Happens all the time. You are so engrossed in your work that at times you even forget to blink for a fair bit of time. The result? Eyes go all dry, red and itchy. Now this sends all the wrong signals to your brain which wants you to rest, but you being you, obviously wont.  There’s a term for that and its called CVS or Computer Vision Syndrome. It could end up in you having a tiff with your girlfriend/co-workers/boss. Ouch.

Enter EyeDefender. A nifty utility that runs a simple black and white animation which reminds you to blink at periodic intervals. It runs some serene visuals which just knock the wind out of you and force you to look at it for at least a minute. You should consider disabling it while watching a movie or such like.

The website lists a bunch of scary sounding syndromes you could avoid using EyeDefender. Which will, no doubt, scare you into downloading the little 186kb software. You can choose how often you want to see the animation and for how long. I however do wish that there was a shorter 30 second option. I found myself reaching out for the icon in the system tray and clicking ‘Exit’. Which kinda defeats the purpose. But then, I guess I have been having too much coffee these days.

You can also use this in conjecture with F.lux, which controls the monitor brightness based on the time of the day and your geographical location. Of course, I am not mentioning that you need to get up from your throne from time to time and stretch your body a bit. Lest, the muscles start creaking.

Download EyeDefender

Image Courtesy – cubagallery

What?

NyooTV is an online video streaming site which has an immense library of  TV shows, music videos, movie trailers and entire movies for your viewing pleasure. You can now watch all this without the guilt of watching illegal content!

Tell Me More

NyooTV essentially aggregates video from all possible sources and adds a few social media features while at it. Facebook chat is baked into the site as well. Plus, I like the simplistic interface and the video player which NyooTV seem to have got spot on. I’ve seen many a good site fumble with their video players in an attempt to provide advertisements. The site will also detect your bandwidth and give you the right feed.

A lot of the content creators like Big Cinemas, Star and their ilk are putting up their content on their shows and movies on their websites.  At the end of the day, you have all of the content at a single place, which cannot be a bad thing.

I, for one, am thoroughly excited by their tie up with Amar Chitra Katha. These were the comic books that brought history to life during my childhood, which was otherwise filled with monochromatic textbooks. Here’s hoping that NyooTV evolves into a definitive answer to Hulu and Netflix. Its about time.

You don’t say…

Alright, there are some niggles, but hopefully they will be sorted out very soon. Like, for a lot of videos the site gives a page stating “Having trouble watching this video? Watch it on the original site.” Also, I wish NyooTV would have less obtrusive ads than the plain old 25 second spot before a video plays. Thats 25 seconds of a user waiting for his content. And 25 seconds is a lot of time in today’s screen age.

Link Me

NyooTV.com

Hidden Reflex – A Bangalore based startup has unleashed the Epic browser on the ever suspecting Indian masses. In fact, I can stereotype us Indians as anything and the Epic will still come out on tops. Because, its got pretty much everything an Indian would ever need. Stopping slightly short of making us a cup of garam chai via an inbuilt plugin.

So what is exactly is the browser all about? Do we really need another one? Fact is, you don’t know what you’re missing till you’ve tried Epic. Its based entirely on Firefox but goes a step further with its in-browser applications. You’re saying extensions? That’s alright really, but Epic apps take the lead in making the browser a better place to spend time inside. Plus there are tonnes of nifty touches that displays the thoughtfulness that has gone behind the browser.

1) Indianized all the way!

Katrina Kaif, the piece de resistance of the Epic Browser. Lol, no.

There are many customization features in Epic that allow you to make your browser look like the way you want it.  There are themes, backgrounds and what have you to deck up Epic the way you please. Also the India button at the top left will connect you with all things India and then some.

2) Energy saving mode

If you are away from your machine for a while, Epic kicks into energy saving mode. Its just a deep black screen and it goes away the moment you move the mouse. Thoughtful.

3) Embedded video in a page.

If there is any video on the page, Epic will present you with an option to watch it in the sidebar. This allows you to scroll to a different part of the page or an entirely new page altogether. Me likes but it can get annoying at times when the video is just another ad.

4) Applications

There are so many cool applications inside Epic that you will almost consider switching over from whatever you are using. All your plugins work and so do some brand new applications.

GMail Backup

This is easily Epic’s coolest feature. You can backup to GMail just like you would on FTP.  It uses the age old trick of sending your own self a mail. But with Epic, you get a neat interface. You could consider opening a new GMail account just for the backup process.

Text Editor

Its basically an HTML WYSIWYG editor but it completely simulates any text processor out there and is actually usable!

