TechPaparazzi » 1-Editor’s Pick

How Wireless GPS Helps Police Officers to Nab Criminals.

Sarv007 — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:42:39 +0000

Wireless GPS proves useful for police officers in responding and fighting crime. One particular aspect is in the form of police dispatching. Dispatchers use wireless systems in keeping track of the whereabouts of police officers while on duty. Maintaining the position of police vehicles helps dispatchers know which officers are closest to scenes of emergencies.

Wireless GPS proves useful for 911 dispatchers

When obtaining this information, employees can contact the nearest officer which can prove a matter of life or death in certain situations. Additionally, dispatchers can determine times of arrival with the aid of this wonderful technology. RFID (Radio-frequency identification) is another form of technology that helps police officers tremendously with using RFID tags in tracking down people on house arrest or parole by sending signals if they enter forbidden areas.

Police officers on patrol are ready to perform their duties with wireless systems, latest global positioning maps and other types of computer upgrades. Most police vehicles are online and hooked into computer-aided dispatch systems.

These new systems have not been fail proof and have experienced tons of glitches. There is always consistent upgrading and properservice being performed to get the new wireless systems as reliable and safe as possible. Training is provided consistently in navigating the system which in return, makes police officers jobs safer and easier with increasing response times. New wireless systems have aided in not only officers response times, but records processing among other exceptional benefits.

Maps and other services

Police officers can access GPS maps in their cruisers to give them exact locations of requests for services. The system lists potential threats, crime trends and call histories, as well. Officers are grateful for wireless systems because it has aided in improving the overall safety of officers in the field.

It has been said that the computer mapping system proves more efficient than ever in comparison to the old system that existed in the eighties. The old system was only upgraded on a periodic basis, but the new GPS wireless system is consistently updated. The maps prove useful for officers in finding safe and quick ways to redirect carsat congested traffic scenes and provide significant details. The GPS technology also comes in handy in areas that determine confusing with street names are similar to other street names in other parts of town. The system overall proves to be a tremendous resource that significantly improves the service that officers give to the public on a daily and nightly basis.

Conclusion

The system has not proved perfect and comes with glitches. Some of the glitches include dealing with firewalls and interfacing with other law enforcement agencies and the CAD system. These glitches were predicted as the technology was introduced to the law enforcement field. Generally, officers who are tech-savvy and even officers who have few computer skills have raved about the new GPS wireless technology that keeps police departments on the cutting edge of this new and innovative technology.

This post is contributed by John Smith; John is fanatical about New Technology and Gadgets, His Knowledge about Technology is just commendable, for more Information of his work visit Aanbesteding politie and Politie aanbesteding.

The 10 Most Crazy Clothing For Geeky Girls

Sarv007 — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:22:46 +0000

Are you a real geek? Are you proud of being a geekette? You can be cute (or sexy), yet embrace your geekyness by dressing in Geek Chick Style. Here are some choices:-

1. Computer Wire Skirt Triggers Geek Lust

Ignoring the catcalls for a wireless version, this sparkling -if rather tangled- outfit that debuted during the recent Austin Fashion Week has caught the eye of enthusiastic tech bloggers everywhere.[source]

2. M-Dress Has A Cellphone Up Its Sleeve

The M-Dress is an elegant silk jersey dress that is also a functional soft electronics mobile phone. The M-Dress accepts a standard SIM card and allows the wearer to receive and make calls without carrying a cellular phone in their pocket or purse. Simplicity is elegance.[buy from here]

3. iDress

The iDress is a black, above the knee, short sleeved dress with a built in protected pouch to carry and store your iPad without hindering your movement or style.

4.Twirkle T-Shirt

The Twirkle T-Shirt is a t-shirt that adds sparkle to your style day and night. During the day the colorful crystals sparkle in the sunlight and at night an array of tiny white or full color LEDs twinkle and glow following the movement of the wearer’s body. The Twirkle t-shirt is washable and works with two small watch batteries.[buy from here]

5.Hug-Shirt

The Hug Shirt™ is a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance! Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one. [buy from here]

6. Ping Facebook Fashion

Designed by Jennifer Darmour these new outfits are socially networked and allow you to connect to your Facebook accounts and send updates to it via gestures. Its possible to send messages and update your status by simply wearing the hood. I guess you ll have to be a little careful not to accidentally trigger the wrong gesture or you might not have any friends left to communicate with. [source]

7. Ladies TQualizer T-Shirt

Just like the previous version the Ladies TQualizer T-Shirt features a funky glowing equalizer display which lights up when music is played. If you want one of these fun Ladies TQualizer T-Shirt’s they are available to pre-order for £19.99 about $33 from ThumbsUpUk.

