Onefourth

Paper Helmets Could Make Cycle Share Schemes Safer, say Creators

noreply@blogger.com (abawasa) — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 13:02:00 +0000

Paper helmets could be protecting the heads of cyclists in under 12 months according to one of their inventors, Thomas Gottelier.

Paper Pulp Helmets are a type of cheap, disposable bicycle helmet made entirely from recycled newspaper. Designed by former Royal College of Art (RCA) students Thomas Gottelier, Bobby Petersen and Edward Thomas, the helmets could cost as little as £1 and are 2-3 mm thick. The helmets are "safe, biodegradable, recyclable and waterproof," Gottelier told Wired.co.uk.

The team says they are currently in discussions with Barclays for investment into the project, with an aim to have the helmets ready for deployment by Spring 2014. A Barclays spokesperson declined to comment. They have also attracted the attention of the London government, Transport for London and Crossrail, as well as a San Francisco-based cycle share scheme, according to Gottelier.

To make the helmets, newspaper is grinded and then mixed into a solution that is 96 percent water. Colouring and waterproofing additives can then be added. The solution is then sucked onto a mould, with the water passing through a fine mesh that leaves only the newspaper on the mould. Once its dried, you have a remarkably strong material that is used as packaging in some parts of the chemical industry. The process is so cheap that the strap for the helmet, which is made from woven paper string, is the most expensive part.

Paper Pulp Helmets arose when Gottelier, Petersen and Thomas decided to do something about the lack of helmet provision on the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme. "Cycle share providers have a responsibility to also provide helmets," says Gottelier. "They preach helmet safety, but they don't have provision for it".

The trio would regularly cycle to university and were inspired to "use materials you see around the city". In London, that's newspaper, primarily the free copies of the Evening Standard and the Metro that litter London's streets and transport system every day. Although it seems counter-intuitive to imagine a paper helmet being safe, Gottelier is confident that it meets European cycle helmet standards. The team have tested it at Imperial College London and the RCA and are looking forward to having it independently-tested at SATRA, the UK's leading helmet testing facility.

However, Gottelier says that it's not meant to be a replacement for current helmets. "It's for spontaneous cycle users and not your everyday cyclists," he says. "We're absolutely not saying that it's better than other helmets". With cycle share schemes popping up in cities around the world, most recently in New York, the question of providing helmets for cycle share users is an important one. The logistical problems around providing useful helmets are significant, the primary one being: where do you keep them?

Although the Paper Pulp Helmets don't directly solve that issue, their recyclability and low cost begin to make it a viable option for cycle share schemes.

Gottelier says they are planning to improve the helmet, making it thicker and altering the shape. "[At the moment] it's not stylish," he admitted.

Original story from Wired.co.uk

The All New Opera for Windows and Mac

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:02:00 +0000

The Norway-based software company released their desktop version 15 of Opera web browser this Tuesday. Opera is an alternative web browser that features an updated design for Windows and Mac computers

It has a cleaner and modern look just like its competitors. It also includes various innovative features right at the starting screen that can be made use of.

The ‘speed dial’ is where users can pin their favorite websites that can be accessed directly by just a click. Users can also get live notifications from sites like Facebook and Gmail right at the starting screen. Various add-ons can be downloaded and added to the list of speed dial and grouping similar applications together.

The ‘stash’ feature is more like a bookmark where users can store or save webpages that they like and organize them into a list that is searchable using keywords. It also has a resizable feature where webpages expand or collapse to just the headings, all in smooth manner.

It also has the ‘discover’ page where users can search top-quality news and entertainment from around the globe. Latest articles can be found based on user’s choice.

Similar to Chrome and Safari, the webpage address bar and the search bar are combined into one. Opera also features a sleeker download manager that includes pop-up listings and statuses of downloading items. Another inclusion is the ‘Off Road’ mode that compresses pages to speed up the browsing even when a network is slow.

See the new Opera 15 in action:

You can download the all new Opera 15 from their website.

Logo and screenshot images courtesy of Opera Software

Limbo Released for iOS

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 20:45:00 +0000

The dark, gloomy world of Limbo is back but this time on the iOS platform. Limbo originally released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Mac, and on the PlayStation Vita in 2010 sold over 3 million copies. It’s certainly a game with lot of exposure.