Social Websites

Anybody who is a somebody in India uses Facebook or Orkut or Twitter. But Epic is a browser for everybody, so it has all the three and then some.

Anti-virus

Epic have gone ahead and plonked an anti-virus inside the browser! Its not quite a full blown thing, but you can get that if you part with a few green ones. But it does tie in nicely with the browser and scans all downloaded files.

There are a tonne of other apps out there and its best if you download Epic and see it for yourself. Of course, all this jaw drop activity does come at the cost of half an inch of real estate to the left half of your screen. I wish Epic would have made the toolbar appear on a mouse move action in that area. Oh, well.

Download Epic

Finally it seems to have dawned upon Samsung. They seem like they’ve had enough of selling Corby’s and Omnia’s to the unsuspecting masses. The Korean electronics giant is upping the ante with its own Bada powered Wave and Android powered Galaxy S. We got a fair bit of time with both the phones at Samsung’s recently held bloggers meet and here is my take on the Wave and Bada OS. (Thoughts on the Galaxy S coming soon)

The Wave is the first smartphone to ship with Samsung’s brand spanking new Bada OS. Its based on Linux and I was hugely sceptical about it before I saw it. ‘Why the hell do we need a brand new OS? Haven’t developers got anything better to do than keep porting apps from one platform to the other? Isn’t Android a free for all? Why not just customize Android the way you want it?’ But a mix of speedy performance from the Wave and the fantastic Touch Wiz UI blew all my pre conceived notions into the weeds. Plus a chat with the super passionate developer dude from Samsung made me want to believe that Bada does have a future after all.

a mix of speedy performance from the Wave and the fantastic Touch Wiz UI blew all my pre conceived notions

‘If we managed to sell so many Corby’s around the globe, surely a more powerful and feature packed OS will offer a better experience and sell a lot more. Plus you code your Bada apps in C++, something we are being taught since 9th grade. We are giving the developers a lot of support and freedom. If you have any problem, I assure you it’ll be solved within 3 hours flat.’ Strong words. ‘Also we’re looking at putting Bada in tablets and in our television sets. Lets now talk about the device itself. Its got a gorgeous 3.3 inch ‘Super AMOLED’ (more about this later) display, a 1GHz processor and it feels wonderful to hold. Just the right size, neither too big and not too small either. And I have to admit, I’m slightly tired with these humongous 4 inch devices. It’s got a fairly decent 5MP camera with an LED flash that allows you to record 720p video. All of this packed into a 10 mm thick body and you know you have a winner in your hands. Coming to the Super AMOLED display, Samsung have eliminated a layer in the screen and have improved brightness, screen readability and battery life by up to 80%. And it shows, the colours really pop out at you. Better experience + more battery life can never be a bad thing.

Now that we’ve concluded that the hardware is pretty top notch, lets shift our gaze to the software. The phone felt very responsive to touches and performed at break neck speeds. I have never seen any Samsung get this snappy. Adding apps in the background didn’t bother it too much either. The UI at first seems like a mish-mash of Android and iPhone. The slide out top bar, the 5 panel home screen are clearly Android inspired and the icon layout is very iOS like. But deep inside is a heart that is throbbing with social media written in every beat. Social Hub is Samsung’s app which connects you to other jobless people around you. The phone book is the first place where you get to see this. When you fire up a contact, it shows you their Facebook status and is also entwined with Twitter. Also when someone calls, you again get to see their picture and FB status. Also, the one feature I really liked in the contact book was that you can slide your finger to the right on someone’s contact entry and it calls. Do that towards the left and it opens a new message. So, that solves the problem of a smartphone being a good phone in the first place.

Alright the UI is very usable and simple. Lets move on to the most important part of a smartphone these days, the apps. All the apps in the Bada app store are free of cost. As a developer you are supposed to monetize them through AdMob. Now that’s good or bad depending on which way you look at it. There are a fair number of apps from Samsung but there is a lot that’s missing as well. Hope Samsung pulls up its socks and gives us more apps. As far as the camera and the battery performance go, I couldn’t extensively test both so I’ll reserve judgement till I get to spend some more time with it. And we got to play Asphalt 5 with the phone being hooked up to a projector. I have to admit, it was pretty awesome.

Life with a PC is always a bit like a love affair. The first few days or months are absolutely fantastic, but then as time passes by ‘it doesn’t feel the same anymore’. Soluto thinks they have a solution. Not necessarily to take care of the  girl/boy friend problems, but for putting the spring back in your PC’s step.

