add the URL and Twitter creates the link for you.

There are plenty of websites helping you to shorten the link. What all these websites do for you is, storing the URL provided by you on there server and providing you the short URL pointing to your URL. Quite smart idea.

Few websites providing this service:

http://bit.ly
http://tinyurl.com
http://lizzer.com

Firefox Addon:

TinyUrl Creator 1.0.5

Few desktop applications providing this service:

Twhirl

twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.

Seesmic Desktop

TweetDeck alike features include the capability to monitor multiple feeds side-by-side in a similar fashion, create custom user lists, and post from multiple accounts while the application keeps track of which ones are which to keep duplicates at bay.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

This will allow you to convert those long URL’s into Short tiny URLs.

The Google Nexus One smartphone is now ready to rock the world. You can view the Google Nexus One smartphone’s features and specifications here as well as watch the Nexus One in action courtesy of a series of videos.

Nexus One is the much talked about Google Phone that would be designed, branded and sold by Google.The phone has no physical keyboard like the Motorola Droid instead it uses the touchscreen technology.This smartphone, which was made HTC, runs on open-source operating system Android.

Nexus One looks almost similar to Apple iPhone and other high-end touchscreen mobile phone released recently. It has a big screen (3.7-inch) with a small button at the bottom. After unlocking, you can see the bright and clear the screen. The screen is a low-power, LED screen which allows deep and vivid colours.

Google has mentioned this phone as “Web meets phone”. A web defined by Google. At the time of setting the phone for first time, the phone prompts you to log into your Google account. Poof! It synchronizes your email, web searches, contacts book and any other information you happen to have with Google.
You become Google designed, Android controlled zombie giving bits and pieces of your information handy to Google.

Is it a much talked iPhone killer? Not sure. But it has potential to do so considering price and the opensource OS platform used.

Google Nexus One smartphone – Technical Specifications

Nexus One: “Web meets phone”

Using your Nexus One

Nexus One – Customization

Nexus One – Google Maps

Reference Links:

• Google NexusOne – YouTube Channel
• Google NexusOne – Technical Specifications

Tag Cloud – Defination – What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a stylized way of visually representing occurrences of words used to described tags. The most popular words are normally highlighted in a larger, bolder font. Visitors to a blog or site using a tag cloud, are able to easily see the most popular topics within the website by clicking on the respective tags.

If you are using the Wordpress Tag Cloud widget, you will come to know that you are unable to style it the way you like. If you call it directly from PHP in your template there are a few options you can use to control the look. The widgetized version does not give you access to options to control the style
neither you can style it with CSS. Not a problem! Now, You can fix the Tag Cloud Widget with this php function without touching the Wordpress core code.

HTML code of the default Tag Cloud widget:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1' title='3 topic' style='font-size: 8pt;'>wordpress< /a>

The CLASS attribute is unique per tag and does not include any weighting information. And the STYLE tag hard-codes the font size based on weight but would override any CSS font-sizing we might have been able apply with the CLASS. Lets use the font-size information from the STYLE to determine the weight and
write a small filter function to rewrite the CLASS and STYLE declarations so we can use CSS to style the tag cloud.

Copy this filter function code block to your functions.php file in your active template.


// filter tag clould output so that it can be styled by CSS
function style_my_tag_cloud($tags)
{
$tags = preg_replace_callback("|(class='tag-link-[0-9]+)('.*?)(style='font-size: )([0-9]+)(pt;')|",
create_function(
'$match',
'$low=1; $high=5; $sz=($match[4]-8.0)/(22-8)*($high-$low)+$low; return "{$match[1]} tagsize-{$sz}{$match[2]}";'
),
$tags);
return $tags;
}


Hook the created php function into the rendering of the tag cloud widget

add_action('wp_tag_cloud', 'style_my_tag_cloud');

The function rewrites the tag links to look like this:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1 tagsize-1' title='3 topic'>wordpress< /a>

The default tag cloud uses font-sizes from 8 to 22 points. The filter function uses a regular expression to extract that size and remap the default range (8-16) to the range defined by the $low and $high variables, for this example I used 1 though 5. An additional CLASS is added ‘tagsize-n’ where ‘n’ is 1-5 and then the STYLE attribute is removed. With the additional class you can now add something like this to your style.css and make the Tag Cloud look any way you’d like!


a.tagsize-1 { font-size: 8px; }
a.tagsize-2 { font-size: 10px; }
a.tagsize-3 { font-size: 12px; }
a.tagsize-4 { font-size: 14px; }
a.tagsize-5 { font-size: 16px; }


A New iPhone

Whether it’s the iPhone 3GS or the rumored iPhone nano, it’s easy to imagine Apple releasing another new iPhone, maintaining their trend of releasing an iPhone per year to stay competitive in the everchanging post-RAZR cellphone market.

