What I'm Doing With My Life.....

The Online Money-Making Revolution of 2023: How to Get in on the Action

2023-01-16T06:07:00.004-08:00

The internet has opened up a world of opportunities for making money online. Whether you're looking for a full-time income or just a way to earn some extra cash, there are plenty of options available. In this article, we'll explore some of the most popular ways to make money online in 2023.

Online Freelancing: Websites like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr have made it easier than ever to find freelance work. You can offer your services in a variety of fields such as writing, graphic design, programming, and more.

Selling products online: Online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy make it easy to sell products online. You can sell your own products or become an affiliate marketer and promote other people's products.

Online tutoring: If you're an expert in a particular subject, you can earn money by tutoring students online. Platforms like VIPKid and education first are great places to find online tutoring jobs.

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing involves promoting other people's products and earning a commission for each sale. This can be done through a blog, website, or social media channels.

Online courses and e-books: Creating and selling online courses or e-books is a great way to share your knowledge and make money at the same time. Platforms like Udemy and Skillshare make it easy to create and sell online courses.

Podcasting: Podcasting has become increasingly popular in recent years, and it's a great way to share your knowledge and build an audience. You can monetize your podcast through advertising, sponsorships, and merchandise.

YouTube: Creating and uploading videos on YouTube can also be a great way to make money. You can monetize your channel through advertising, sponsorships, and merchandise.

Online surveys: Some companies will pay you to take online surveys. This is a simple and easy way to earn a little extra cash in your spare time.

It's important to note that while it is possible to make money online, it does take time, effort, and dedication. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and success will depend on your ability to find a niche, create valuable content, and build an audience. The most important thing to remember is that no matter what method you choose, it's important to do your research and be patient. With hard work, you can turn your online venture into a profitable one.

The End of the Pandemic: What Could Happen Next

2023-01-16T06:03:00.001-08:00

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had a significant impact on the world since it first emerged in 2019. The virus has affected nearly every aspect of daily life, from healthcare and education to the economy and travel. One of the most pressing questions on many people's minds is what the future of the pandemic will be and when it will come to an end.

One potential outcome is that the virus will eventually become endemic, meaning it will continue to circulate at a steady level in the population. This is similar to how seasonal flu viruses are handled, with regular vaccination and treatment strategies in place to manage the spread of the disease. In this scenario, the virus would likely continue to cause occasional outbreaks, but overall the number of cases would decrease and the virus would no longer be considered a global emergency.

Another possibility is the development of herd immunity, where a large portion of the population becomes immune to the virus through vaccination or previous infection. This would greatly reduce the number of new cases and deaths from the virus. However, it's important to note that experts still don't know what proportion of people would need to become immune to achieve herd immunity, and it's also not clear yet how long immunity to the virus lasts.

A third potential outcome is that the virus could eventually be eradicated, similar to how smallpox was eliminated in the 1970s. This would require a concerted global effort to vaccinate the entire population and quickly contain any new outbreaks. However, this outcome is considered unlikely given the high number of cases and the virus's ability to mutate.

The development of effective vaccines has been a major step toward controlling the pandemic and has provided hope for the future. Vaccines not only protect individuals from severe disease, but also help to slow the spread of the virus and reduce the number of deaths. However, the distribution and administration of vaccines has been uneven globally, and it will take time for enough people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.

In conclusion, the future of the coronavirus pandemic is uncertain, and it's likely that it will continue to impact the world in some way for the foreseeable future. The key to controlling the pandemic is the ongoing development and distribution of vaccines, as well as continued adherence to public health measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The end of the story of the pandemic will be determined by the ability of the world's leaders and health experts to successfully manage the virus, with the ultimate goal of reducing the number of cases and deaths.

#covid

The Importance of Staying Hydrated: How Proper Water Hydration Can Improve Your Health

2023-01-16T02:05:00.004-08:00

Water is essential for life and keeping our bodies hydrated is crucial for maintaining good health. When we don't drink enough water, we can experience symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, and dry skin. In this article, we will explore the importance of water hydration and the benefits it can provide for our bodies.

The human body is made up of 60% water, and it is important to maintain this balance to keep our bodies functioning properly. Water helps to regulate our body temperature, lubricate our joints, and transport essential nutrients throughout our bodies. Additionally, water is essential for the digestion process, and it helps to flush out toxins and waste products from our bodies.

Drinking enough water can also aid in weight loss, as it can help us feel full and reduce our appetite. When we are dehydrated, we often mistake thirst for hunger, leading us to eat more than we need. Drinking water before meals can help us feel more satisfied and eat less.

Proper hydration is also important for our skin. When we don't drink enough water, our skin can become dry and dull. Drinking water can help to plump our skin and give it a healthy, youthful glow. Additionally, water can help to flush out toxins that can cause acne and other skin problems.

In addition to the benefits for our physical health, drinking enough water can also improve our mental well-being. When we are dehydrated, we can experience symptoms such as fatigue and brain fog, which can negatively impact our mood and cognitive function. Drinking water can help to improve our concentration and focus, and it can also help to reduce stress and anxiety.

It is recommended to drink at least 8 glasses of water per day, however, the amount of water you need may vary depending on your activity level, the climate, and your individual needs. It's important to listen to your body and drink water when you feel thirsty.

In conclusion, water hydration is essential for maintaining good health. It helps to regulate our body temperature, transport essential nutrients throughout our bodies, aid in weight loss, improve our skin, and boost our mental well-being. Drinking enough water can have a positive impact on our overall health and well-being, so make sure to stay hydrated throughout the day.

As we have discussed, staying hydrated is crucial for maintaining good health and reaching our fitness goals. One way to make sure you're getting enough water during your workout is by using a high-quality water bottle specifically designed for gym use. Our product offers a leak-proof design, a convenient carrying handle, and measurement markings to help you track your water intake. It's made of durable, BPA-free material, and it's the perfect size to carry with you to the gym, on a hike, or for any physical activity. Stay hydrated and reach your full potential with our specially designed-water bottle.

I would offer you this product I'm using currently, it helped me a lot

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Thanks

Fahim...

طيار من سلاح الجو الملكي يثير الفخر و الاعجاب على مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي

2016-05-26T06:25:00.002-07:00

طيار من سلاح الجو الملكي يثير الفخر و الاعجاب على مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي

تداوله مواقه التواصل الاجتماعي صور قائد احدى مقاتلات سلاح الجوي الملكي الاردني و هو ير فع بفخر هذه الرساله

happy independence day Jordan

خلال العرض الجوي لذكرى عيد الالستقلال للملكله الاردنيه الهاشميه

The horror-movie streaming service Shudder serves up phantasmic scare fare

2016-05-26T06:14:00.003-07:00

The horror-movie streaming service Shudder serves up phantasmic scare fare

If you love quality horror films, this streaming service is worth the price of admission.

Movie-streaming sites are like used bookstores (or if you’re old enough to remember them, the video-rental stores of the VHS and DVD eras). If you go in with a specific title in mind, the odds are it won’t be there. But if you go in and start browsing the inventory, you’ll likely find some interesting treasures. Complex corporate deals and copyright issues beyond common understanding prevent any one service from being a superstore hosting every conceivable title.

So what’s the alternative to the “used bookstore?” Easy: the “specialty store” that focuses on a particular genre instead of trying to cover everything comprehensively. We’ve previously covered the high-brow film service Fandor, the documentary-film service CuriosityStream, and the independent-film champion Indiepix. Now we’ll weigh in on AMC’s Shudder, which specializes in the genre of horror.

I’m a fan of horror films and have spent many, many hours watching them and writing about them; certainly anyone who doesn’t like horror films will find very little to care about here. But even as a self-professed “expert” (or, at the very least, something slightly beyond amateur), I was impressed by the range and quality of titles Shudder offers, even though their current library consists of less than 400 movies. (I estimate that I’ve seen only about 100 of the available movies, and found a couple of dozen I wanted to see.) The price is excellent, much lower than either Netflix or Hulu: just $4.99 per month (or $50 per year).

Subscribers can view Shudder's inventory of films by genre, including the type of monster featured in the film.

If you don't want to pay

I think that what impressed me the most is the unique “Shudder.tv” option, which allows anyone—even non-members—to simply tune into an endless stream of horror films. Though the site does tell you the title of the movie that’s currently on, you never know when a movie is going to start or end, and you don’t know what’s coming next. But that’s part of the charm. It’s almost like the old days of cable TV: just turn it on and see what’s playing (as of this writing, it’s a 2006 movie calledCold Prey, from Norway.) There is a warning of graphic content, which is useful for parents who are keeping an eye on their kids, and for kids who are trying to sneak in a subversive viewing.

As for the selection, Shudder won my heart right away with a generous selection of Italian horror films, including a dozen from Mario Bava—my favorite, Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966) among them—a half-dozen from Lucio Fulci (including the must-see The Beyond), and a few more by Dario Argento. At the other end of the spectrum, the site offers plenty of cheeseball silliness that used to decorate the back shelves of video stores in the 1980s, movies like David DeCoteau’s Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988), which speaks for itself, Larry Cohen’s killer ice-cream movieThe Stuff (1985), and Troma titles like The Toxic Avenger (1984). There are also newer cult items like the brilliant Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) and the astoundingly awful Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010).

If you haven't seen Tucker and Dale vs Evil, stop what you're doing and watch it. Right now!

There are art-house movies, ranging from a fine collection of Asian horror movies—the great Audition (1999), the incredibly spooky Pulse (2001), and the amazing monster story The Host (2006); plus A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007), I Saw the Devil (2010), and Marebito (2004)—to other imports like Dead Snow and Trollhunter (from Norway), Let the Right One In(Sweden), Sheitan, Fear(s) of the Dark, and Trouble Every Day (France),Heartless and Severance (England), Nosferatu the Vampyre (Germany),Timecrimes (Spain), and more.

