The Last Password You'll Have to Remember

I've been using LastPass for a while and found it to be a very useful add-on for my daily Internet browsing. LastPass is a free password manager and form filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure and comes in a form of an add-on for your browser. Here is a brief summary of its features:

• Create strong passwords, knowing you only have to remember one.
• Log into your favorite sites with a single click.
• Fill forms in a second.
• Access and manage your data from multiple computers seamlessly.
• Share logins with friends and let others share logins with you.

You can read more on LastPass on a mini review posted on gHacks.

Highly recommended!

Content Aware Image Resizing

Seam Carving, sometimes referred to as content aware image resizing is an algorithm for image resizing (primarily shrinking) developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

Watch this video to really understand what exactly this amazing technology is about:

Even you can play with Seam Carving by downloading it as a GIMP plugin or a standalone application (Windows/Mac/Linux).

Here are some other Seam Carving resources that you may find interesting:

• AS3 Content Aware Resizing or Image Seam Carving - contains links to many implementations, some with source
• Fast content-aware image resizing and Object removal using seam carving, still fast - more thoughts on the algorithms and an implementation in OCaml
• CAIR - Content Aware Image Resizer - a multi-threaded C++ implementation
• rsizr - a very slick Flash-based seam carving utility
• Seam Carving - a nice write-up that explains how the algorithm works

One Less Cow

During 1998-2003 I was part of a band called "Para Ahat Pahot" (translated to English: "One Less Cow") as the keyboardist. The guys that were in the band those days were:

• Meron Dushansky (singer, composer)
• Yaki Morad (guitarist)
• Nir Shain (drummer)
• Ruby Haviv (bassist)
• Guy Soffer (keyboardist)

Here are some songs we performed. I might upload more, depends on your comments :-)



And here are some photos:



In 2004, I also composed and played a chillout/ambient tune called "Reason" (I miss the spare time I had those days):



By the way, if you are interested in this cool MP3 flash player I used, you can find it here. It even let you customize the size, colors and behavior.

Digsby - Really Great Client for IM+Email+Social

I finally found the time to check out Digsby, some kind of a hybrid freeware client for instant messaging, email and social networks. After 5 minutes of testing, I decided to uninstall my Live Messenger, Google Talk, GMail Notifier, Twhirl and TwitterFox. Highly recommended!

Here is a list of Digsby's features:

Instant Messaging

• One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts.
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
• Rename contacts with an alias so you don't have to remember buddy names like 'giantsfan123'.
• If one of your friends has more than one IM account you can combine them into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicate buddies.
• Send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window.
• The InfoBox lets you check everyone's status message and profile just by moving your mouse down the list.
• Changing your status has never been easier. just one click right on the buddy list!
• Multitask while you chat. Minimize the IM window and you see popups of new IM's. Best of all, you can reply right from the popup and get back to what you were doing.
• Log conversation history and find the information you need our search-enabled log viewer.
• And so much more.

Email

• Manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from digsby.
• Get popup notifications when new email arrives. Clicking a popup takes you right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.
• The email InfoBox gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
• Perform actions such as "Mark as Read" or "Report Spam" right from the email InfoBox.
• Send emails to your friends right from the IM window. The email is sent directly from any account digsby is tracking for you.

Social Networking

• Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts.
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
• The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
• Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Personalize

• Customize digsby with application skins to give it a personal look and feel.
• Change the way your conversations look with themes – everything from simple AIM-style windows to 3D conversation bubbles.
• Complete control over the layout of buddies on the buddy list. Change everything from buddy icon size to whether or not to show a snippet of their away message.
• Sort your buddy list how ever you want! You can organize buddies manually, by status, by service, by name or by log size to place those you communicate with most at the top. You can even choose a secondary sorting method.
• Customizable notification system lets you choose what events you want to be alerted about and how.

Other

• Digsby offers complete synchronization between computers and installations. Everything from the skin you chose to your pre-defined status messages follows you from place to place.
• You can place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors right from digsby.
• Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager.

The Sum of Your Facial Parts

By The New York Times:

Is the woman pictured on the right more attractive than the woman on the left? Do her wider-set eyes, the longer distance between her hairline and the bridge of the nose, and the rounder shape of her face make her more beautiful?

The photograph on the right was doctored by the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an “unmistakable similarity” to the original.

The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.

Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

Continue reading this article on The New York Times.

Create Your First Android Application

On the following video, Dan Morrill shows how to build a simple application on Google's Android platform.

CAUTION! You may find it interesting only if you are a developer:-)

Nokia 5800 (Tube) - Not an iPhone Killer?

After reading the not so positive review of Engadget, I came to the conclusion that currently there is (still) no decent rival for the iPhone. From Engadget:

"This is no iPhone when it comes to to solid media integration or full-featured media player apps. On the communication side, we're sad to see Nokia almost burying some of its S60 advantages. Everything's still there, but Nokia didn't put the gruntwork in necessary to really take advantage a next-gen interface as it relates to keeping track of emails, social networking, IM and the correspondences of more than four people."