The game starts off with almost no introduction and no tips or tutorial on how to play the game, but it’s fairly simple and straight-forward. You complete puzzles, unlock stuffs and you move ahead, sound’s simple right? Then why did it sell over 3 million copies? Many know why but if you are one of those people who still haven’t explored the dark, moody, intriguing world of Limbo, I strongly suggest you buy yourself a copy. If you are an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or anything that runs iOS user than it’s even better because this beautiful game has been released on the iOS platform at just $4.99.

Download

A wonderful game, with beautiful visuals and terrifying sound design, it’s really not difficult to get lost in it like the lone wandering child, escaping death and killing giant deadly animals. It’s a game that’s going to make a lasting impression long after you have completed. Puzzles range from simple to some tricky ones, some require quick thinking while some just a little patience. You will probably die many times in your journey and will spring back to the last checkpoint (numerous times at first) but mind you, the death sequences even though innovative are not a pretty sight to watch. Despite its overwhelmingly gray palette, Limbo is a beautifully grim work of art. A game without colors, yet so beautiful.

You can read a full review here.

You can download Limbo for iOS here.

Top 10 Websites To Learn Guitar

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 23:47:00 +0000

Image courtesy of worradmu / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have bought my first guitar, yippee!! So what do I do now? That’s probably the question everybody has when they buy their first guitar and set out with the hope to master this beautiful instrument. A couple of weeks here and there, surfing the web and trying out stuff on their own, gets pretty frustrating for some. So for the starters and the others who need much better options, here are 10 that could make your day..

10. GUITARLESSONS.COM

They have a wide variety of guitar lessons for beginners, intermediates and advanced players and for free. They don’t have a structured course but a little search around would give you what you are looking for with a video tutorial. They also have jam tracks to play along and offer couple of guitar learning dvd’s too.

9. FREEGUITARVIDEOS.COM

This is a good place to start because they offer free guitar videos. They have many instructors teaching various styles and in various playing levels. Many videos contain techniques and some artist based styles. Except guitar they also teach few other instruments like mandolin, banjo, bass etc. They also contain jam tracks and guitar dvd’s.

8. GUITARMASTERCLASS.NET

Another great site with many features and guitar techniques. They have lessons in many guitar styles like rock, fusion, metal etc. They also have a feature of user video upload for feedback from the number instructors available from around the world. They also have video chat to help you improve with on the spot feedback.

7. LICKLIBRARY.COM

They have various lessons for songs and techniques. I didn’t personally explore the site but they do offer some great video lessons to help improve your playing. There are many lessons that you either subscribe to or purchase on per-video basis.

6. STEVIESNACKS.COM

A site for blues guitar lessons. Numerous free videos to get you started with blues and great content. The videos are recorded in an unusual way but still manage to teach the required technique.

5. MORTENSLESSONS.COM

A place for jazz guitarists. Morten is a great jazz player and teaches theory, technique and improvisations ranging from be-bop era to modern players. Hundreds of videos, mp3s, jam tracks, pdf at affordable price.

4. MATTWARNOCKGUITAR.COM

There are numerous lessons to make you better at playing jazz guitar but everything works on live video. The instructor Matt Warnock teaches jazz guitar through Skype or Gmail Video Chat. It will not be the most preferred way of learning for many but it does work for some. So if you are interested in live jazz guitar lessons this might be the place for you.

3. GUITARTRICKS.COM

One of the most preferred website for online guitar learning. They have a free registration that has very limited offering of the course but the paid monthly subscriptions give full access to the great video lessons, tutorials from many instructors and numerous techniques to help you play better and all this in an affordable price.

2. TRUEFIRE.COM

Another preferred website for some serious guitar learning. They have a huge collection of lessons from many instructors in various styles of playing. You download all the video lessons at an affordable price. Their subscriptions vary and according to them the discounts available on the lessons vary too. People serious about learning the instrument and are ready to pay can check out thiswebsite.

1. JUSTINGUITAR.COM

50k people like him, over 100 million people have watched his YouTube instructional videos, 20k unique visitors visit his site each day, what more can be said? A great instructor, great course structure with unique tips and exercises and most of the lessons for free. This is a great place to start your guitar career. He also offers dvd’s at 50$(4 dvd’s) which can also be quite helpful but his free video lessons would more than just enough to get you started.

