YouOS -- Another OS Over Web

Found another online OS which has been there for quite some time. This one seems even more powerful in terms of readily available programs ,around 482 created by users as it claims.You can spot a shell displayed in the screenshot. YouOS, by virtue of its popularity seems to have a great future ahead.

EyeOS -- Your OS on Web

How about running an Operating System inside your browser, and accessing itanywhere on the web. I am talking about EyeOS -- a web service based on Ajax that features a basic replication of an Operating System. Besides basic file system it supports programs like word editor, web browser ( browser inside the browser !!), bookmarkingservices,calculator,calendar and a lots more. It can be furthur extented to include many other widgets by clicking on the plus sign in top right (ref Screenshot) suchas games,chat,ftp client,port scanners,flv players etc.

Online Compilers

Suddenly came to mind to look for online compilers. Though I had a somewhat greater speculation about finding Online Compilers, it failed to disappoint me as I came across a few. These compilers come handy when you do not want to go through the process of downloading or purchasing desktop compilers, or you want to compile on the fly or just to test a code snippet if it works or not. A word of caution though, these compilers do not come even near to the power of desktop compilers. In case you want a free compiler or tool here is a good collection.

Heres a little list of Online Compilers

♠ Java :Online java compiler, lets you upload a no. of files and provides download for compiled file. You can also view the compiled applets directly.

♠ DJGPP C Compiler : Online version of DJGPP compiler. Write the code and download .exe file.

♠ C/C++ Compiler : Lets you write online code and shows compiler messages upon compilation. Good to check codes.

♠ C#, C, VB.NET, FORTRAN : Compile the stated languages. (link not working at the time of writing)

Fighting Spam with Disposable Emails

Very often we come across sites that requires you to provide email address to receive their services, mostly they use it for verification purposes. But the very next day your inbox starts flooding with spams and then you decide to end your life(?). Surely your email address is leaked and sold to professional spammers following the age old business mantra "everythings fair in love and cyber world".

Fortunately, or rather driven by the need, of late some sites has come up with disposable email concept to fight the spammers. The sites provide email addresses which remain active for a limited time mostly a day or week, or limit the number of emails after which they expire. Some of them are full featured while others receive only. Almost all of them are no frills and let you create email adresses on the fly. Here are some of the sites that provide disposable email services:

DodgeIt- no registration required, provides RSS feeds, receive-only.

E4ward- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, allows multiple aliases of an account.

GreenSloth- no registration required, receive-only, e-mail expires automatically after a week.

KasMail- requires registration, allows up to 25 aliases, can set aliases to expire after a certain amount of time.

Jetable- provides mail forwarding, account autoexpires after certain amount of time.

Mailinator- no registration required, provides handy spam map, receive-only, e-mail expires automatically after a few hours.

MailNull- requires registration, provides mail forwarding.

PookMail- no registration required, very simple to use.

SneakeMail- requires registration, provides mail forwarding.

SpamDay- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, account is automatically destroyed after 24 hours of opening.

SpamGourmet- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, can create custom aliases which automatically expire after a certain number of e-mails received.

Spam.la- no registration required, no frills. You can see all spam being sent to all Spam.la accounts, or just your own.

SpamMotel- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, mail can be accessed through desktop e-mail clients, can reply to e-mail from your real e-mail address using SpamMotel e-mail.

TempInbox- no registration required, provides RSS and Atom feeds, receive only, supports many different languages.

Will Hack for Food- requires registration, account expires after user indicated period of time, best name ever.

Draw Professional Sketches

Heard or seen of a criminal got caught by the sketch made on the basis of witness. Obviously many times, if not in real live, in TV shows of course. The real Police here is the Artist who draws the face by merely following the descriptions of the witness. No doubt they are adept and very accurate. They envied many with their rare talents.

But now they might envy you when you draw the same face within seconds without even knowing 'S' of sketching. Thanks to the ever increasing realm of web services. I am talking about "flashface.ctapt.de". The site lets you choose from a range of types of hairstyles,eyes,noses,lips etc that just makes the coveted art of sketching a matter of few drag-drops. The drawn sketch can be saved online or distributed through emails. The wonderful thing is that its all online, without you to download anything and that is what we mean by Web Service, isnt it. [More details at Digital Inspiration]

I Want More: Online Drawing

World's Eldest Blogger

Senior netizens are on the rise and they have come a long way in spreading the wisdom of ages over net. Donald Crowdis, a 92 year old from Canada blogs about life and wisdom in his unique humoristic style. His blog Don To Earth has tints of wisdom spread allover, earned through years of experience and GenX has lot to learn from it.