Soluto is a statistical software that aims at putting the social web to some use in optimizing the start-up time of your PC. As of now, you can call Soluto a PC start-up optimizer with a social bent. But won’t the geeks ask “why not just hit Windows + R, type in msconfig and get the job done? Well, that’s the problem people. The geeks know it, the huge horde of masses using a PC don’t know what to do when their PC slows down.

Hence Soluto breaks up the programs that sit in your start-up into ‘No Brainer – Remove’, ‘Potentially Removable’ and ‘Required’. Here you can control the behaviour of the application like pausing them (you’ll have to start them manually) or delaying them (apps start when Soluto thinks the PC can afford to).

After you click on a block representing some application/service you are presented with some data on what other users did with it and what you should be doing with it.

It also shows a cool graph of your PC’s startup times after you’ve installed Soluto. All this while protecting your privacy.

There’s also a wiki mode which allows you to add information about programs for the betterment of the community. And all this in the amazing interface which makes the software just so much more awesome than what it is.

Soluto also have an ongoing ‘PC Genome Project’. They aim to collect data that frustrates users and put it to good use for everybody on the planet. And they constantly maintain that they are just a statistical software that suggests actions based on pre-recorded data. They also plan to extend to other factors of your PC which slow it down. Watch the cool video below.

Download Soluto and end slow start up misery.

1. The Sony Ericsson XPeria X10 is a prime example of the fact that failures are the stepping stones to success. Remember the Aino, Satio, Yario? Well, never mind.



{Design and Build}

2. Sony Ericsson has always had a good design language and the X10 continues the tradition.
3. The smooth back panel makes it a real joy to hold. Also gives the phone a solid grip on surfaces. Why doesn’t everybody use such materials?
4. You have a choice of 2 colors, white with a glossy texture and black with a matte finish.
5. Build quality is good, overall.
6. The power button, audio jack and charging port are at the top, volume and camera buttons to the right side and the camera plus a single LED flash make up the back panel of the phone.
7. Big phones need big hands to work. Smaller hands can wait for the X10 Mini.
   


{Display}

8. The humongous 4.0” screen is good enough to get anyone drooling.
9. Colors are rich, bright and there’s no trouble reading the screen even in the full blast of an Indian summer.
10. The screen is very responsive to inputs and if there’s any sluggishness, it’s only the early bugs.
11. Who’s idea was it to have a glossy surface for the screen? Attracts fingerprints faster than an A-list Hollywood celeb attracts paparazzi.
12. The X10 has multi-touch, but you’ll have to wait for the next update to let your pinch zooming ambitions see the light of the day.


{Interface}


13. SE has a done a fantastic job with their custom interface, UXP which takes care of pretty much everything where the Android 1.6 misses the mark.
14. However, their custom UI means you have to wait for Sony to update the software, which is hopelessly irritating. X10 owners will get the 2.1 by Q4CY10 ! !
15. A top-notch mobile UI designer is heading for Android, custom UI’s should be history. I hope. With fingers crossed.
16. The on-screen keyboard is a royal pain in the backside.
17. Skipped inputs, rubbish word recommendations etc are the norm. Thankfully, this is Android. You should get a replacement keyboard from the Android Market.
    
    {Multimedia}
    
18. Top notch multimedia performance is expected, this is a Sony after all.
19. Mediascape is their answer and is way better than Android’s default media player. Neat, simple UI to get you to your content in as few taps as possible.
20. DivX support, where art thou?
21. External speaker could have been a bit louder.
22. Watching movies is fun.
    
    {Camera}
    
23. 8.1 MP camera with a single LED flash with all sorts of gimmickry like Smile and Face Detection borrowed from Sony’s Cybershot division.
24. Great day time pictures as is the wont with most SE phones.
25. At this price, someone should have at least thought about a dual LED flash, let alone a Xenon one.
26. HD video recording is coming to X10 with Q4′s update.
27. You can tag people in the gallery, which is again a great feature. There’s geo tagging too.
28. Camera button needs some real pressing to get the job done.
    
    {Social Networking}
    
29. Great phone for the social junkies, you know.
30. Timescape, Sony’s in house social media app, delivers all your social content (mails, smses, tweets etc.) in a timeline like format. This can be traversed easily with a flick and it looks rather neat. But this can be a resource hog if you overwhelm it with all your societal quirks.

{Connectivity}

31. It’s got almost every 4 letter mumbo jumbo out there.
32. Yay, Bluetooth file transfer!
33. Love browsing on it. It’s pretty close to a full PC experience.
34. GPS latches on pretty quickly.
35. Wise Pilot, the bundled navigation software isn’t up to the mark.
36. Indians stick to Google Maps, I say.
    