8. 8 Bit Dynamic Life Shirt

Check out these geeky T-shirts, a great geeky valentines gift for you and your partner. Buy one of these glowing shirts for yourself, and gift one to your significant other (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, fembot 2000…). During your normal activities two and a half pixelated hearts will light up on your shirt. Hey… you’re depressed and in need of a recharge. But get within hugging distance of your significant other wearing the matching shirt and suddenly the hearts on both of your shirts start to light up until you’re fully powered up. Go too far astray from the source of your affections and you’ll drop back down to two and a half hearts again. Got it? The 8-Bit Dynamic Life Shirt is available to buy online from $11.99 to $24.99 from ThinkGeek.

9. HTTP Panties !

If you’ve ever run across a “403 Forbidden” error on a web site, it means you’ve either stumbled onto the wrong page, or you’ve been snooping where you shouldn’t be! One nice thing about the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that runs the web (HTTP for short) is that it includes helpful status codes such as “404 Not Found” when a resource can’t be found and “403 Forbidden” when the web site you’re knocking at does not want you to come in. One rarely seen status code is the elusive “200 OK” which basically means that everything went fine, and you’re seeing the page you’re supposed to be seeing! [buy this from here]

10. Nintendo Controller Bikini

A cool Nintendo Controller bikini that brings back the retro styled controller to sexy fashion. [source]

Blogger Interview: Marko Drapić From ThisBlogRules.com

Sarv007 — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:09:10 +0000

Recently I interviewed Marko Drapić from ThisBlogRules and asked few questions to him related to his blogging life and personal life.

Marko is one of the top funny blogger around in the blogging arena. After seeing same things again and again circulating on web, it’s refreshing to find one site dedicated to surfing for things others don’t.

Marko Drapić

Q1. When did you start blogging? What were your original plans for your blog and why did you start blogging?

Ans. I started blogging 3 years ago, but I made some websites before that. My plan was to be successful and to run a big and famous blog, simple as that.

Q2. Why did you opt for this niche?

Ans. This is the niche I personally know the best. I represent creative stuff that I like to millions of people out there, and also humorous photos, movies and great photography are a part of this. That’s all I want to do when I’m online.

Q3. From where you got idea of the killer domain “thisblogrules.com“?

Ans. The true story is that I was not so happy with this domain to begin with but later on I started to like it. It’s catchy, easy to remember and brandable.

Q4. Can humorous content be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site?

Ans. First of all content must have quality, have to be unique, and links and traffic will eventually come.

Q5. What is your favorite blogging tool or the tool you couldn’t live without?

Ans. That has to be Photoshop. It is important to me as the Internet browser that I am using. Every photo on my blog, and there is almost 3,000 of them, is edited and fixed by me. About plug-ins WP Super Cache is very important, and I know my hosting service couldn’t live without it.

Q6. What tips would you give new bloggers to help them start out on a path to success?

Ans. Work, work and work. Don’t give up. Be unique; don’t just copy other successful blogs. Make your blog design simple and clean. Have good relationship with your fans on facebook and twitter. Be professional and update your blog often and results will come.

Q7. One of the hardest things for beginner bloggers is getting traffic. What tips can you give bloggers to drive traffic to a new blog?

Ans. Social bookmark and social news sites. Also there are a lot of traffic exchange services nowadays and you have to use them clever. As I already said, uniqueness and quality content is the key to success.

Q8. What are your three favorite blogs to read? What makes those blogs special?

Actually I don’t follow blogs. I check out some blogs of my friends from time to time, and the only site I visit daily is reddit.

Q9. What’s your top success & dream success in blogging?

Ans. I’m happy how things are going at the moment, but it can always be better. I was featured on Yahoo news, Askmen, NY Post, German Financial Times, MTV and on media from Brazil, Belgium, Greece, Croatia, Denmark and many more. I guess my dream is to have steady 10 million hits per month.

Now moving to some personal questions

Q10. What else do you do aside from blogging?

Ans. I work a lot and don’t have much spare time. I have several other projects on web and much more plans. I wish sometimes that a day could last for 50 hours so I could finish everything that I want to. Still, I like to relax with my girlfriend and our puppy Louie, travel, go to restaurants, football matches and to shop.

Q11. Which quote explains you more “Behind every successful man,there is a woman” or “Behind every successful man,there is a BLOG” (Can you explain too) ?