The site also offers respectable—if disturbing—movies like Lars von Trier’sAntichrist (2009), and even documentaries like Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (2009) and Room 237 (2012). The latter doc is about the weird theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (which is not on Shudder, incidentally), and the former—which I recommend to non-horror fans—is an interesting thesis about how horror films tend to tap into the moods of their times.

You'll find plenty of twisted Asian films in AMC's archives, including The Audition.

The usual free, public domain stuff is here, but Shudder hasn’t bothered with the bad ones. Their choices include: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Carnival of Souls (1962), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Night Tide (1961), Nosferatu(1922), Spider Baby (1964), White Zombie (1932), and other classics.

The site, curated by horror aficionados Sam Zimmerman and Colin Geddes, and backed by AMC Networks (producers of Mad Men and Breaking Bad), avoids tons of junk, remakes, lazy sequels, or movies that were simply designed for a quick, opening-weekend profit only to be discarded and forgotten. Instead, the curators have put together several categories and lists for fans to dig through. There are genres (“body horror,” “creature features,” “documentary,” “extreme,” “gothic horror,” “horror comedy,” “killers,” “paranormal,” “psychological thrillers”) as well as types of monsters.

How well does the site actually work? I checked out a movie I’d been wanting to see called We Are Still Here (2015), a kind of paranoid ghost story featuring cult stars Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, and Lisa Marie. I played it on the Shudder app on my tablet, on my laptop, and on my smart TV and had no problems; it was a very enjoyably unsettling experience. But I discovered the site’s first major flaw. Though the option to turn on subtitles or captions has been provided, it does not work. Foreign-language films have subtitles, of course, but for those of us who like to watch late at night with the volume low so as not to disturb others in the house, we’re out of luck.

You'll find lots of out-of-the-mainstream fare on Shudder, including the disturbing We are Still Here.

Another flaw is the inability to build a queue, but there is a way around that. Simply click on the movies you’d like to see, and let them play for a moment, and then they will appear in your “history” just below your login information. Otherwise, the site is beautifully designed, with little “shuddering” animations on the links and moody, zooming artwork, as well as well-written blurbs, quotes, and little horror-related jokes here and there. (“Stalk us on Facebook, Twitter, etc.”) Users can rate each movie from one to five “skulls” and give comments (which mostly seem thoughtful and above-board; very few trolls, so to speak).

Recently, the site has asked horror filmmakers to curate their own collections of five films each. Karyn Kusama, whose excellent The Invitation is currently in release; Robert Eggers, whose The Witch is probably the best horror movie of the year so far; and Alexandre Aja (High Tension) each choose five interesting films to recommend, with a little written blurb as to why. This lends even more credibility to a site that already succeeds on many levels. It’s so good, it’s scary.

Shudder has a deep well of classic horror films, including the Bela Lugosi feature White Zombie.

If I were a guest curator

If, in some alternate universe, I could curate my own five from the site, I’d go with these:

George A Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), the third of his six zombie films to date. Although the superior original is here, this one is rather under-appreciated, with its underground bunker setting, oppressive military presence, and the unforgettable “trained” zombie Bub.

Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966), probably Bava’s spookiest and most atmospheric movie, demonstrating his unique and masterful use of color for different emotional states and nightmare logic. In it, a doctor arrives in a small village to perform an autopsy, but finds the townspeople living in fear of a ghost girl.

If the title, Spider Baby, isn't enough to grab you, seeing Lon Chaney Jr. in the credits should.

Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish-language Let the Right One In (2008) is an adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, and one of the best and most unusual vampire movies of recent years. With an extremely moody, dreamy style, the movie tells the story of a friendship between a strange, outcast young boy and a vampire girl. Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) starts by blatantly stealing the music from Hitchcock’s Psycho and gleefully continues by turning H.P. Lovecraft’s story into a shocking, hilarious splatterfest. Glowing green tubes of goo, hideous zombie cats, and murderous severed heads make this cult classic worth several viewings.

Jack Hill’s Spider Baby (1964) was also called “The Maddest Story Ever Told,” which is just about right. It’s an experience unlike any other, a genuinely creepy, spooky horror comedy about a family with a regressive disease; the older each person gets, the more monstrous they become. Lon Chaney Jr. gives a surprisingly touching performance as the family chauffeur who takes care of the youngest ones. (He also sings the theme song.)

Intel NUC6i7KYK review: This Skull Canyon NUC smashes all mini-PC preconceptions

2016-05-26T06:09:00.003-07:00

Intel NUC6i7KYK review: This Skull Canyon NUC smashes all mini-PC preconceptions

Intel’s Skylake Core i7 NUC is talented across the board.

AT A GLANCE

Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK Next Unit of Computing

PCWORLD RATING

This completely revamped NUC raises the bar for what a mini-PC can do, handling both content-creation tasks and 1080p gaming with ease.

Outside of that, the NUC6i7KYK forges a different path for itself. For starters, it looks nothing like the rest of Intel’s signature line of tiny computers. This NUC is flat and long, comes shaded in black and gray, and has a huge skull emblazoned on the lid. (Undoubtedly as a nod to the machine’s codename, Skull Canyon.)

ALAINA YEE

The Skull Canyon NUC (front) with the Intel NUC5i7RYH (top rear), Gigabyte Brix GB-BXA8-5557 (middle rear), and Zotac Zbox Nano (bottom rear).

Its hardware also veers from the expected course. Stuffed inside is a beefy quad-core processor with top-of-the-line integrated graphics, meaning you can run content-creation tasks in more acceptable windows of time, and you can also play fairly recent AAA games at 1080p on this little machine. And yes, that’s at reasonable framerates.

The former king of the NUC mountain hasn’t just been dethroned. It’s been kicked so far off a cliff, someone needs to scrape its remains off the ground.

Price, specifications, and ports

Predictably, the kind of performance that Intel packs into this NUC doesn’t come cheap. The list price for this bare-bones system is $650. Our review unit, which came equipped with a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB NVMe SSD and 16GB of Crucial DDR4/2133MHz memory, totals just a little over $1,000 at current street pricing for hardware alone. Add in the cost of the Windows 10 license we used for testing, and we’d be over Intel’s target of $1K total for the build. To hit that mark, you’ll have to spend less on parts to afford Windows, or go Linux.

ALAINA YEE

For that bare-bones $650, you get a 2.6GHz Core i7-6770HQ quad-core Skylake processor that can boost up to 3.5GHz, Iris Pro Graphics 580 sporting 128MB of eDRAM, and a whole bunch of cutting-edge hardware. Two M.2 slots support SATA 6Gbps and x4 PCIe Gen 3 (AHCI or NVMe) drives in either a 42mm or 80mm length, with the option to run two drives in RAID 0 or RAID 1. An Intel Wireless-AC 8260 card features 802.11ac 2x2 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and Wireless Display 6.0 support. Two SO-DIMM sockets can take up to 32GB of DDR4/2133MHz RAM, or even overclocked DDR4 RAM. Headers are accessible underneath the user-replaceable lid for NFC, two USB 2.0 ports, and two USB 3.0 ports. As with the Broadwell line of NUCs, you can useplans provided by Intel to design custom lids and make use of these connectors.

ALAINA YEE

If you don’t like the skull-embossed lid, a plain black lid comes with the system. You get a VESA mounting bracket and multi-country AC plugs in the box, too.

On the outside of the NUC6i7KYK’s 8.31 x 4.57 x 1.1-inch (211 x 116 x 28 mm) chassis are a bevy of ports. (A note about that case: While the new form factor looks sleeker, its plastic shell makes it feel a lot less indestructible than its square-brick siblings.) You get three standard USB 3.0, one charging USB 3.0, a SDXC slot, gigabit ethernet, a 3.5mm headset jack, a combo rear speaker/TOSLINK jack, a Kensington lock slot, mini DisplayPort 1.2, and HDMI 2.0 with HDCP 2.2 support (aka the ability to play copy-protected 4K content). An infrared receiver comes embedded in the front of the system.

ALAINA YEE

A USB-C port supports Thunderbolt 3 and 10Gbps USB 3.1, as well as DisplayPort 1.2. Arguably, the Thunderbolt 3 support is a marquee feature of this Skull Canyon NUC—its implementation helps Intel bill the NUC6i7KYK as a gaming machine.

ALAINA YEE

Let’s discuss that marketing

Yes, Intel has positioned this machine as a mini-PC designed for gaming. It’s the first NUC the company has touted this way, and the approach is two-pronged: superior integrated graphics on one side, and the dangled promise of using an external video card over Thunderbolt 3 on the other.

Selling a general premise of gaming is a curious gambit. PC gamers with full-tower rigs would never dream of abandoning ship for a system whose size greatly constrains (and inflates the price of) performance. Even people playing on much humbler hardware would be giving up a lot.

PCWORLD

If you take a quick look at 3DMark’s publicly available scores for its Sky Diver test, which simulates 1080p gaming on Medium settings, you can get a rough idea of the gap that still exists between the best integrated graphics and the budget end of current discrete graphics cards. While CPU performance can affect game performance, zeroing in on Sky Diver’s Graphics score (instead of its Overall score) should minimize that influence.

Because 3DMark’s compilation of scores aren’t performed on the same machine, and some cards are overclocked to varying degrees, I also ran 3DMark Fire Strike (which simulates 1080p gaming on Ultra settings) on the Skull Canyon NUC and the Nvidia GTX 750 Ti to grab a little bit of data under more controlled circumstances. As you can see, there’s a long way to go before integrated graphics can handle Ultra settings. Even the 750 Ti itself can't make it, but it gets a heck of a lot closer.

PCWORLD

Briefly put, if someone needs or wants a system with a dedicated graphics card (be it an Nvidia GTX 750 Ti or an AMD Radeon Fury X), the Skull Canyon NUC isn’t worth consideration. Those gamers aren’t the right group for this mini-PC, and it’s odd that Intel didn’t narrow the focus of its marketing campaign to avoid their questions and confusion.