Fun over Telnet

Telnet is a remote login protocol which is primarily used for accessing resources on a remote computer and for various administrative tasks. Some servers around the world have left some ports open to explore whats inside. Lets have a look on them:

For each of the addresses Go to Run ->type telnet followed by address(without quotes) ->Enter. (ex: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl)

♠ Address : "towel.blinkenlights.nl" -- Sit back and enjoy the ASCII Star Wars.
♠ Address : "193.201.201.131 4000" -- You need to register at Shadow-Lands in order to play this game.
♠ Address: " dr.nostrum.com 2000" -- I hear you love scary explorations.

Those were just a little glimplse. There exists a good amount of servers that allow remote login freely.

Educational,Entertainment and Foreign Language Telnets[ link1 ][link2][link3][link4]

Multiplication Made Easy

This multiplication trick uses lines and dots to calculate the result.

Porn -- Not to survive

A latest analysis has concluded that there are now only about 1 percent of total web-pages that contain sexually explicit content. The porn industry is falling steeply downside. The porn sites use to make money just by showing sexual content (in the form of images or videos mainly) which until recently attracted a large number of audiences. Of late these audiences have come to know about the cheap tricks played on them and thus the downside of porn. Here are some of the methods to filter porn:

♠ A simple way to block sexual content is to configure Content Advisor in Internet Explorer (open Internet Options ->Content tab), Firefox can be configured to block Pop Up windows (open Options->Content tab). There is no built in content filter in Firefox, this is where extensions come handy, Firefox extension Procon serves as good filter.

♠ There are also a lots of porn blocker softwares available for download.One example is NetDog which works with both IE and Firefox.

♠ In order to avoid those annoying porns appearing in the search results we recommend using Google Safesearch. It can be configured through preferences section on the Google homepage.

♠ PicBlock blocks the images based on flesh content by blurring them out "PicBlock blocks porn images by detecting the amount of flesh tones in images. Since the software is not based on offensive keywords list or known URLs, PicBlock may not be a substitute for your content filtering software." [via Digital Inspiration]

Fun with win XP

Bored of doing the routine tasks! Lets have a break and try exploring bugs ( or rather features) in Windows XP.
>> Open notepad and type "this app can break"(without quote), save and close.Now open it again. What is This!! This works for every other combination of 4-3-3-5 letter words such as "bush hid the facts" or simply "abcd efg hij klmno".This will not occur when you occurs for the first time, when you delete the weirdcharacters and again write your 4-3-3-5 combination nothing happens.
>> Open Word and type "=rand()" (without quotes) and you get a famous pangramrepeated over few lines. Type "=rand(5) to get 5 paragraphs.Type "=rand(p,s) toget p no of paragraphs with s no of sentences. This cannot be said bug as it hassome usability and it has been documented at Microsoft [link].

HOMELAND : Home is where the heart is.

Find out more about my home here.[http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddiqui]

Yourminis = Flashy Netvibes

Yourminis resurrected the Flash world which in the recent past had its thunder stolen by the much hyped Ajax. It also widened the coverage of flash to include homepage content management and not only games and videos. Netvibes [earlier coverage here] implemented Ajax as its backbone to serve contents to the users in a highly customizable manner. Yourminis' also offering the same but with a backbone of flash which gives it an "elastic look", functions are more or less the same i.e. you can include feeds, mails ,podcasts, widgets etc etc. What remains to be seen is that who wins the battle or if we are fortunate this will simply give rise to a healthy competition and end users will be only one to get the cheers.

File Uploads

The more the skill you have for creating things, the more productive you will be and the more space you will need to put up your content online. For a free hosting service like Blogger you
cannot upload all that you wish. Blogger, Flickr etc allows upload of photos, but then if you are a video photographer or a programmer and you insist on using Blogger to upload your creations, I am afraid that you first have to invent ways to convert them to images. So, lets better be a little adaptable to the atmosphere and make use of free upload services that a good number of sites provide. Here is a good review of sites that allow uploads, most of them are direct which means that you do not have to register. In most of them you can upload any type of file including executables. After uploading you can share the link provided. I checked out some of them, such as Zupload and Mega-File, and got instant results.

Picture Downloader

Not less than often we spot a guy who opens each picture on the net and decides whether to download it or not. Even if he wanted to download all the pictures from the site, he has to open all the pictures individually , and the wait between the page loads cause some to think about the ways of committing suicide.

I was one of them until recently when I came across a lot of "Picture Downloaders" (see how) across the net. I picked up one called Abacre Photo Downloader from Abacre [download] , while a lot more were available here (nice collection).

These tools provide filters like what type of image to download (jpeg, gif, png etc), file size of image (in kb), size/dimension of image (in px). Download the whole album and delete the ones that doesn't suit your taste.

Just Married -- Orkut and GTalk

Today Orkut and GTalk were integrated, which means that you can see the online status of you friends and invite them for chat or give 'em a call. Now you can import your Orkut friend's list to GTalk. All that is needed is to go to the settings page on Orkut and check a simple radio button. Its even easier to send scraps from GTalk. Here is the help by Google and download GTalk here.