Ans. Definitely my woman Sanja. She is the greatest. I like to call her the chief creative officer of TBR. She writes the most amazing stories for TBR and other big blogs. Even if she graduated to be HR manager she is quite excited to be working on web.

Q12. Where do you want to be in 3-5 years time?

Ans. I don’t know what city and country we will be in, because everything is possible for us. Main objective is business and the upcoming projects.

Q13. If you are a God what would you do to the world?

Ans. That’s an easy one, I would make world peace.

Q14. How do you party, or hang out with your friends?

Ans. You have to see it to believe it. We party hard, especially my friends. We like to gather at weekends at mine or the other’s apartment, have some drinks and hit some night clubs.

Q15. What was the last movie you went to see?

Ans. I think it was “Timecrimes”. It was kind of weird but fun.

Q16. Can you share some pics that are not available on net till now?

Ans. Here you go, our Boston terrier puppy, a master brain behind thisblogrules.com

Q17. In the end would you like to add something?

Ans. Failure doesn’t mean you are a failure it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.

I’d like to thank the Marko for the time and effort taken to answer my questions. You’re a truly remarkable and unique individual – thank you for sharing your views with the TechPaparazzi readers!

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Live James Bond SPY lifestyle with these.

Sarv007 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:30:35 +0000

Introducing real-life gadgets that trounce some of 007’s most outrageous toys. Spies are everywhere these days, With so many secret agents–both real and fictional–in the public consciousness these days, PCWorld.com thought a short list of high-tech spy gear was in order.

1. Remote Monitoring

What do these household items have in common? They’re bugged! The Small B/W Wall Clock Camera, model C1390B24 (lower left, $276) has a black-and-white camera hidden inside, while the Air Freshener 3G Camera, model CX300MC-A (lower middle, $720) has a color camera inside plus a SIM card that lets you watch the live video feed on a 3G phone. The Power Strip Hidden Audio Monitoring Device (upper left, $1209) is also rigged with a SIM card and a microphone, so you can dial in and listen to conversations. For $100 more, you can get a version that calls you when it detects voices in the room.

2. Spy Cams

Tiny cameras that record on the sly can be hidden in all sorts of objects. Here we see (left to right) we seethe Spy Pen Camera ($30), which lets you download 640-by-480 video and audio recorded on the built-in 4GB memory straight onto your computer; the Button Camera ($129), featuring three styles of button covers with matching real buttons for the rest of your jacket or shirt; the Key Ring Spy Camera ($102) with built-in microphone; and the dressy Tie Camera ($252), which can share a power supply with the optional Covert Video Recorder ($389).

3. Cellular Jammers

Need to scramble a cellular signal and thereby render nearby cellphones’ calling capabilities useless, so your evil-empire nemesis can’t deliver his latest intelligence update to the homeland at the appointed hour? The High Power Portable Jammer (left, $205) isn’t covert, but it can scramble signals at distances of up to 60 feet away. The 3G Mini Cell Jammer (right, $199) promises to scramble cell signals for 3G, UMTS, CDMA, and GSM networks within a range of up to 32 feet.

4.Keyloggers

When you can’t crack the encryption code on some secret plans locked away in a computer file, your only other option is to identify the user’s password and use that to access to the information in unencrypted form. That’s when spies (and paranoid spouses) turn to keyloggers, which record every keystroke that a user enters on a specific computer.

5. GPS Trackers

The PTXTrak Real-Time GPS Tracking Device (left, $470) transmits the location of a car or person every 10 seconds (if driving) or every 20 feet (if walking), while you watch on a Web-based map. The Mini GPS Logger (right, $288) records and stores–on the device itself–the route, stop time, speed, direction, and altitude of a moving object. Subsequently you can retrieve the data and download it to a computer via USB.

6. Document Scanners

PlanOn’s handy document scanners do the job quickly and covertly–assuming that no one considers moving an unopened ballpoint pen rapidly across every line of text on a page to be odd. The DocuPen Xtreme X05 (top, $300) comes with 64MB of internal memory, takes MicroSD cards for expansion, and can perform Bluetooth transfers as well. The DocuPen RC810 (bottom, $170) has 8MB of memory and takes about 4 to 8 seconds to scan a full page of text.