Intel will argue that you can get better performance by buying a Thunderbolt 3 cabinet, installing a discrete graphics card, and then plugging that complete unit into your Skull Canyon NUC. That would provide a way to play the latest releases at 1080p/60fps on Ultra settings. The problem is that Thunderbolt 3 cabinets haven’t really filtered out into the wild yet. The Razer Core was slated to launch in April, but as of this writing, it's yet to appear.

So while I’m eager to see how this NUC would perform with an external video card, that’ll unfortunately have to wait.

Gaming performance

For the moment, what makes more sense is the NUC6i7KYK as a gaming machine for people who don’t care about a big blockbuster’s framerates or looks. Instead, they want a portable workstation or a very high-end, compact HTPC that can still run a fairly recent AAA game at 1080p.

In this context, “run” means framerates above 30fps, which is playable if not all that fast. It also means dropping graphics settings down a lot, or even to rock bottom. Believe it or not, some people actually wouldn’t mind these limitations, given that Steam’s most recent survey (April 2016) shows quite a few users are rocking integrated graphics. In exchange, they’d get framerates like 35.13fps in Shadow of Mordor or 50.79fps in GTA 5.

PCWORLD

Honestly, these numbers are pretty exciting, given what integrated graphics achieved on the Broadwell NUCs. Even non-Iris graphics on the Core i7-6700HQ aren’t all that spectacular. In three-year-old games like BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider, the older mini-PCs put up a valiant but futile struggle to show playable framerates, and the i7-6700HQ’s Intel HD 530 still gets trounced by the Iris Pro 580 in the Skull Canyon’s i7-6770HQ.

PCWORLD

(Note: The numbers for these older mini-PCs were obtained while running Windows 8.1, but we haven’t seen enough of a difference between that operating system and Windows 10 to believe that the Skull Canyon’s domination is affected by running the newer OS.)

Because the older mini-PCs couldn’t take much more stress, these charts show framerates for each game’s lowest settings. You can play with prettier graphical settings on the NUC6i7KYK, though. At 1080p, BioShock Infinite hit 38.39fps on Medium and 32.75fps on High, and Tomb Raider reached 61.2fps on Normal and 40.8 on High.

When you look at those numbers, it’s pretty impressive to see just how far integrated graphics have come.

General Performance

Make no mistake—this mini-PC is also powerful for non-gaming purposes.

As with gaming performance, plenty of people will misunderstand the point of buying a system this small, and say that for the same budget, you could build a full desktop or buy a laptop that includes a display, keyboard, and trackpad. However, you can’t put a laptop or a full desktop into the front pouch of your backpack, and they won’t weigh 1 pound, 5.8 ounces.

So let’s talk instead about how fast this machine is for something so compact. In our PCMark 8 benchmarks, the NUC6i7KYK moved along briskly during the Work Conventional test, which simulates office tasks like spreadsheet entry, word processing, and video chatting. It netted a score of 3,458.

PCWORLD

These kind of activities aren’t very challenging—even systems with less powerful CPUs can manage decent performance. More interesting was the NUC6i7KYK’s score of 3,759 in the Creative Conventional test, which includes more intensive tasks like video editing.

PCWORLD

As its PCMark 8 Creative Conventional score suggests, this tiny computer can realistically be used for content creation. The results of our Handbrake video encoding test, which involves converting a 30GB video file (MKV) into a smaller MP4 file using the Android Tablet preset, show this more clearly. The Broadwell NUC was one of the fastest mini-PCs with an encode time of 1 hour and 41 minutes—and the Skull Canyon NUC screams past it with a time of 48 minutes. That’s slightly faster than the socketed Haswell part in our PCWorld Zero Point desktop system.

PCWORLD

Granted, Haswell was two generations ago, but look again at the size of the Skull Canyon NUC. Intel’s engineers cooked up some voodoo magic to coax this kind of performance out of a machine the size of a VHS tape, especially when you look at the temperature the NUC6i7KYK hits under full load.

PCWORLD

I typically don’t see processors sustain 100°C for extended periods of time, much less for nearly the full 48 minutes of our Handbrake encode test. As shown in this screenshot, some thermal throttling does occur, but the stock clock speeds barely drop—maybe by about 0.1 to 0.2GHz.

When asked, Intel indicated this isn’t abnormal behavior for the Skull Canyon NUC, and this temperature level isn’t a cause for concern. So if you happen to notice your NUC6i7KYK’s processor sailing along at the boiling point for water, it should be fine.

About the only downsides to the NUC6i7KYK are its power consumption and how loud it is, and they’re not even that bad. Compared to the similar complaints I had about the Broadwell Core i7 NUC, the peak power draw of 72.1W under load seems more reasonable, especially given how much performance this Skull Canyon NUC delivers. And the fans are quieter than the Broadwell NUC’s—they’re on par with a slightly noisier laptop.

PCWORLD

Final thoughts

If this Skull Canyon NUC is any indication of where Intel wants to push the form factor, mini-PC enthusiasts may have a golden future ahead. Even though I’d personally hesitate to categorize this system as a gaming machine, its performance is excellent across the board. The idea that the next Core i7 NUC could do even better is exciting.

That said, Intel told us there’s no set plan to produce a direct successor to the NUC6i7KYK—rather, that will depend on how well it sells. There are potential challengers to this tiny system: Gigabyte could update its NUC-like Brix Pro line with Skylake models, or mini-STX (another of Intel’s pet projects) could actually take off. Both the Brix Pro line and mini-STX use 65W processors, which would provide a little more compute power.

Either of those options would be a trade-off rather than an upgrade in performance, though. Neither can match the Iris Pro Graphics in this Skull Canyon NUC. On top of that, the Brix Pro line is infamous for its shrieking fans, while the slow start for mini-STX suggests it could go the way of thin mini-ITX. This Skylake Core i7 NUC, on the other hand, requires very little compromise. Paying top dollar should always result in having a fantastic computer, and that’s exactly the situation here
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Ronaldo looks set to leave Real Madrid

2015-07-23T01:53:00.004-07:00

Madrid, July 20 (IANS) Former Real Madrid captain Iker Casillas's agent Santos Marquez believes superstar Cristiano Ronaldo's decision to sell his image rights to a company owned by Valencia president Peter Lim suggests that the Portuguese striker is set to leave the Spanish football giants.

Ronaldo is under contract until 2018 but raised eyebrows on June 29 when he announced that he had signed a deal with Mint Media, goal.com reported on Monday.

Marquez believes that the agreement is bad news for Los Blancos, as he is viewing it as a sign that the Portugal captain is dissatisfied with club president Florentino Perez and is now preparing his Real exit.

"One day (Perez) will need to explain why Cristiano works for another company outside of Real Madrid. Imagine Cristiano generating 40 million euros elsewhere and giving it to Peter Lim. It ends up in Valencia's coffers and that's deplorable," the agent said.

"Will anyone speak out and ask Florentino why Cristiano has sold his image rights to Peter Lim? That's not normal; it suggests that Cristiano is planning to leave."

Marquez then launched a savage attack on Perez's handling of goalkeeper Casillas' Real departure. Academy product Casillas was left sitting all alone at a press conference last Sunday as he brought the curtain down on a 25-year association with Los Blancos by announcing his decision to join Portuguese club Porto.

After being heavily criticised for his absence, Perez organised a hastily arranged send-off ceremony the following day and stated during the proceedings that it had been Casillas' desire to depart.

However, Marquez has accused the Real supremo of spinning a web of lies in relation to the manner of his client's exit.

"Iker never wanted to leave. He said that he never wanted to leave and that he could never ask to be Madrid's first choice goalkeeper, that he had two years left on his contract and that he would have liked to end his playing career at Madrid," the agent said.

"He was happy and Madrid is his home but they didn't want him. Three weeks ago (new head coach Rafa) Benitez came along and the club started going crazy about signing (Manchester United No.1 David) De Gea and said what a great goalkeeper Keylor (Navas) is.

"That was a lack of respect towards Iker. He couldn't ignore it. There is a before and an after to all of this. Benitez is not to blame; it was all orchestrated."

Scott Adkins returns as Boyka in Undisputed 4

2015-07-21T07:19:00.001-07:00

Great news for Boyka fans! Boyka: Undisputed 4 starts shooting in June 2015 with Scott Adkins set to return as Yuri Boyka and Isaac Florentine ready to direct once again. Larnell Stovall will be the fight coordinator, which is fantastic news considering how awesome the fights were in Part 3. The script has been penned by David White who also worked on the other 2 Boyka Undisputed movies; no other details are known as yet with regards to story however a few months back Isaac Florentine said at an interview, “Something is always changing in Boyka. That character is deeply religious. Already you see this in the scene that establishes him in Undisputed 2. In Undisputed 3 we see what motives him is that he is truly religious. Basically this will continue to motivate him in the next chapter…” Although an official release date has not been announced, the movie is expected to hit the screens in 2016.

Scott Adkins, the mega-talented actor and martial artist from Undisputed III and Assassination Games, let out a few tidbits of information over Twitter recently as well. He wrote that a script for Undisputed 4 is complete. Despite both director Isaac Florentine and Scott Adkins wanting to make it, it took time to secure funding for the film since Undisputed 3 was not a big hit, due in large part to people pirating the film. The fact that Adkins' Undisputed character Uri Boyka has developed a cult following among fans does not mean much if the movies are not commercially successful.

During an interview with Impact (via EP.com), Scott Adkins had this to say about Undisputed 4 while promoting Ninja 2: Shadow of the Tear, “It's great to do the festival circuit with films like this but I don't think watching it at home will spoil your experience… the real problem is the piracy and I really would hope that people that enjoy these types of films. Let's be honest, we don't get that many anymore. I hope they support it by buying it on whatever platform when they get the chance because it is getting harder and harder to finance these films because they make no money.”

A Possible New Meteor Shower: May Camelopardalids

2014-05-24T03:45:00.001-07:00

Scientists anticipate a new meteor shower tonight: the May Camelopardalids, resulting from the dust of periodic comet 209P/LINEAR. No one has seen it before, but the shower could put on a prolific show. The shower is predicted to be active on May 24, 02:30 - 11:00 UTC (May 23, 10:30 p.m. to May 24, 7 a.m. EDT). The peak is projected between 06:00 - 08:00 UTC (2-4 a.m EDT). This will be a one-night-only event.