What do you think about it? Waiting for your comments...

Google News for Blogs

Google's Blog Search homepage has been updated and it now includes a list of popular stories, which are categorized and clustered similarly to Google News. Their FAQ explains:

"Blog Search uses a set of algorithms to try to determine the most popular stories in the blogosphere. We consider factors such as a blog's title and content, as well as its popularity throughout the rest of the blogging community. Then we display groups of posts that are closely related."

via Google Operating System

Try Google Search As It Was in 2001

In honor of the 10th birthday, Google brought back the oldest available index. A search for Gmail returns “gmail.linuxpower.org”, a Linux “email client for the Gnome desktop”. Other keywords you may want to check out:

• iPhone
• Barack Obama (771 results)
• Facebook
  
• YouTube (0 results)
  

Take a look back at Google in January 2001 and add comments of your interesting keywords!

Android Videos

Now that G1 is out, it's time to get a feel of Google's first complete, open and free mobile platform. Here are some cool videos courtesy of Android Developer Channel:

• Full web experience
• Make it your own
• Run multiple apps, all at once
• Browser tricks
• Home screen customization
• Media in the browser
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Home screen shortcuts
• Apps can easily embed the web
• Apps are created equal
• Apps can run in parallel
• Apps without borders
• Reader and photos
• Copy & paste
• Fast scroll

Get Your Own Favicon

Favicon is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. Browsers typically display a page's favicon in the URL bar and next to the page name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers with tabs also show favicon next to the page title.

You can design your favicon online (supports uploading an image of your own also), or download one from free libraries on the web, like FreeFavicon and FaviconRUs. If you are aiming to recent browsers, your favicon can be of type PNG, ICO or GIF (also animated).

Once you got your your icon, it needs to be hosted somewhere on the web (Picasa, GooglePages, ImageShack, Photobucket etc.) and you must have an option to get a direct link to it.

Next thing is to include a reference on your website/blog. The following line should be added to your <head> section (replace http://myFaviconURL with the URL you have from the previous step):

<link href='http://myFaviconURL' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

In Blogger’s template for example, search for the <title> section above the <head> and put it below:

<head>…

    <title>…

    <--- put it here --->

You are done!

Ultimate Online File Conversion Tool

Zamzar is a free online service that will convert video, audio, compressed archives and documents. You upload the file, enter your email address, and it will send you a note when your new file is ready for download. The site also supports download/conversion of YouTube (and all other flash-based video sites) videos and Office 2007 to 2003 file conversion. The list of supported types is very long. Really easy and useful!

Back in Time: 80's Music Videos

If you are as old as I am and were born in the 70's, memories of music videos from the 80's are stored in a decent area of your brain. If you want to bring back these memories (for good or bad) you will like 80smusicvids. The website contains a huge list of videos sorted alphabetically by artist and song name.

Google Phone G1 is Announced Today

Here are the specifications known so far:

• In-store, immediate sales only available in stores within 5 miles of a 3G covered area. If a store is beyond that range, representatives will walk customers through a T-mobile.com purchase
• One touch access to: Search, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Calendar, and Google Talk
• Gmail account and data plan required
• GPS
• 3.1 mp camera, no video recording
• No stereo bluetooth (A2DP)
• Dimensions: 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 in
• Weighs 5.6 ounces
• 480×320 65K color screen
• 5 hour talk time, 130 hour talk time
• Expandable up to 8GB

via TechCrunch

Steve Jobs Demos Apple Macintosh (1984)

With all these "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads these days, it's nice to get back to 1984 and watch Steve Jobs revealing Apple Macintosh live for the first time, in front of 3000 people:

Look what Bill had to say about Apple Macintosh back then:

Samsung Introduces 10x Zoom Point-and-Shoot

The Samsung HZ1 compact superzoom camera is announced today. Here are some interesting specifications of this beauty:

• 10x optical zoom
• 10.2 mega-pixel
  
• 24-240mm wide angle lens
• 720P HD video recording
• Dual image stabilisation
• Face detection
• Newer automated photo modes such as blink and smile detection (capture the final shot under ideal conditions)

This camera might turn out to be my top point-and-shoot favorite (replacing Panasonic's DMC-TZ5).

Introduction

Hi everyone and welcome to my new blog!

Let's start with a quick introduction:

I'm a software developer working at a large software company. I'm developing mostly on .NET platform since 2003. I'm happily married and have a cute little (non-sleeping) daughter.

I can't hide my passion and consider myself a technology junkie, so expect to find a lot of reviews about cool gadgets, sites and software on my blog. In addition, I'm pretty (very) lazy when it comes to sports (including watching it) so be sure I'll not share anything related. I might share some personal life updates when I think it may interest someone.

Ohh, and I have another hobby: playing the keyboard (since 2nd grade) and composing/producing music on the computer (currently with no spare time for it).

Let's start this journey!