7. Antibugging Protection

When it’s so easy to bug someone it’s hard not to be paranoid your bugged yourself. In the spy vs. spy world of gadgets and countergadgets, there are some easy ways to avoid being bugged. The PE-AJ1 Audio Jammer electronic noise generator (left, $169) can knock out any wired or wireless microphone within an area of 150 square feet (note, however, that a protected area of 150 square feet works out to a protected radius of only about 7 feet, according to the ancient spy formula A = πr ²). The KB-DD800 Multifunctional Portable Sweep Unit (right, $495) purportedly can detect bugs and cameras hidden in the room, as well as GPS trackers and wire telephone tapping.

8.Night Vision

If you’re after some night vision gear for your mission, you can choose between monoculars and binoculars. The Night Own 3×50 monocular (upper left, $450) is suitable for camping, boating or wildlife observation, as well as for espionage, while the Patrol 2X24 monocular (right, $360) is a sound entry-level model that you can attach to a tripod. If you want to go pro, consider the Ranger Digital Night Vision 5×42 binoculars (lower left, $760), with 5X magnification, a built-in LCD screen, and a rubberized body.

9. Aerial Snooping

It looks like a prop from a Batman movie, but The Bat (left, not available in stores) is a functioning drone that carries microphones, shoots photos and video, and comes equipped with sensors for detecting poisonous gases and radiation. Only 6 inches wide, it cost $10 million to develop at the University of Michigan. More down to earth (but still up in the air) is the Spy Kite (right, $46), which lets you snap photos from heights of up to 80 feet and download them to your PC via USB.

10. Phones No Longer Safe

If your mission is to spy on someone who uses a BlackBerry or an Android phone, a service called MobiStealth (left, $80 for three months) promises to enable you to monitor their location, listen to phone calls via a Web interface, and check the user’s text messages and Web history. Mobile Spy claims that its iPhone Spy software (right, $50 for three months) works in a similar manner with iPhones–but only if they’ve been jailbroken.

11. Spy Coins

Finally, all self-respecting spies need a safe way to transfer to the home office all the data they’ve acquired during a hard day of skulking around. These hollow spy coins from Dereu & Sons have been uses since the Cold War by spies to transport secret messages or suicide poisons. Now you can use them to carry a MicroSD card. Available coins include U.S. nickels (left, $30 each) and half-dollars (a significantly better deal at $25 each), British pounds (right, $33 each), and EU euros ($30 each).

Source: PCWorld.com

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20 Strangest Sights in Google Earth

Sarv007 — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:31:31 +0000

Ever since Google first let people scour the planet from the comfort of their computers through the Google Earth software program, fans have been on a virtual scavenger hunt from the North Pole to the South Pole looking for anything interesting, unusual, or unexplained. From shipwrecks to crop circles, from ads big enough to be read from space to a giant pink bunny nearly the size of a football field, we’ve collected just a few of the odd and spectacular sights. You can see the same images in Google Maps by clicking the links we provide–but you’ll get a better view by copying the coordinates in parentheses after each link and pasting them into Google Earth’s ‘Fly To’ box.

1. Celebrity Obsession

As if Oprah Winfrey’s celebrity weren’t big enough already, an Arizona farmer built a 10-acre homage to the talk show host (Google Earth coordinates 33.225488,-111.5955). Visitors can tell their friends, “I got lost inside Oprah’s head.” The celebrity-obsessed can also visit Google Earth Hacks, which has a Google Earth-style map of Hollywood stars’ homes.

2. Bikinis From Space

Spend enough time on Google Earth, and you start thinking that the world is a pretty low-resolution place. But Google Earth is steadily updating its maps with high-resolution pictures. Zoom in on this Google Earth satellite shot of Australia’s Bondi Beach (Google Earth coordinates -33.892351,151.27538), and you can almost read the designer labels on the bikinis.

3. Show Me a Sign

Google Earth doesn’t have advertising, unless you consider the corporate logos and trademarks big enough to be seen from space. This giant Ford logo (Google Earth coordinates 42.302284,-83.231215) is found near (where else?) Detroit, Michigan. You think that’s big? Check out the massive Coca-Cola logo (-18.529225,-70.25002) etched into a hillside in Chile with 70,000 Coke bottles. Haven’t they heard of recycling?

4. Map Mysteries

Some of the sights you find in Google Earth are just plain mysterious. For example, why is a fighter jet parked (Google Earth coordinates 48.825183,2.1985795) in what looks to be a residential neighborhood lot near Paris? And why is this lake in Iraq (33.39845000,44.48416800) blood red?