Projected viewing of May Camelopardalids meteor shower at 06:00 UTC. Click here for full map. (NASA/MSFC/Danielle Moser)

“Some forecasters have predicted a meteor storm of more than 200 meteors per hour,” said Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “We have no idea what the comet was doing in the 1800s. The parent comet doesn’t appear to be very active now, so there could be a great show, or there could be little activity.”

› Viewing tips, projected rates, other FAQs
› Audio: Dr. Bill Cooke discusses May Camelopardalids (mp3s) Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Ustream Sky View

This shows a live sky view from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Before 9:30 p.m. EDT, you will either see recorded footage or a blank screen. If you see a blank box, this indicates that the camera is functioning properly and transitioning from daylight to dark.

More About the May Camelopardalids and Comet 209P/LINEAR

Comet 209P/LINEAR was discovered in February 2004 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project, a cooperative effort of NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, and the US Air Force. It is a relatively dim comet that dips inside the orbit of Earth once every five years as it loops around the sun.

In 2006 meteor experts Esko Lyytinen of Finland and Peter Jenniskens at NASA Ames Research Center announced that Earth was due for an encounter with debris from Comet 209P/LINEAR. Streams of dust ejected by the comet mainly back in the 1800s would cross Earth's orbit on May 24, 2014. The result, they said, could be a significant meteor outburst.

"We expect these meteors to radiate from a point in Camelopardalis, also known as 'the giraffe,' a faint constellation near the North Star," Cooke said. "It’s a great opportunity to see a new meteor shower -- an opportunity I want to see with my own eyes.”

10 Programming Languages You Should Learn in 2014

2014-05-24T03:34:00.004-07:00

IMAGE: MASHABLE, NINA FRAZIER HANSEN

The tech sector is booming. If you've used a smartphone or logged on to a computer at least once in the last few years, you've probably noticed this.

As a result, coding skills are in high demand, with programming jobs paying significantly more than the average position. Even beyond the tech world, an understanding of at least one programming language makes an impressive addition to any resumé.

The in-vogue languages vary by employment sector. Financial and enterprise systems need to perform complicated functions and remain highly organized, requiring languages like Java and C#. Media- and design-related webpages and software will require dynamic, versatile and functional languages with minimal code, such as Ruby, PHP, JavaScript and Objective-C.

With some help from Lynda.com, we've compiled a list of 10 of the most sought-after programming languages to get you up to speed.

1. Java
2. C Language
3. C++
4. C#
5. Objective-C
6. PHP
7. Python
8. Ruby
9. JavaScript
10. SQL

IMAGE: MASHABLE COMPOSITE. IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

What it is: Java is a class-based, object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the 1990s. It's one of the most in-demand programming languages, a standard for enterprise software, web-based content, games and mobile apps, as well as the Androidoperating system. Java is designed to work across multiple software platforms, meaning a program written on Mac OS X, for example, could also run on Windows.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Lynda.com, Oracle.com, LearnJavaOnline.org.

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What it is: A general-purpose, imperative programming language developed in the early '70s, C is the oldest and most widely used language, providing the building blocks for other popular languages, such as C#, Java, JavaScript and Python. C is mostly used for implementing operating systems and embedded applications.

Because it provides the foundation for many other languages, it is advisable to learn C (and C++) before moving on to others.

Where to learn it: Learn-C, Introduction To Programming, Lynda.com, CProgramming.com,Learn C The Hard Way.

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What it is: C++ is an intermediate-level language with object-oriented programming features, originally designed to enhance the C language. C++ powers major software like Firefox, Winampand Adobe programs. It's used to develop systems software, application software, high-performance server and client applications and video games.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Lynda.com, CPlusPlus.com, LearnCpp.com, CProgramming.com.

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What it is: Pronounced "C-sharp," C# is a multi-paradigm language developed by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative. Combining principles from C and C++, C# is a general-purpose language used to develop software for Microsoft and Windows platforms.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Lynda.com, Microsoft Virtual Academy, TutorialsPoint.com.

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What it is: Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language used by theApple operating system. It powers Apple's OS X and iOS, as well as its APIs, and can be used to create iPhone apps, which has generated a huge demand for this once-outmoded programming language.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Lynda.com, Mac Developer Library, Cocoa Dev Central, Mobile Tuts+.

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What it is: PHP (Hypertext Processor) is a free, server-side scripting language designed for dynamic websites and app development. It can be directly embedded into an HTML source document rather than an external file, which has made it a popular programming language for web developers. PHP powers more than 200 million websites, including Wordpress, Digg andFacebook.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Codecademy, Lynda.com, Treehouse, Zend Developer Zone,PHP.net.

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What it is: Python is a high-level, server-side scripting language for websites and mobile apps. It's considered a fairly easy language for beginners due to its readability and compact syntax, meaning developers can use fewer lines of code to express a concept than they would in other languages. It powers the web apps for Instagram, Pinterest and Rdio through its associated web framework, Django, and is used by Google, Yahoo! and NASA.

Where to learn it: Udemy, Codecademy, Lynda.com, LearnPython.org, Python.org.

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What it is: A dynamic, object-oriented scripting language for developing websites and mobile apps, Ruby was designed to be simple and easy to write. It powers the Ruby on Rails (or Rails) framework, which is used on Scribd, GitHub, Groupon and Shopify. Like Python, Ruby is considered a fairly user-friendly language for beginners.

Where to learn it: Codecademy, Code School, TryRuby.org, RubyMonk.

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What it is: JavaScript is a client and server-side scripting language developed by Netscape that derives much of its syntax from C. It can be used across multiple web browsers and is considered essential for developing interactive or animated web functions. It is also used in game development and writing desktop applications. JavaScript interpreters are embedded in Google's Chrome extensions, Apple's Safari extensions, Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and Adobe's Creative Suite.

Where to learn it: Codecademy, Lynda.com, Code School, Treehouse, Learn-JS.org.

SEE ALSO: Is JavaScript the Future of Programming?

What it is: Structured Query Language (SQL) is a special-purpose language for managing data in relational database management systems. It is most commonly used for its "Query" function, which searches informational databases. SQL was standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the 1980s.

YouTube Goes Down for Some Users

2014-03-12T16:14:00.005-07:00

The YouTube website shown on a computer on March 18, 2010.

IMAGE: RICHARD VOGEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY SETH FIEGERMAN5 HOURS AGO

Some YouTube users experienced rare disruptions from the service on Wednesday.

DownRightNow, which tracks outages for popular sites, said that YouTube was evincing a "likely service disruption." The outage comes just one day after Twitter experienced amassive outage on the web and on mobile.

A rep for YouTube could not immediately confirm the outage, or the reason for it.

UPDATE 3:35 pm ET Weds: A rep for YouTube confirmed that "some" users had problems accessing the video service on Wednesday, but no reason was provided for the disruption.

"Some people encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube today," the rep said in a statement provided to Mashable. "We worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We're sorry for any inconvenience this caused."

Yahoo! pours $1 billion on product development; eyes tech to lure users

2014-03-02T02:48:00.003-08:00

NEW DELHI: Technology giant Yahoo! invested $1 billion in 2013 on product development to beef up its media, news and entertainment offerings to serve advertisers and consumers better as it takes head on giants like Google.

Also, the California-headquartered company went on an acquisition spree, acquiring as many as 28 start-ups last year, as it looks to grab consumers' attention, especially those using mobile handheld devices.

CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the firm in 2012 to revive its declining fortunes, has been working on "re-imagining" Yahoo's core businesses across search, communications, media and video.

"Product development expenses for 2011, 2012, and 2013 totaled approximately $919 million, $886 million and $1 billion, respectively, which included stock-based compensation expense of $81 million, $74 million and $83 million, respectively," the firm said in a US SEC filing.

Yahoo! continually launches, improves and scales products and features to meet evolving user, advertiser and publisher needs. Most of the software products and features are developed internally by the employees, it added.

"Our engineering and production teams are primarily located in our Sunnyvale, California, headquarters, Bangalore, India and Beijing, China," the firm said in a the filing.

Yahoo!, which is increasingly seeing a major chunk of its usersbase going mobile, aims to make compelling ads and integrate them with news and information.

Reiterating its strategy of "building products focusing on mobile first", the firm further said: "Today we have over 400 million monthly mobile users, an increase of more than 150 million users since we launched our new Mobile and Emerging Products team in October 2012".

Today, mobile traffic represents more than half of its 800 million monthly users (the numbers do not include Internet Message Access Protocol or Tumblr users), it added.

Yahoo! said increasing mobile traffic has been the result of an "engaging and inspiring suite of new and revamped product experiences designed to make users' daily habits mobile."

20 Ways To Restore Faith When Everything Goes Wrong.........

2014-02-26T20:55:00.004-08:00

by James Altucher

Sometimes I wish the mother ship would land and take me home. I look in the sky. Where is the ship, with the beautiful aliens. The ones I belong with. Why did they leave me here on this pathetic planet. Did they really want me to grow old and die here?

In the past 15 years I was probably suicidal on at least three different occasions. How would I kill myself? Who knows. I googled it. It’s hard to actually find a technique that works. Try googling “I want to die”. You’ll just end up back on this blog. Which won’t tell you how to die. Because there is no good technique. Trust me.

But all of those moments had several things in common.

I couldn’t take the pain. I didn’t want to die. I wanted the pain to die. I had gone from a high to a low (being constantly at a low doesn’t do it. You have to go from a high to a low to experience the sense of loss) and when I thought the only way my kids would be happy is if they were able to cash in my life insurance policy. That’s how screwed up I was.

And, the irony is, it’s at exactly these moments that its hardest to have “faith”.