    {Performance}
    
37. 1GHz Snapdragon, baby!
38. Accelerometer aligns your screen pretty quickly. Its almost iPhone quick.
39. Scrolling doesn’t display any jerkiness either.
40. Battery is good enough to see you through till the end of your day.
    
    {About Android 1.6 with UXP}
    
41. At the risk of sounding repetitive, the only frustrating thing about the X10 is not having 2.1 till Q4 of this year! By that time everyone will be having Gingerbread.
42. All the updates coming out from Android are constantly improving in performance and X10 owners will have to miss the bus.
43. Why isn’t there a opt-out option for those who want the plain vanilla Android?
44. But then, the phone is targeted at the high fliers who are most certain to give you nothing but a cold, blank stare when you get into version debates with them. They might at best, throw in a “It gets my work done you geeky pig head, upgrades be damned”.
    
    {Final Words}
    
45. Sony Ericsson is very much out of the woods and is back in the reckoning as a serious contender in the smartphone market.
46. The phone could have been priced more aggressively. At this price, they need to throw in a free date with Kareena Kapoor, their brand ambassador in India.
47. There are cheaper phones that do all of this and more. Droid comes for the same price with a full keyboard.
48. A lot of the problems will be solved by December ’10 when Sony will deliver Android 2.1 with their custom UI. But seriously, December? That’s the amount of one market cycle these days.
49. There are too many things for which you might have to wait till Christmas. Geeks could consider waiting till then. Low fuss users wanting to just get the job done can get it right now.
50. No phone is perfect.

Big thanks to Suhas for his inputs. All images courtesy Sony Ericsson.

You have to kinda hand it down to Google for the crazy stuff they coming up with. I think its precisely what you get when you give your employees an hour of free time everyday. Check out Google Chrome battle it out against a potato, electricity, sound and what have you. I think they had to find unnatural competition for a web browser since I doubt any of the other available browsers are as fast as Chrome is.

Speed Video

Making Video
They’ve also made a video which shows exactly how the video was made that makes you envy the good people working at Google.

Download Google Chrome

If your workplace forces you to use Internet Explorer, fret not. Google’s got a killer extension that brings the goodness of Chrome right inside IE. Download the Google Chrome Frame.

P.S. A speed test bloodbath featuring Opera, Chrome and Firefox is one the cards.Do stay tuned till then, folks!

Fashionably late to the mini-SLR party

Sony might be a tad late to the non-mirror SLR party, but its more than made up for it with 2 brand spanking new offerings, the NEX3 and the NEX5. It is most certain to make all the ladies in the house drop whatever they were doing and attend to vie for the attention of these 2. And sure enough, they are nicknamed the ‘EVIL’ series, precisely the type who get the eyeballs at a societal gathering. Sony’s going to launch these cameras today and lets take a good long look at the spec sheet.

Before that, lets check out the competition this camera faces.

1) Panasonic DMC-GF1
2) Olympus E-PL1

Both of the above cameras are based on the Micro Four Thirds standard which eliminates the need for a penta-prism setup which reduces the size of the camera body drastically.

Key Specifications and Real World Implications

1) APS-C size sensor – This is a tad bigger than the M 4/3 sensors and almost as good as the half frame SLR’s like the Nikon D5000 or the Canon 500D. Bigger the sensor, better the, well everything. This allows a bigger mega pixel count while providing a narrower depth of field, improved light sensitivity, the works.

2) Bigger Lens Mount - Reportedly, the NEX cameras can be fitted on with Sony Alpha Lenses which is a big plus if you already have a Sony Alpha DSLR camera and a few lenses. This allows you the liberty of using the bigger cameras for indoor studio shoots and the smaller NEX cameras for outdoor shots. Win!

3) Tilting LCD – The NEX-3 and NEX-5 feature a bright tilting LCD that moves 90 degrees which is something none of the the competitor cameras have. This allows you to take shots at really odd angles.

4) HD video – The NEX-3 can take videos at 1280×720 while the NEX-5 can go the whole hog at 1080p. This can be a tad confusing and Sony should have come out with a single camera that could have done it all. My intuition tells me that the NEX-3 will get the volumes for Sony.

4) No in body image stabilization - This is where the NEX-es take a hit. In the quest for small, Sony have sent the image stabilization tech outside the camera body. All that will now be housed inside the lenses, which means buying IS tech each time you buy a new lens. Which also means that the price of the lenses go up significantly.