5. Only From the Sky

Dubbed The Badlands Guardian by locals, this geological marvel (Google Earth coordinates 50.010083,-110.113006) in Alberta, Canada, bears an uncanny resemblance to a human head wearing a full Native American headdress–and earphones, to boot. Of course, The Guardian was produced naturally. For a more synthetic wonder that can be truly appreciated only from above, check out the giant man-shaped lake (-21.805149,-49.089977) near Bauru, Brazil.

6. All-Seeing Cat’s Eye

Standing in front of China’s Beijing South Railway Station must be impressive, but seeing it from the perspective of the Google Earth satellite is cool, too (39°51’50.35″N, 116°22’21.78″E) (see it on Google Maps). From above, this ultramodern railway station looks like a cat’s eye. For larger-than-life architectural finds, nothing beats Google Earth for getting a grand perspective–be it the 350-foot Atomium (50°53’41″N 4°20’28″E) in Brussels, Belgium [zoom to image], or Dubai’s Burj Al Arab (25° 8’30.90″N, 55°11’4.76″E) [zoom to image], the world’s tallest freestanding hotel.

7. Airplanes, Jets, and Missiles

Whether parked, crashed, or flying, airplanes are among the most sought-after and collected finds in Google Earth. Here is the mammoth airplane graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (32° 9’1.75″N, 110°49’56.57″W) (see it in Google Maps) in Tucson, Arizona. You might ask, why should a good airplane go to waste? Some people agree with you–like these folks (45°24’28.71″N, 123° 0’28.23″W) (see it in Google Maps) [zoom to image] who live in Washington state and couldn’t bear to see perfectly good Boeing 727 go to waste: They made a home out of it.

8. One Nation Under Chicken

If alien visitors happen to land in Rachel, Nevada, don’t be surprised if they think Colonel Sanders is our leader. That town has an 87,500-square-foot image of the smiling Colonel (37°38’47.40″N, 115°45’1.27″W) (see it in Google Maps) composed of 65,000 one-foot-square tiles, according to reports. This KFC logo is part of a larger trend called mapvertising, in which companies create product logos that are visible from space (or from planes landing at Chicago O’Hare Airport (42° 0’28.67″N, 87°53’9.89″W) (see it in Google Maps) [zoom to image]. A video of the making of the giant-size Colonel Sanders has been posted to YouTube.

9. Caught on Satellite

Sometimes Google Earth is lucky enough to catch things as they happen. Here Google Earth captures a truck that crashed (Google Earth coordinates 46.765669,-100.79274) outside of Bismarck, North Dakota. In another instance, Google Earth caught fishermen illegally bottom-trawling (28.102512,-14.265835) beaches near Spain’s Canary Islands.

10. Car Tipping

You’ve probably heard of cow tipping, but what about car tipping? To judge from this photo, a dearth of cows in the Netherlands has inspired people to begin tipping parked cars instead (51°19’18.13″N, 6°34’35.64″E) (see it in Google Maps).

11. Military Mysteries

What’s the purpose of the mammoth designs painted onto the floor of a Chinese desert?(40°27’4.87″N, 93°44’42.90″E) (see it in Google Maps). Perhaps only the Chinese military knows. That’s who some people speculate is behind not several (40°27’23.66″N, 93°23’7.78″E) [zoom to image] similar mile-wide paintings. A nearby Stonehenge-looking formation (40°27’31.04″N, 93°18’47.21″E) (aee it in Google Maps) [zoom to image] with three jets parked in the middle suggests a possible military purpose to the enterprise. But giant white lines etched into the Earth are not unique to just China. A mysterious pattern of white lines found in Norwich, UK (52.481725, 0.520627) (see it on Google Maps) [zoom to image] has prompted some Fox Mulder fans to say “I want to believe.”

12. Out-of-This-World Art

Instead of working with paint brushes and canvases, some artists use bulldozers and backhoes to create art. In their 1997 desert installation called Desert Breath (27°22’50.10″N, 33°37’54.62″E) (see it on Google Maps), artists Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou, and Stella Constantinides created two interlocking spirals that stretch almost 0.25 mile from side to side in the Egyptian desert. The inset images on the left are from DanaeStratou.com and show Desert Breath just after it was completed and before the installation was ravaged by wind, rain, and time.

13. I Heart Google Earth

How does Mother Earth show her love for Google Earth? With heart-shaped islands (43°58’42.70″N, 15°23’0.14″E) (see it on Google Maps) [zoom to image], ponds (52°15’27.48″N, 10°31’17.62″E) (see it on Google Earth) [zoom to image], and botanical enigmas (20°56’15.47″S, 164°39’30.56″E) (see it on Google Maps) [zoom to image], of course. How do mere mortals show their love for Google Earth? We etch our devotion into Mother Earth via heart-shaped designs (48°53’26.45″N, 12°30’36.01″E) (see it on Google Maps) [zoom to image], of which there are plenty.