(that must've hurt)

We all have moments when it seems like everything is going wrong. It’s unavoidable. A relationship turns sour. A job is lost. A business goes down in flames. You are robbed. You feel lonely. And so on. The list of possible calamities that are in store for us simply because we are human is awesome and overwhelming.

When I had my first kid I was very sad about this. I looked at this tiny baby and all I could think about was, “how will I protect her when she’s feeling alone”. “how will I protect her when she’s rejected”. “How will I protect her when the things she thinks she’s most in control of go horribly astray.”

There’s no answer. I can’t protect her.

No matter what you do right now, things might totally suck. Its that enormous leap between your lowest moments and the moments that you think will make you happy that faith is required.

When things are already at the best, that leap is tiny or non-existent. So you don’t need any faith at those moments. Or faith is too easy.

It’s precisely when things are at their worst that you need “faith” the most. I put it in quotes because we still haven’t defined it.

Here are some kinds of faith.

Faith in God. In other words, a higher power that if you pay attention to in some way (prayer, gratitude, humility, ethical behavior, etc) then rewards are waiting for you.
Faith in a creative power within you. Your subconscious. The idea being that you put in the work, you do whatever you can in the time you have, and then you say, “Ok, I’ve done it all. Now you have to do something.” In other words, you give up. To yourself, to God, to the universe, whatever.
Faith in destiny. For instance, if you’ve always succeeded before doing a certain formula (for instance, for me, “the daily practice” I recommend) and things are down now, knowing that if I just apply that formula then once again things will go well.
Other kinds of faith. Faith in Jesus, faith in Buddha, or the Tao, or Yoga, or a spiritual guide, or a higher power, all fit into the above faiths.

The benefits of all of these faiths is that they relieve stress. Hard work and anxiety suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Being anxious about something 20 hours a day probably won’t do much more for you than being anxious about it for 1 hour a day. Working for 10 straight hours probably won’t accomplish more than working for 3 super-productive hours.

(when I was studying last year in India (next to the above woman), the teacher, Sharath, said: rich, poor, happy, sad - do your practice)

One time I was seeing a therapist. He said, “what can I do to help you. What can relieve your stress.”

I said, “the only thing that will relieve my stress right now is if you immediately give me a million dollars.”

That, of course, didn’t happen. I had to develop other methods for relieving stress. In fact, I became an expert at having faith at the critical moments only because I had so many of them.

So here’s what you should try to do regardless of whatever faith you subscribe to. The key is to work hard but to also cultivate a feeling of surrender. You need to give the universe space to do its thing for you. There’s evidence that working hard for 90 minutes is about all we can do if we want to be at peak productivity. Then taking a break.

Faith is in the breaks.

When things are bad do this:

A) Work hard for 90 minute stretches. Avoid any distractions.

B) Take breaks

C) In the breaks do one or more of the following:

D) Exercise until you sweat. This has been shown to relieve stress and anxiety and act as an anti-depressant.

E) Write down ideas for how you can solve your issues. If you need to generate income, start brainstorming. You might have very bad ideas at first. But eventually the ideas will be good. It took me about a month of writing down ideas every day before I started coming up with decent ideas. Within six months of writing down ideas every day and following the other ideas in the daily practicemy life was changed completely. In fact, my life now is completely different every six months.

F) Send three emails to people you are grateful for. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t spoken to them in ten years

G) Go to your inbox, find an email from 2007, reply to it. That works wonders at reestablishing contact with people.

H) Go swimming. Just get up and go swimming somewhere. Exercise and keeping yourself from drowning will distract you.

I) Go to a museum. During the financial crisis of 2008 I was really feeling bad. I was long stocks, I was going through a divorce, things were at their worst for me. I spent lunchtime without my computer or phone. I would go to a museum and hang out in the bookstore/café and read books about artists. This had my brain going in a completely different direction than the anxieties of staring at the market.

J) Draw. Similar to above. .Sometimes in 2009 when I was going through a deal that wasn’t working out, Claudia and I would take out water colors and paint. It was fun and again had my brain going in a different direction.

K) Pretend. In 2008, I described another situation where I reached out of myself and made contact with people by pretending to be a psychic. I don’t recommend this. But sometimes pretending to be something you aren’t can bring up to the surface a part of yourself you didn’t know existed. That person might be a fun person to get to know. You don’t know everything about yourself. Give other parts a chance to come out and play.

L) Meditate. I don’t always recommend this. It’s really hard to meditate when things are at their worst. Meditation involves 30 minutesof sitting still and watching your thoughts. But your thoughts could be too overwhelming. Instead of doing 30 minutes every day how about trying 60 seconds here and there throughout the day. Try “The Power of Negative Thinking” to train your mind.

M) Reread, “I Surrender”. Surrendering is the key. Is there a higher power? Who knows? But I do know that you can’t control everything. There’s a saying, “infinite patience produces immediate results”. Slipping into patience mode, even when your neck is right there on the guilliotine, can provide you with some respite despite the axe that is bearing down on you.

N) Help someone else. For instance, if someone else needs work, introduce him to someone who can hire him. If someone needs some information, find the info and give it to him. This sort of activity compounds in value. Until you’ve helped so many people that there is a world of people waiting to help you when you are down. Trust me, having that net waiting for you when you jump out of the burning building will be a lifesaver. I’ve used that net many times. I’m surprised there’s not a hole in it at this point accept for the fact that I keep strengthening it by helping people every day.

O) Be a superhero. This goes along with the above. But do it anonymously. Help someone where you completely expect nothing back, like a superhero does – strong, anonymous, and with mysterious powers. I don’t know why it works, but the returns on this are ten to one.

P) Think of your heroes. It’s amazing when you read the biographies of the greats. They all had their trials they had to survive. I regularly post about people I admire and what they’ve been through and how they’ve survived it. Here are a few: Louis Armstrong. Dorothea Lange. Buddha.Bukowski. And so on.

Q) Watch something funny. Watching a movie like “Superbad” won’t necessarily bring you faith but will snap you out of the thoughts that are clogging your head. Laughter has a cleansing effect and is also known to cure many toxic illnesses, mental and physical (and emotional and spiritual).

R) Finally, doing some form, even miniscule, of what I call “The Daily Practice”, has always helped me to restore my faith, my life, my money, my happiness (or at least, my contentment). If that post I link is too harsh I provide many modifications and ideas of how to moderate the practice in my book, “I Was Blind But Now I See”.

S) Promise. I said “finally” above but I have two more things. You can spend fifteen minutes promising yourself over and over again, “I will put one foot in front of the other”. Tell yourself who needs you to do that (children, friends, family, etc). Promise it again. And again. And then call someone else and promise them. Build your support group with these promises.

T) Most important: When you have money, love, contentment, this is not when you have succeeded. These are the results. The trumpets are not blowing now. You’re sleeping and you don’t care. MOST IMPORTANT: the trumpets are blowing when you are at your lows and you take that next step forward. That is success. That is love of life. That is creativity and spirit and God.

When you are at the lowest, you are closest to God, to your faith, to a higher power, to an inner you. To whatever you want to call it. Nobody cares what you call it. This is your moment to shine, to show how much you’ve learned, to show how much you are able to succeed. There are no other moments as powerful. Please don’t waste them.

Katy Perry accused of insulting Islam in her latest music video for Dark Horse

2014-02-26T20:36:00.003-08:00

Uh-oh – it seems that Katy Perry has landed herself in hot water with her Muslim fans. The US pop singer has come under fire for featuring what is being viewed as a blasphemous scene in the music video for her latest single, Dark Horse.

An online petition has been launched by a British-Muslim fan demanding that the video – in which a pendant featuring the name of Allah is seen being burned – be removed from YouTube. At the time of publishing, the petition had received 35,378 signatures.

Dark Horse features Katy dressed as Katy-patra, the object of many pharaoh’s attention. Just over a minute into the video, the singer is seen zapping a man who is wearing the necklace.

Katy Perry has come under fire for featuring what is being viewed as a blasphemous scene in the music video for …

The petitioner, Shazad Iqbal, explains that the video is “considered as highly controversial to its viewers as a result of its portrayal of blasphemy.”

He continues: “Blasphemy is clearly conveyed in the video, since Katy Perry (who appears to be representing an opposition of God) engulfs the believer and the word God in flames.”

While most of the signatories expressed their disappointment in the video, one questioned why such a symbol was used to begin with.

“The fact that Islam didn’t even exist in ancient Egypt is what really confuses me as to why they felt the need to have anything to do with Islam in this video,” said Danyal Johnson. “Obviously it is symbolic of the anti-Islamic message being portrayed.”

This is not the first-time Katy has caused controversy with her art. Last November, the singer was accused of being racist after dressing as a Japanese geisha for the opening performance at the 2013 American Music Awards.

Renowned Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia dies at 66

2014-02-26T06:33:00.003-08:00

Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia plays a guitar during a rehearsal of closing concert of the Biennial of Flamenco in the Andalusian capital of Seville October 9, 2010.

CREDIT: REUTERS/MARCELO DEL POZO

Paco de Lucia, the influential Spanish guitarist who vastly expanded the international audience for flamenco and merged it with other musical styles, died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack in Mexico.

The 66-year-old virtuoso, as happy playing seemingly impossible syncopated flamenco rhythms as he was improvising jazz or classical guitar, helped to legitimize flamenco in Spain itself at a time when it was shunned by the mainstream.

"I learned the guitar like a child learns to speak," the guitarist said in a 2012 documentary.

Born Francisco Sanchez Gomez, he became famous in the 1970s after recording bestselling album "Entre Dos Aguas", becoming the first flamenco musician to perform at Madrid's opera house Teatro Real in 1975.

Paco's albums such as "El Duende Flamenco de Paco de Lucia" and "Almoraima" reinvented traditional flamenco.

He toured extensively with well known international artists and played with the likes of Carlos Santana and Al Di Meola, happy to expand flamenco rhythms into jazz, although that upset flamenco purists.