5) Detachable External Flash – Thanks to the bigger lens mount, there is just no space to pack in a flash which is quite interesting. You get an external flash as standard which you can plonk in at your own will. Sony is also readying mounts for the bigger Alpha series flashers.

CNET Video Review

Price Chart

(Courtesy Quesabesde)

The camera is expected to launch today (May 11, 2010) and release on June 3rd.

Geek Spec Sheet

Image Sensor: 14.2 million effective pixels.
Metering: Multi pattern, centre-weighted and spot.
Sensor Size: APS-C-sized CMOS (23.4×15.6mm).
Lens: Sony E Series mount.
Shutter Speed: 30 to 1/4000 second. Flash sync: 1/160 sec.
Continuous Shooting: seven fps.
Memory: Memory Stick PRO Duo, PRO-HG Duo, SD, SDHC, SDXC cards.
Image Sizes (pixels): 4592×3056, 4592×2576, 3344×2224, 3344×1872, 2288×1520, 2288×1280.
Movies: 1280×720, 848×480, 640×480 at 30 fps for the NEX-3 and 1080p for NEX-5
Colour Space: sRGB, Adobe RGB.
LCD Screen: 7.5cm LCD (921,600 pixels).
File Formats: JPEG, RAW, JPEG+RAW, MPEG4.
ISO Sensitivity: Auto, 200 to 12,800.
Interface: USB 2.0, HDMNI, AV.
Power: Rechargeable lithium ion battery, DC input.
Dimensions: 117.2×62.6×33.4mm WHDmm.
Weight: 297 g (inc battery and card).

Reviews from around the web are starting to trickle in.
1) Imaging Resource
2) CNET

Final Thoughts: The Sony NEX family have arrived and how. With its aggressive pricing I also expect  it to be a tough contender to every other brand in the mini-DSLR market. This will also signal price cuts and feature additions in cameras from Olympus, Panasonic and Samsung. Most of all, Canon and Nikon who have largely turned a blind eye to this market will now be seriously thinking about firing their own salvos in the mini-DSLR arena. Let the battle begin!

Here are some pictures that are doing the rounds

Sources
Quesabesde
Sony Alpha Rumours
Digital Photography School

Exactly who doesn’t like gazing at the night sky? I would definitely love to doze off looking at the twinkling stars and trying to spot constellations. Sounds weird but there is an amazing sense of calm up there in the heavens even if everything around you is topsy turvy.

Now, not everyone can prop up a telescope or just enjoy the luxury of sleeping under a starry sky. Neither do we have such clear skies that aid our fantasies. That’s precisely why I’ve complied a list of websites which allow you to do just that.

These websites go far beyond the simple telescope and the naked eye. You get access to images from the Hubble and a dozen other powerful observatories like they’re your own playground. All this without even having to download anything. I know, the Web is just so awesome.

1) Giga Galaxy Zoom

This website uses some seriously high res images from ESO’s satellite’s (to the tune of 65 MB per image!!) to show you a crops of The Milky Way and the Lagoon Nebula. The website is run by some nice French blokes at the ESO who aim at ‘connecting the sky as seen by the unaided eye with that seen by hobby and professional astronomers’. C’est magnifique is all that I have to say

2) Wiki Sky
WikiSky wont bother giving you imagery of our very own solar system but will go far, far beyond it. There are so many views of different galaxies, comets, nebulas and black holes present that you could spend an entire day looking at them and still want some more. The best part of the website is ‘The Attractive Spots of the Universe’ to the right. The website also allows you to take screenshots to set as wallpapers and such like.

3) Neave’s planetarium

This is a rather simple flash app which allows you to see the night sky as you would normally see it. You can have constellations, details of a particular star. The cool thing is you can adjust your viewing position to see the sky from any damn location on the planet. And if you remember, we’ve linked to Neave before. The guy is just so cool, that you gotta give him link love.

4) World Wide Telescope

You know all those ads from Microsoft which show kids excelling at school projects and stuff after using MS Office? You can safely assume that MS Office was NOT what the kids were using; it most probably was WWT. This application can easily satisfy all your needs when it comes to gazing far into space. They’ve got some amazing interactive tours to help students and tutors alike. Plus the thing is seamlessly blended into Bing Maps, just point your mouse skywards and let the magic begin. Available as a desktop app and on the web.

5) Google Sky
Google Sky comes to you  with the all to familiar interface of Google Maps. Its got a fair amount of space images from the Hubble, but that’s about it. Not really a force to reckon with in space research. Just a nifty, low fuss stargazing client.

Image Courtesy: neilcreek