Download of the Day

Ook? Video Ook! -- This firefox extension lets you to download embedded videos from sites like YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe etc (of course when opened in Firefox browser).

[Download]

A Wonderful game based on Theory of Gravity

Remember good old days of school, bragging about gravity, now its time to rejuvenate those "horror moments" with this addictive game. The aim of the game is to let the comet burn completely without colliding with any of the planets. See how the comet bends/curves when it comes in the vicinity of a planet.

SpringerWidgets -- Same widget for my Web and my Desktop

SpringerWidgets is integrating the widgets what we commonly differentiated as "widget for web" and "widget for desktop". The widget will work with same look and feel whether its embedded on the web or put up on your desktop. They have developed some samples for this. One of the sample widget to read RSS feed is shown here. Remember although this widget is embedded on this blog you do not have to come to this page everytime to view it (unless you are a die hard fan of this blog :-) ), instead you can download the desktop version of the same from here.

Get this widget!

Writing Hindi with Hindi Kalam

Writing in Hindi was never this easy. HindiKalam has a very good interface that allows to write Hindi online with the very much acronyms that Indians use while chatting on IMs (such as kaise ho for कैसे हो) etc. It also lets one embed English into the Hindi Writing as I am doining now.

हींदी is fun. हींदी िलखना अब काफ़ी आसान हो गया है

Cross Site Chatting

Geesee launched its cross site chat facility a few days back. As reported by Techcrunch : "Geesee is an embedded chat service that lets users communicate across any number of web sites in common chat rooms organized by tags". While this service was continuing to gather applauds from the web community, ChatCreator stepped in to steal the thunder. It provides much similar interface like Geesee but with a better look and feel with its sleek design.

Heres an example:

Download of the Day

Google Earth 4 (beta) -- The latest version of Google earth is doing round the corners. It comes bundled with some extra features which were earlier provided as paid service. This includes 3D, polygon and path drawings. [Download]

If and only if -- Passion==Drawing && Creativity+=1

Creativity, a very abstract term for even most creative people, manifests itself through as many acts in the world as possible. The act of doing something gives a vent to the creativity nurturing inside a living being. The act could be anything from a highly applauded painting on canvas to a mere act of thinking, its just that the way of expression doesn't matter.It could even be Online Drawing if you are not biased towards those conventional paintings painted by some bearded weird looking creature.

Cumulatelabs displays a fully featured drawing canvas to get your hands dirty, provides a drawing experience much like a drawing software only with a little slower speed.Earlier it was compatible with IE only but Firefox support is also included.

Now, some out of the box creation with ImaginationCubed which has very sleek user interface with great speed and feel of elasticity. Its greatest feature is that the "piece of art" can be created online with two or more artists participating simultaneously in the same drawing. You can send invitation to your friend (or your love) to take part in the creation. Wow, now unlike good old days we will have paintings patented to a bunch of people rather that bearded single guy. After the completion of the grand act, the art can be viewed in an animated fashion -- the pencil moves the same way as you did while drawing, to recreate your piece.

Now in order to add something that people called "professional look" Drawspace can serve as a wonderful mentor online.

Netvibes - Unifying Web

The very first page that I got after entering the url http://www.netvibes.com/ to my surprise contained all my favorites. It was like whole of internet before you, and you are confused but amazed. The site boasts of providing everything and all customizable, it provides a tabbed interface where feeds, news,web searches , webmails, bookmarks , photo organizers, social networking, API search etc can be customized according to your taste. These all occurs in real time.

Download Of the Day

Express Talk -- A voip soft-phone by NCH which provides dial up facilities to VoIP numbers and ids. It can be used directly for audio blogging at Gabcast (see more detail). [Download]

Online File Conversion

Zamzar provides a cool service when it comes to converting your image, document, audio, video from one format to another as per your taste or necessity. The interface is simple and sleek, and you get your converted file through email. Now atleast you do not have to download different readers for different formats or conversion tools to your desktop.

Really the world is moving towards better web solutions second by second. Kudos to the realm of Web Services.

Downloads of the Day

Firefox 2.0 for Windows -- Firefox 2.o is the latest version of browser from Mozilla.
[Download]

Internet Explorer 7 -- Internet Explorer 7.0 is the latest version of web browser from Micorsoft.
[Download]

Absolute Color Picker 3.0 -- A wonderful tool for web-designers to pick colors from a wide range and convert it to hexadecimal representation. [Download]

Instant Web Calculator

Welcome to hassle free calculation. InstaCalc is an online calculator which provides calculation facility in real time, that means results are displayed as you type. It claims to be faster that windows and easier than excel, which seems true looking at its speed and rich features.

The most interesting part is its graph and chart calculations, it instanly draws charts on your screen as you vary the parameters.

It does'nt take much to explore all its features. A comprehensive reference section is provided.

It also provides codes which can be embedded onto your geeky page to enable on the fly calculations.