Well those were the some of the websites that offer great online lessons for people who don’t have the time to hire a personal instructor (recommended). Some are free while some are paid subscriptions but still they are worth it. Choose the site that suits you the best and complete all the courses covered there before jumping to any other course or site.

Not to forget: The greatest online library would be, of course YouTube. Anything and everything can be found here all you need to do is… search.

How Not To Learn Guitar

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 20:13:00 +0000

I’ve been searching around the web for ways to improve my guitar playing and found many people out there who suggested pretty good ways to improve my playing but it was really difficult to find the things a guitar player comes across during his or her career of playing the stringed instrument. I’ve been playing for two years without any instructor and I can say that it’s really difficult to master the instrument without any professional guidance. I myself am searching for one. So the first suggestion on how to not learn a guitar would be…
don’t learn without any professional guidance. It saves you the time, speeds up the learning process with the direct feedback you get from the instructor and most importantly sets a discipline on the way you learn so that you don’t go haywire about what to learn next and how to go about it. So for the people who have just started on their own I would seriously suggest an instructor.

But the many few like me who don’t have the time and the money to invest in a tutor and prefer to learn from the internet, here are some tips on how to improve which is completely based on my experience. Personal experiences may change and guitar playing techniques and practicing techniques differ from person to person but you can get a general guideline on how to go about on your daily practice.

The most and most and most important thing about practicing this complicatedly simple instrument is to practice SLOWLY!
NEVER try anything fast. Let it be the notes, the licks, the chords, the scales, the slides, the bends, the hammer-ons and pull-offs, do everything slowly. It’s the motto to master this instrument. Play Slow.
Playing fast gives rise to errors and bad learning where you tend to ignore these errors and go on with the playing. If this becomes a habit, it becomes a habit hard to lose. It’s the way your brain works. There’s something called muscle memory. It’s the way your brain remembers the positions of your fingers. It’s like riding a bicycle, when you first start off you concentrate on the pedals, the handle, and the balance and you would always prefer a clear road to ride. You learn to pedal slowly; putting your legs down each time you lose the balance but always try to complete the extra rotation the next time you start. This way you gain better control and finally you are blazing through even the busiest streets where the concentration is only on the road and not on the pedal, the handle and even the balance because, everything feels automatic. That’s how your brain remembers things. So by starting slow and doing it again and again slowly, the brain remembers the finger positions and then you can play the chords and notes much better. The more slowly you do the more better you get but don’t start too slow or you will be bored even before you start. A metronome (discussed next) can help in this situation. Playing slowly helps you to hit the right strings in the right spots and the brain remembers these spots and helps you the next time you play them. So start slow and gradually increase your step and one day you will be able to play fast even with your eyes closed.

If you have perfectly understood the playing slow part and are implementing well in your guitar training the rest of the things are just extra help to make you play better, smoother and faster.

The next is, never say no to a metronome. A metronome is your best friend.

There are many, including me, who used to practice without a metronome thinking that timing and perfection would automatically come one day but trust me, using a metronome increases the rate of getting better drastically. It helps not only to keep time but gives a sense of urgency or a type of a short deadline where you need to be in a particular position on the fret board and that too perfectly. In turn it helps to keep all your attention in the note you are playing and the note you are going to play next. So the next time you sit for your practice session be sure to have pick up the metronome.

The next is just something probably everyone knows and does. Never practice in a room where there are people surrounding you or even a single person sitting next to you. You might say that’s obvious but the point I am making here is not that the person next to you will disturb you but you won’t have your full concentration on the part you are practicing. It is completely important to have your full concentration on the chord or note you are playing. Having such concentration helps your brain to remember better and execute better. So have all your attention in on your finger position, the chord shape, the next chord or note and in no time everything will come automatically.

15 minutes of slow, disciplined, perfect and dedicated playing every day is way better than hours of random fretting. So having complete control on the way you play helps you gain much better control on more advanced playing. The greatest time and energy of practicing should be dedicated to the basics. Never ever try to jump and go to the next session until you master the first one. Never try to play the advanced techniques until you have mastered the basics. A person having his basics completely right and on the spot will go on to become a better guitarist than others, probably a great one. So have your basics right and practice the right way and you could master this instrument in no time.