For the new iPhone there are a lot of speculation and on the Internet there have been a variety of pictures of new iPhone, this iPhone Pro by the exposure it looks more like a concept phones.

It’s no secret that most of Gizmodo loves the iPhone, so we’re pretty excited to see what’s next.

Just so Apple!

Apple Magic Mouse

This amazing Magic Mouse uses a laser track engine, making it one of the more sensitive and responsive mouse in the world. It works on more surfaces than the conventional optical tracking mouse. The optical mouse we have come to know and love which would need continuous movement to reactivate the detecter. Well those days are over as the Magic Mouse removes our mouse worries, and concerns instantly. This means that on almost every surface the mouse is able to track the movements and respond to the user’s needs. These surfaces range from the top of a table in starbucks to a desk in your home office. Since it utilizes a laser track engine there is also no need to purchase or even use a traditional mouse pad.

Just so Apple!

4G Networks

4G refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a successor to 3G and 2G standards, with the aim to provide ultra-broadband (gigabit-speed) internet access to mobile as well as stationary users.

Intel-backed WiMax launched in a few locales by carriers Sprint and ClearWire. AT&T and Verizon (and eventually T-Mobile) are gearing up LTE technology. The Nokia-driven GSM-based “Long Term Evolution” may actually whomp WiMax with download speeds of over 300Mbps—though its presence probably won’t be felt in the US before 2010.

Windows 7

Microsoft can do better than Windows Vista. And with Windows 7—expected sometime before the year is up—they will. Whether it’s the new features or the less taxing system requirements, Windows 7 promises to be a vast improvement on Vista, and hopefully enough to coax most of us still clutching XP for dear life to finally upgrade.

Wireless HDMI

A multitude of companies have various wireless HDMI technologies, but there’s no set standard (two warring factions need to settle the fight before we can have interoperable products). The technology is there, now it’s just a matter of logistics and handshaking.

Wireless HDMI is a technology for serving wireless high definition video and audio in consumer electronics. This is a relatively new technology as you can tell by the low number of products available at this time. see this search for wireless HDMI.

However, Wireless HDMI is the perfect alternative to putting holes in your walls to run HDMI cables through. In fact, you can broadcast in full 1080p using most Wireless HDMI kits like the Brite-View BV-2500 seen above are designed to help make installs much easier when you can’t stick components in the same room.

USB 3.0 Devices

Wireless HDMI may not be quite cooked yet, but the eSATA-crushing USB 3.0 standard is ready to roll. Look for a multitude of products announced within the next week with blazing transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps (moving a 25GB file in under a minute). They’ll also benefit from USB 3.0’s higher electrical power output.

A Great Android Phone

It will be called the Google Phone (update the official name is “Nexus One”) and will launch in early January, 2010. It won’t be sold by any one carrier, but instead will be an unlocked GSM phone. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and possibly AT&T, whose exclusivity deal with the iPhone is about to run out. It will be running Android 2.1

PS3 Slim

The new version is undoubtedly smaller, with a lower-profile casing when sitting flat that’s also shorter (but deeper) than the existing PS3. It both weighs less (7.05lb compared to 11lb) and uses less power (250W versus 280W), though it will require an optional $24 stand if you want to position it vertically. If you have a gamer in your life who doesn’t have a PS3 or needs to replace their old console, this is a great and fairly cheap option. Also watch out for game bundles that are offered with some system sales

Motorola Droid

While we love the iPhone, the Droid really does do everything users could want from a device and it does it with the hottest new mobile operating system on the market (Google Android 2.0). We love the feel of the device, the thousands of apps now offered for Google Android and the fact that AT&T isn’t shoving it in our faces. If you’re a Verizon customer this is the only phone you should be considering. Price: $199 with a two-year contract

Nokia 5800

Nokia have been the top seller of mobile phones for a long time now and want to revive the market with their Nokia 5800 / N97 touch screen phone – their effective iPhone killers (Nokia N97 N-series touch phone has already been announced and released last year).

From Q3 2007 to Q3 2008 they lost 15.4% of the market share, dropping to 35%, due mainly to the iPhone. With the release of the Apple iPhone it has caused a ripple in the market and mobile phone manufacturers have realised that they need to raise their game. Blackberry have out their Storm 9500 (bottom of top 10) which will be a hot gadget of 2009 (once it gets the firmware it needs to speed up navigation) and will be available before the end of the year.

Just follow Apple!