"It has been said, and rightly so, that Paco de Lucia has never been surpassed by anyone and guitar playing today would not be understood without his revolutionary figure," Spain's arts association SGAE said in a statement.

De Lucia went on to record flamenco jazz fusion with Di Meola and John McLaughlin in a series of now legendary concerts, and also recorded with Chick Corea.

He was highly acclaimed after playing Joaquin de Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" at London's Festival Hall in 1991, attended by the composer himself, and considered one of the best interpretations of the piece.

De Lucia memorised the piece by ear as he did not read music, and gave it a distinctive flamenco flavor.

"With the guitar I've suffered a great deal, but when I've had a good time, the suffering seemed worthwhile," he said in the documentary.

He also formed a partnership in the 1970s with singer Camaron de la Isla which played a large part in creating the New Flamenco movement.

A spokesman for the city hall in Algeciras, where de Lucia was born, confirmed his death and said the city had decreed two days of official mourning.

Daylight Dies – A Frail Becoming Review

2014-02-25T22:17:00.004-08:00

How can you not love melodic doom-death. It has melody, doom AND death! What could be better? Coming hot on the heels of the latest from Hooded Menace, we get more melodic, doomy and downcast music from DaylightDies. A Frail Becoming is the fourth album full of gloom and despair from these North Carolina masters of melancholy. Unlike the doom-death acts moving in the direction of funeral dirge, Daylight Dies has always kept things more melodic, accessible and light (in the context of depressive doom-death, anyway). Throughout their career, elements of October Tide, Katatonia and Insomnium found their way into the mix. All can still be found on A Frail Becoming, but the sound here is much more clearly a mix ofGhost Brigade and Rapture, with a healthy dose of post-rock style and sensibility. Never a crushingly heavy band, Daylight Dies often relied on the harsh vocals to prevent them from dropping out of the doom-death genre and becoming a gloomy goth band. Despite the absence of the heft of bands like Draconian or Hooded Menace, their style has resulted in some excellent releases, most notably No Replyand Dismantling Devotion. That style continues here with their most Ghost Brigade-y release yet. A Frail Becoming is loaded with moody, doomy, mid-tempo examples of doom rock with a sturdy backbone of death vox running counter-point to mournful clean signing. When it works, it’s very good. Unfortunately, some of the material is more dull than doomy and drags without ever becoming memorable. Luckily, things hit more than miss and overall, this is an enjoyable, if slightly flawed release, sure to please those who loved the last Ghost Brigade or Swallow the Sun albums.

“Infidel” opens in bigtime Ghost Brigade mode, right down to the alternating melodic and chunky, thick (vaguely core-ish) riffing. There’s an effective ebb and flow to the song and anger battles tranquility throughout. The chorus is a good one and manages to convey that bleak “Finnish style” gloom we all love so much. Things get even better with the doom rock of “Sunset,” where clean and death vox trade-off seamlessly to create a cold, somber winner that could have sat comfortably on the last Ghost Brigade opus. The weeping leads and downbeat flourishes call to mind both Insomnium and Rapture and everything about the Daylight Dies style gels here.

Other moments of success come with the forlorn hopelessness of “A Final Vestige,” the soft, emotional, Katatonia-esque doomy post-rock of “Ghosting” and the extra heavy, ponderous, but beautifully melodic “Hold on to Nothing,” which channels a lot of Swallow the Sun. Lastly, the lengthy closer “An Heir to Emptiness” uncorks a plethora of downcast leads and unhappy moments over its slow and shambling eight-minute run.

Alas, despite a general level of quality, some less-than-stellar moments do crop up. “A Pale Approach,” while not bad per se, never really gets going, and while the Rapture styling of the song itself is decent, there isn’t much payoff as it runs its course. The same issues follow during “Dreaming of Breathing,” though some above-average riffing helps bail things out a bit at the midway point. Still, it’s not a world beater by any means. In all honestly, even the good stuff here isn’t quite up the level of genre contemporaries like Ghost Brigade orKatatonia.

I can’t fault the vocals, since they are well done throughout. Egan O’Rouke uses his sad, sullen cleans to good effect and he shines on most of the tracks. Nathan Ellis has a standard issue but effective death growl that suits the music well enough and he gets the job done. The interplay between the vocals is also generally well thought out and works well. While there are some great, doomy leads and riffs scattered aboutA Frail Becoming, I can’t say I’m a fan of some of Charlie Shackleford’s core-ish, simplistic riff choices. Though they aren’t used a lot, they irk me whenever they appear and I think the music would benefit from those chugga-chuggs riffs dropping off entirely.

Sound-wise, this is the production twin of the last Ghost Brigade platter. It’s a clean sound, but the polish doesn’t get in the way of the doomy, grey pall the material casts over the listener. This isn’t a sound that necessarily needs a raw mix, so long as the guitars have adequate balls, which they do here.

This isn’t the best Daylight Dies album, but it has enough of their central sound and wintry charm to appeal to long-time fans and fans of the style. I’m a bit disappointed with just how much A Frail Becoming mirrors Ghost Brigade this time out, but since I like that band, its hard to dislike this. Stick with it and let it grow on you and you’ll be treated to some pleasant, if not exceptional doom rock designed to take you into the frozen glooming. Be sure to check out their superior back catalogue as well!

'Godzilla': Eight Easter Eggs You Have To See

2014-02-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

Take a deep dive into the images that tell us the most about the monster's return.

For the movie's second trailer, "Godzilla" delivered another moody look into a world overrun with gigantic monsters without giving too much away.

While I appreciate saving some of the surprise for theaters, some of the teased are just too maddeningly intriguing to leave a mystery. That's why I've broken down some of the key frames from the trailer to unlock their secrets.

Okay, so we're getting the messy stuff out of the way first. First order of business, here's this gross. Something pretty nasty happened to this thing, which was apparently radioactive at one time. The claw marks on the side suggest that a monster has been in the area and could be responsible for whatever is coating the outside. I'll leave it at that.

Now, let's move on to this egg sack missile thing. Here's a missile that looks like it's attached to an egg sack. Are there mini Godzillas on the way? Doesn't that sound dangerously close to a plot line of the 1998 Roland Emmerich "Godzilla"? Let's not think too much about that and move on.

Well, since we're on the topic of monster anatomy, here's the rib cage of something very big. Are we looking at the remains of long-dead Godzilla food? Seems pretty likely.

While the trailer didn't feature a ton of good looks at Godzilla, it made up for it by teasing at least two different kinds of kaiju. I can't say that there's definitely a flying monster in "Godzilla," but there's a flying monster in "Godzilla." Don't believe me?

Oh, are those wings? Sure looks like there's a flying monster in "Godzilla," huh? Perhaps it's our old friend Rodan.

This still is less clear. What we have here is a foot that doesn't belong to Godzilla, and without a wider look at the beast, I can't say for sure whether it's the winged monster. We could be looking at two kaiju that aren't Godzilla and an enormous amount of restraint on the part of WB's marketing team.

Just how big is this version of Godzilla? The poster from last week showed him towering over San Francisco, and after a few glimpses in the trailer, that representation seems more and more accurate.

FYI, this is the Statue of Liberty from New York, New York in Las Vegas. Godzilla or another kaiju makes it far inland, but not that far.

"Godzilla" opens in theaters on May 16.

Godzilla

Man’s selfies after plane crash are both incredible and terrifying

2014-01-12T21:30:00.002-08:00

Ferdinand Puentes, 39, was among the eight passengers in the Cessna Grand Caravan that lost power and crashed off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, last month.

Puentes captured much of the terrifying ordeal on his GoPro camera.

"There wasn't panic or anything. It was very orderly. It wasn't like any of the movies or the TV shows," passenger C. Phillip Hollstein Jr. told The Associated Press.

Puentes' footage shows passengers calmly exiting the plane, which was quickly filling up with water.

"I actually had two GoPro cameras, but the one on the stick was rolling," he told HawaiiNewsNow.

Puentes posted selfies of himself floating in the ocean on Facebook. In one photo, a fellow passenger floats behind him. In another, the plane sinks in the distance.

He tried to swim for the coast line, but exhaustion quickly took over.

"A lot of things was (sic) just racing but you can't actually say, 'Oh, I'm going to do this and that.' It's pretty much everything is on instinct. Just trying to survive," he said.

"Steel-toed boots, heavy work jeans, and long sleeve shirt. It was hard and exhausting to swim with all that," Puentes told KHON 2.

Pilot Clyde Kawasaki tried to corral his passengers together in the rough waters, and gave Puentes an extra seat cushion to float on as they waited an hour for the Coast Guard to rescue them.

"The way how he handled the flight and everything, he kept his calm, it's just amazing how he did it," Puentes told ABC News. "He is my hero."

Puentes and Kawasaki are now good friends.

Yesterday, Puentes boarded a plane for the first time since the December 11 crash — to overcome his new fear of flying.

"It hurts, but you have to heal my way of healing and move forward," Puentes said, adding that his life has changed since the crash:

"A lot of things seem petty now. Can't take things for granted."

"Physically I'm fine. Emotionally I'm still a little bit shaken," he admitted to HawaiiNewsNow.

"I still have a hard time sleeping at night."

Hawaii’s Health Director Loretta Fuddy was the only passenger to die in the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board is currently investigating what caused the small plane to lose power.

Ariel Sharon death in Israel: World reaction

2014-01-12T01:38:00.001-08:00

World leaders a

ISRAEL

President Shimon Peres gave a very personal tribute to a man who was a friend, long-time political rival and also a partner in Israel's 2001 unity government. He spoke of his dear friend Arik who "knew no fear" and was one of the architects of his country. "He was an outstanding man and an exceptional commander who moved his people and loved them, and the people loved him."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "his memory will forever be held in the heart of the nation" while Ehud Olmert, who took over as PM after Mr Sharon's stroke, said he was a smart and realistic person who was not a warmonger. Tzipi Livni, who founded the Kadima (Forward) party with Ariel Sharon and is now chief negotiator with the Palestinians, described him as a "father of the nation".