Joomla - To Get Started

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:56:00 +0000

Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Yesterday while surfing the web for easy ways to create websites and blogs I came upon Joomla. The name itself sounded weird that I had to check it out and I’m glad I did because I got what I was looking for. An easy and reliable way to create websites!
First, we’ll see what Joomla is. According to the description given in their website:

“Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.”

It’s a web application that allows you to build a website in a very easy way. Even a common man with little sense of web coding can build websites and blogs using Joomla. It’s the front-end way of creating websites. Some softwares like Adobe Dreamweaver make this possible by applying the famous WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) principle where you can actually make a website by dragging and dropping elements on the webpage and directly viewing the results with minimal coding. This helps to most of the non-web programmers who, like me, want fast and readymade results or at least something that’s pretty easy to make. Joomla does this for you without the requirement of heavy softwares like Dreamweaver. I do love Dreamweaver but it’s little more technical and you do need to know how the software works in order to know how actually it works and how to debug if something goes wrong. I’m not saying that you don’t have to do this in Joomla, but with the availability of various extensions, ready-to-use templates and its ease-of-use make it much simpler. It’s an open source, easy to use application and it’s free!

To know more about Joomla and what all you can do with it you can visit their page: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

That’s a great page to know everything about Joomla. For installing Joomla I would prefer installing on Xampp. I installed on Xampp and it’s a pretty easy procedure. Xampp is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming language. That’s the Wikipedia definition of it. Xampp creates a local server on your computer in which you can store the websites you create and view it locally on your browser. It also installs MySQL database for creating and storing databases required for your site. It’s a complete web-package that gets you ready with a local server and with Joomla installed on it you are ready to create your own websites or blogs.
To Install Joomla on Xampp I found this (below first link) article very helpful. It had a detailed description with pictures to guide you on how to install. If you want to install Joomla 3.0 on Xampp you can view their own website for guidance. Both the links can be found below.

http://www.insquaremedia.com/joomla-guides/building-a-joomla-site/19-how-to-install-joomla-on-xampp
http://www.insquaremedia.com/joomla-guides/building-a-joomla-site/19-how-to-install-joomla-on-xampp

Hope you found this article useful. I’ll be posting more as I uncover the various features of Joomla.

It's started!! - Again

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:50:00 +0000

My last post, actually the first post of this blog was about 6 months ago. That's a long time. Well I start again and this can be my official starting post.
As i mentioned in the first post (if anyone ever read it) I still don't know what to write about. So, I just thought of writing what I feel like sharing. You can view the 'Why Onefourth' page to know better about what I intend to share. It's really difficult to come up with a particular topic to write upon. I really don't understand how few people out there earn millions just by writing some posts in their blog. All they do is write about stuff they know or love or are really good at. I have so many interests, it's really difficult to narrow down to just one!
So, why not write something about everything?

It's started!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 09:56:00 +0000

Well, this is my first blog post. Not a good start to a blog but well what can I do? I was way out of ideas, or rather blog ideas. So just decided to start with 'this' post. I really don't know what I'm gonna write in this blog of mine (why the hell did I even start it in the first place?) but what the heck, why don't we just give it a try as we do to many other things. ;)
So, finally I start off with this post of requesting people (probably who know me) to give feedback, or better.. ideas on what to write! I'll be even happy to post some of your articles, posts or whatever's interesting, you can help me to keep this blog alive. :)
So please give a feedback or comment or can even mail me (provided anyone reads this) and help me build this blog. Any help would be appreciated. :)

Privacy Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Privacy Policy for http://oneforth.blogspot.in/

If you require any more information or have any questions about our privacy policy, please feel free to contact us by email at nadeemabd@gmail.com.

At http://oneforth.blogspot.in/, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ and how it is used.

Log Files
Like many other Web sites, http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons
http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie
.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on http://oneforth.blogspot.in/.
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ and other sites on the Internet.
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html

Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Our advertising partners include ....
Google Adsense

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

http://oneforth.blogspot.in/ has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. http://oneforth.blogspot.in/'s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.