Praise came from across the political spectrum, with Ehud Barak, the Labour prime minister who lost the 2001 general election to Mr Sharon, describing his decision to pull Israelis out of Gaza as extraordinary and "crucial to the future of the state of Israel".

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

There was little sorrow among Palestinians at Ariel Sharon's death, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At Khan Younis in Gaza, sweets were handed out and posters of the late Israeli prime minister was burned.

"We don't say good riddance but I don't think he has left us anything positive," said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. She told the BBC his legacy was one of violence, bloodshed and cruelty. Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was a "unilateral redeployment" that maintained a "very strict siege".

Former minister Ghassan Khatib said "in all his history, he played a negative role" and a senior official in the Fatah movement, Jibril Rajoub, condemned him as a criminal whom Palestinians had wanted to see tried as a war criminal.

Khalil al-Haya of Gaza's Islamist militant Hamas movement said after eight years Ariel Sharon was going in the same direction as "other tyrants and criminals whose hands were covered with Palestinian blood".

UNITED STATES

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle led tributes in the US, saying that as "Israel says goodbye to Prime Minister Sharon, we join with the Israeli people in honouring his commitment to his country".

His predecessor George Bush, who was president at the time Mr Sharon was prime minister, said he had been honoured to "know this man of courage and call him friend".

In a personal reaction, Secretary of State John Kerry said that it was no secret that the US had had differences with the late Israeli leader at times, but he would never forget meeting "with this big bear of a man when he became prime minister as he sought to bend the course of history toward peace".

Ex-President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, a former secretary of state, said Ariel Sharon had given his life to Israel and it had been "an honour to work with him, argue with him, and watch him always trying to find the right path for his beloved country".

EUROPE

UK Prime Minister David Cameron paid tribute to the "brave and controversial decisions" Mr Sharon had taken in pursuit of peace, describing him as one of the most significant figures in Israeli history.

His words were echoed by French President Francois Hollande who said that after a long military and political career "he made the choice to turn towards dialogue with Palestinians".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel "is mourning with the Israeli people", her spokesman said. In Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Mr Sharon had "dedicated his whole life to defending the interests of his country".

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the late Israeli leader had been a great friend of Russia and praised what he had done to protect his country's interests.

UNITED NATIONS

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Ariel Sharon was a "hero to his people" and he urged Israel to build on the late prime minister's legacy of pragmatism to work towards a Palestinian state.

OTHER REACTION

The organisation Human Rights Watch said Ariel Sharon had died without facing justice for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli commission of inquiry found him personally responsible for failing to prevent the massacre.

Will you pay Dh45,000 around $4000 for Google Glass? UAE seller believes so

2013-08-19T05:24:00.001-07:00

Now you can buy a Google Glass in the UAE that is being sold on Dubizzle for more than 800 per cent its original prize.

The developer version of the Glass Glass Explorer – Grey edition is being advertised in the UAE for a massive Dh45,000 ($12,251) as against the original price of $1,500.

In comparison a user on eBay is auctioning it off at around $4,000.

Google started rolling out the Glass to developers earlier this year and plans to launch it in the open market in 2014.

Google had allowed interested developers to pre-order the device for testing and have distributed about 2,000 glasses.

It is also in the process of distributing the glasses to about 8,000 winners of #ifihadglass contest.

The possibilities are immense. Google itself introduced what the Glass does in its introduction last year.

A US based firm Infinity AR uploaded a video of what’s in store and it has become an instant hit with 1.6 million views in a matter of two months.

And this video of Alex Blaszczuk, a law student paralyzed from the chest down and unable to use her hands demonstrates how “With Glass, paralysis doesn’t have to be paralyzing.”

While developers have been busy building Android-based apps for mostly web-based services, Google has promised to soon announce the Glass Development Kit (GDK) that can run directly on the Glass.

Just last week Google announced additional updates introducing Now Cards, Voice Commands and Video.

Now Cards enable a user with information such as dinner reservations, hotel bookings and concerts based on the confirmations in your email; find show times and movie information for nearby theaters and even assist you with emergency alerts, such as traffic and weather alerts and even live scores of your favorite sports.

Google has also added new voice commands such as “Post an update” for Path and “Take a note” for Evernote.

“Updates and notes are just the beginning; soon you’ll be able to use your voice to trigger all sorts of services. We’ll keep you posted (pun very much intended) as we roll out more,” a note on Google Plus said.

What are some alternatives or similar to library.nu?

2013-08-15T04:57:00.004-07:00

Lets build a wiki, from everything mentioned:

http://bookos.org/
http://ebookee.org/
http://it-ebooks.info/
http://en.bookfi.org/
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
http://libgen.info/ (Russian)
http://btdigg.org/
http://monoskop.org/log/
https://docs.google.com/document... (A great list of libraries)

Apple’s iPhone 5S to debut on September 10th

2013-08-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

iPhone 5S Release Date

Apple’s next-generation iPhone 5S will be unveiled during a press conference on September 10th, a new report claims. The news comes from AllThingsD, which has accurately reported the timing of severalApple announcements in the past before invitations were sent to the media. The iPhone 5S is expected to feature an external design nearly identical to the current iPhone 5, but an exclusive BGR report revealed that the handset is in store for a major internal overhaul. Rumored specs include a faster processor, an upgraded camera and possibly a fingerprint scanner. It is unclear if Apple’s low-cost “iPhone 5C” or the next-generation iPad will also debut at the September 10th event.

AOL boss Tim Armstrong sacks employee in front of 1000 staff

2013-08-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

Being fired is unpleasant when done compassionately. But imagine getting the sack in front of an audience of about 1000 colleagues.

That's what happened to an employee at AOL, when the company's chief executive, Tim Armstrong, lost his cool during a major conference call.

Mr Armstrong was reportedly not pleased about the employee taking his photo. So, in a snap decision, he fired him.

Wielding the axe: Tim Armstrong. Photo: Getty Images

"Abel, put that camera down right now," Mr Armstrong can be heard saying in the audio leaked to the internet. "Abel! You're fired. Out!"

The now-former employee was Abel Lenz, the creative director of the AOL-owned local news platform Patch, according to Jim Romenesko, who published the recording on his media blog.After pausing for about five seconds, the executive continued the briefing as if nothing happened.

Fired: Abel Lenz.. Photo: @lenzabel

Alannah Rafferty, who is an associate professor of organisational behaviour and management at UNSW's Australian School of Business, said the incident was the perfect case study of what not to do when firing someone.

"Not only is it devastating for the individual involved but it's also quite devastating for the morale of the company because these senior executives provide the standard for the kind of behaviour that's acceptable in an organisation," she said.

She said the negative repercussions would be long term.

"He's really influencing the culture quite powerfully because people will be talking about this forever in this company," she said. "It's part of the myth-making that occurs in organisations.

"Reactionary decision-making is also not good behaviour to be modelling to your employees - and also to other leaders in the company."

Ironically, just moments before the outburst, Mr Armstrong told staff he did not care if anyone leaked information about Patch.

"I don't care what the press says. I don't care if people leak information," he said.

Mr Lenz has not yet commented publicly, except to tweet "no comment" with a blurry picture from Old Town Bar in Manhattan, New York City.

When Mr Romenesko asked him for comment via Twitter, he replied: "I appreciate the interest Jim, but I have nothing to share. Go Patch!"

According to the UK's Daily Mail, the call last week was about possible major cuts to Patch. The meeting with staff was meant to boost morale among those staying with the company.

Associate Professor Rafferty said such times of change are when strong leadership is most important.

"The fact that he's engaged in this behaviour during a period of high uncertainty is just devastating."

She said it would be very hard to counter the effect of such a critical incident.

"He could apologise. He could send out a letter. He could try a whole range of things. But it's not going to negate the effect of that very powerful incident on culture and morale."

Xbox One unveiled – what will you get for your money?

2013-08-10T23:42:00.004-07:00

Microsoft's unboxing video offers plenty of dazzling jargon, details of 'bonus' features and yet another reverse-ferret

Protests over the Xbox One’s always-online functionality have been heard loud and clear.

A one-liner has stuck around the games industry for a while now. What isMicrosoft's successor to Xbox 360? The Xbox 180. Such has been the runup to the release of the Xbox One, which has featured more reverse-ferrets than a mirrored petting zoo – and all of them self-inflicted. Thursday brings another, but this time wrapped in the more interesting news of what exactly gamers will get for their investment of £429 – outlined in that most modern of formats, the "unboxing video".

If you can't spare a few minutes of your life to watch big-budget QVC, fear not. The headline change here is the inclusion of a chat headset, because back in June Microsoft announced customers would have to buy it separately. The newly packed-in headset enables voicechat with three times the sampling rate of the Xbox 360 equivalent (ie clearer, a very welcome improvement), has in-line controls, can be worn on either ear, weighs a light 44 grams, and despite the "liquid black" finish still looks cheap as chips. But it'll certainly do the job.

Thursdays other new details perhaps have more to do with the dazzle of jargon. The Category 2 HDMI cable in the box is capable of outputting on 1080p, 3D and 4K displays. This is arguably no less than you'd expect, but Microsoft could have plumped for a cheaper option – so fair play. Equally welcome is the step up in Xbox One's wireless adaptor, which now works on dual-band 2.4ghz and 5ghz frequencies.

Also included is the new version of the Kinect sensor, but after this we get into the kind of territory that may have your eyes drooping – for example, the inclusion of a power supply. The Xbox One controller (also included) features more than 40 design improvements, it was reiterated, though the video somehow forgot to mention that the play & charge kit (ie a bespoke rechargeable battery) is sold separately. There is also the bizarre boast that Xbox One's pad can be used without batteries – if you buy the aforementioned play & charge kit, and use the cable included therein. What was that thing about razorblades and razors?

Known quantities were re-stated; the console will have a 500GB hard drive, a slot-loading Blu-ray optical drive, HDMI input and output, three USB 3.0 ports, a Kensington security slot, IR blaster port, and a S/PDIF interface. Following the recent "increase" in Xbox One's GPU speed from 800 to 853MHz (a tit-for-tat announcement designed to stoke fan wars), this means that the only major spec left unknown is the speed of Xbox One's 8-core CPU, which will likely be announced at Gamescom – the rumour mill says to expect something around 1.6GHz.

For me the greatest part of Thursday's announcement, the cherry on top, was a glimpse of the redeemable code included only for "Day One" purchasers, as Microsoft calls them. This code will grant its owner an "Achievement" [sic] upon entry – branding them among the community, if you will, forever after. And that's not all.

Hand-in-hand with this is the Xbox One's embossed controller, which bears the legend "Day One 2013". This is an interesting phenomenon. It is as if Microsoft looked at the fetishisation of say, Apple products, and thought the Xbox One could do with a bit of that. The only difference being that the Xbox One is a big black rectangle rather than a svelte design masterpiece. These Day One bonuses clearly aren't aimed at me – that is, an adult – though one does wonder who goes in for this stuff.

You sense that, in years to come, marketing students will look back on Xbox One's launch as a famous example. What could have been done better? With another policy reversal on Thursday, the answer is clearly "lots". But it is also important to give credit where it's due: as with Xbox One's always-online functionality and draconian copyright enforcement, it seems that the loud protests have been heard by Microsoft and, more importantly, acted upon. Such an attitude doesn't hide Xbox One's mistakes. But it does suggest that, once players are unboxing the thing rather than Major Nelson, there will be far fewer.

How to Earn Money Through Google Adsense

2013-08-10T23:37:00.003-07:00

Money for nothing? Well, not quitebut close! Google’s AdSense is a revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites that places ads for goods and services that are relevant to the content of your site, targeted to the people who frequent your pages. In turn, you get paid a small amount when the ad is either displayed on your page, or clicked on. We'll show you some good ideas that added to your own, will help increase your AdSense revenue.

Steps

Creating an Ad Unit

1
Sign into your AdSense account. Go to AdSense, and click on My ads in the upper left.
- Create a new Ad unit. In the main screen area, under Content > Ad units, click the+New ad unit button.
2
Name your ad unit. This can be any name that suits you, but many find creating a standard naming format helps them manage large amounts of data.
- For example, using [target site for the ad]_[ad size]_[ad date] is one approach, that would look like this: mywebsite.com_336x280_080112. Whatever format you decide to use for naming, make that your standard.
3
Pick a size. See "How to Do It" below for details, but Google has found best practicesthat generate more clicks.
4
Set your ad type. This determines the types of ads you will see on your website: text only; text and image/rich media; and image/rich media only.
5
Create a custom channel. A custom channel lets you group ad units however you choose, such as by size or location on a page.
- You can track performance by custom channel, and turn your channel into a targetable ad placement so advertisers can target their ads to your ad units.
6
Create your ad style. This lets you choose colors for the various components of an ad: border, title, background, text, and URL. It also lets you choose corner styles, from square to very rounded, a font family, and a default font size.
- It's good practice to create an ad style that harmonizes with the look and colors of your website.
- You can use Google's presets, or use your own custom settings. In either case, a sample ad on the right will show you how your ad will appear
7
Get the code for the ad. When you're done with the ad setup, either save your ad unit, or click the Save and get code button at the bottom to get the HTML code for your site.
- If adding code to your site is a puzzle you want help with, click here for Google's code implementation guide.

How to Design Your Ad Campaign

1
Analyze your content. In designing any kind of ad campaign, it's crucial to know who your target is. If you're writing a food blog that caters to single men on a budget, for example, you've narrowed the scope of who you will be appealing to. You've also got a very good focus point for your ads. What are things single men who cook drawn to? Here are some possibilities: dating, cars, movies, politics, and live music.
- Think about who frequents your website, write down what you feel are the most important characteristics of your viewers.
2
Fine tune advertisements. While AdSense will auto-populate your page with what they feel are relevant ads, use their tools to provide tighter controls.
- Set up channels. Channels are like labels that let you group your ad units your way—by color, category, or pages. By setting up channels, you can get detailed reports on the performance of your ad units, and use that to your advantage. For example:
  - Use one style of ad on one group of pages, and another style on another group. Track and compare the performance of the two styles, and pick the best performer.
  - Compare performance on pages that focus on different things. For example, if your pages about gardening perform better than your pages on cooking, you might consider adding more to your gardening pages.
  - If you have separate domains, set up a channel to track each of them to see which is generating the most clicks.
3
Optimize your ad placement and site design. Google has found there are places where ads are more effective, and places where they are less effective.
- Ads that appear when you first arrive at your page (i.e., "above the fold" as they say in the newspaper world) tend to be more effective than those that are below the fold.
- Ads on upper left tend to perform much better than ads on the lower right.
- Ads directly above the primary content, and ads that appear at the bottom of the page and above the footer tend to perform very well.
- Wider ads are generally more successful, as they are much easier to read.
- Ads that display images or video perform very well.
- Using colors that complement your website colors will make them more readable, and so more effective.
4
Learn how AdSense works. AdSense automatically sends ads to your site based on a few different criteria:
- Contextual targeting. AdSense crawlers scan your page, analyze your content, and serve up ads designed match your content. They do this using keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the link structure of the web.
- Placement targeting. This allows advertisers to choose to run their ads on specific subsections of a publisher's website. If your website matches an advertisers criteria, their ad will appear on your page.
- Interest-based advertising. This lets advertisers reach users based on their interests and the user's previous interactions with them, such as a visit to their website. Google's Ads Preferences Manager allows users themselves to choose their interest categories, which further helps advertisers focus their ad campaigns. This method is good for monetizing your site more efficiently, as it increases the value for advertisers and provides a more relevant experience for users.

What's it Worth?

1
Manage your expectations. When you sign up for AdSense, you'll want to know what kind of revenue can you expect to see. There is a lot that goes into what kind of return you can expect, and managing those things will help you maximize your earning potential.
2
Traffic. First and formost, in order to generate any kind of revenue from AdSense you must have people clicking on your ads. In order for this to happen, you need to have people on your site, reading your content! Whether you have a business website, or a personal blog, the rule is the same: Get the word out!
- Heavily trafficked large sites can see over a million hits a day, whereas a blog might feel lucky if they have 100 visitors a day.
- For every thousand page impressions (views) you receive, you may earn from $.05 to $5. Yes, that's a broad range—over a month, that is between $1.50 and $150.00! Where in that range you can expect to frequent depends entirely on you, your site, and your promotion efforts.
3
Cost Per Click (CPC). This paid every time somebody clicks an ad on your page. No, you can't click your own ad—Google will see this, and shut you down so fast your head will spin. The advertisers set the price for these ads, and they can vary greatly.
- An advertiser may spend a lot on a per-click basis, but that ad may generate very little interest on your site. #*An ad that may generate $.03 per click may get 100 hits, but that doesn't add up to much.
4
Clickthrough Rate (CTR). This is the percentage of visitors to your site compared to how many them actually clicked on an ad. If 100 people came to your site, and 1 of them clicked an ad, your CTR is 1%, and that's not an unreasonable number. You can see how getting more traffic to your site will really make a difference.
5
Revenue per 1000 impressions (RPM). This is an estimate of how much you might receive if you have 1000 impressions (page views).
- If you made, for example, $1 for 100 impressions, your RPM would be $10. There is no guarantee you'll make that, but it's a good way to check the overall performance of your site.
6
Content is king. The quality of your content is an important factor in understanding your earning potential. If your site provides rich, compelling content and a great user experience, you will have more interested users. Google's crawlers will also have an easier time determining the type of ad content would best fit on your site. Interested users + targeted ads = $$$
7
Start building keyword-rich pages. Liberally seed with well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site.
- If your site is about topics such as debt consolidation, web hosting or asbestos-related cancer, you’ll earn much more per click than if it’s about free puppies.
- If you concentrate only on top-paying keywords, you’ll face stiff competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, so do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.

Video

Create a new Google Ad Unit for Google Ad Sense.

EditTips

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do say that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags.
Quality is the most important part of any web site. If your site does not contain the content of expected quality the visitor might not come back,
Some webmasters are designing brand new sites specifically for serving AdSense text ads, however it’s against the AdSense rules to design a site purely for AdSense, so you’ll want to include a few Affiliate links or sell your own product, too.
A great resource for earning money is using traffic driving sites like Flixya You can sign up for Google Adsense and Flixya, without the costs or time needed to build traffic or your own site.
Avoid non-English characters on English pages. There is a bug which can cause these pages to show irrelevant French ads
.

What I'm Doing With My Life.....

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The Importance of Staying Hydrated: How Proper Water Hydration Can Improve Your Health

https://bit.ly/3GPsh88

طيار من سلاح الجو الملكي يثير الفخر و الاعجاب على مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي

The horror-movie streaming service Shudder serves up phantasmic scare fare

The horror-movie streaming service Shudder serves up phantasmic scare fare

If you love quality horror films, this streaming service is worth the price of admission.

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If I were a guest curator

Intel NUC6i7KYK review: This Skull Canyon NUC smashes all mini-PC preconceptions

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Take a deep dive into the images that tell us the most about the monster's return.

Man’s selfies after plane crash are both incredible and terrifying

Ariel Sharon death in Israel: World reaction

World leaders a

ISRAEL

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

UNITED STATES

EUROPE

UNITED NATIONS

OTHER REACTION

Will you pay Dh45,000 around $4000 for Google Glass? UAE seller believes so

Now you can buy a Google Glass in the UAE that is being sold on Dubizzle for more than 800 per cent its original prize.

What are some alternatives or similar to library.nu?

Apple’s iPhone 5S to debut on September 10th

AOL boss Tim Armstrong sacks employee in front of 1000 staff

Xbox One unveiled – what will you get for your money?

How to Earn Money Through Google Adsense

Steps

Creating an Ad Unit

How to Design Your Ad Campaign

What's it Worth?

Video

EditTips