14. Extremely High Resolution

Since Google Earth debuted in 2005, the satellite images accessible through the mapping software have gotten sharper. Sometimes you can be caught off guard by stunningly crisp images of random things. Here is an image of a park in Sebastopol, California, where people are lounging on the grass and others are lining up for lunch (38°24’40.50″N, 122°50’25.42″W) (see it on Google Maps; to see this image on the resulting map, move the slider bar all the way to the highest magnification, next to the + label). What gives? According to unconfirmed reports, this is a meeting of Foo Camp, an annual hacker conference sponsored by O’Reilly Media. Another seemingly random high-resolution image captures a lonely Land Rover driving through a Moroccan desert (27°56’25.44″N, 12°17’28.15″W) [zoom to image]. Other spectacular high-resolution images, like these pyramids located outside of Cairo, Egypt (29°58’44.64″N, 31° 7’54.60″E) [zoom to image] (See it in Google Earth), don’t leave you wondering, “What’s the story behind this image?”

15. Parched Lips

Eat your heart out, Angelina Jolie. These lips may not be as famous Jolie’s but they’re bigger. This geological find (12°22’13.32″N, 23°19’20.18″E) (see it in Google Earth) is located in Gharb, Darfur, in Sudan. To earthbound locals, the landmass is just another nondescript hill that’s 0.5 mile long. If you ask me, this lady needs to do something about her 5 o’clock shadow.

16. When Things Go Wrong

With Google’s unblinking satellite eye trained on us, it’s bound to capture things as they happen. Here in Frankfurt, Germany, you can spot a house fire (50° 2’16.46″N, 8°14’29.01″E) (see it in Google Maps). Here is another of a car accident and massive traffic snarl (51° 4’47.89″N, 6°59’17.70″E ) [zoom to image] in Germany. Off the coast of Sudan, you get a good view of a Bolivian cargo ferry, the SS Jassim, that ran aground and capsized (19°38’46.58″N, 37°17’42.19″E) [zoom to image].

17. Swastika-Influenced Design

A US Navy barracks on Coronado island, San Diego was built in the design of a swastika by accident and now must be rebuilt to not resemble this symbol.

18. Aircraft Traffic Jam

A strange anomaly indeed. Three planes taking off right behind each other or a graphical error?

19. Bunny in Google Maps

Giant Pink Bunny created by a group of artists near Artesina, Italy as seen in Google Maps.

20. Where’s Waldo in Google Maps?

Canadian artist Melanie Coles built a large image of the iconic “Waldo” onto a rooftop at an undisclosed location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Create Your Own First-Person Shooter Game for Free With Cube 2: Sauerbraten

Sarv007 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:10:59 +0000

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features & eyecandy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine. The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code & design, and its code is Open Source (ZLIB license, read the docs for more on how you can use the engine).

Cube 2: Sauerbraten (free) is an engine/editor for designing and playing first person shooter games, primarily aimed at multiplayer LAN games. It is an entirely open source/freeware project, actively supported and developed, and supports a good set of features, all of which ultimately lead to getting some friends together and blowing each other to bloody gobbets. Good times, good times.

While many systems for designing FPS maps use an editor/engine split, where you engage in an edit/test/edit again cycle, Sauerbraten makes no such distinction. You load up, or create, a map, then press “E” to begin editing it, and “E” again to leave edit mode. At the simplest level, editing consists of extruding or deleting cubes and adding textures, but to create the kind of beautiful maps you can see in screenshots or play as part of Sauerbraten’s distribution package, you will need to master a variety of skills, as well as creating or importing textures designed for your specific needs.

Sauerbraten does not use a standard Windows interface. Most editing in Cube 2: Sauerbraten is accomplished by some mix of “click a key, then spin the mousewheel.” In essence, you constantly shift into different modes. Press “y” to make the mousewheel cycle through textures. Press “g” to make the grid size smaller or larger. Multiple players logged into a map can all edit it cooperatively, allowing teams to work on a project and see each other’s changes happening dynamically.

In some cases, you need as much coordination to edit a map as to frag your friends. For example, bending and deforming corners requires holding down the mousewheel while dragging to select a range, then spinning the mousewheel to edit the corners, all without ever letting the mousewheel up or clicking any of the other mouse buttons. My failure to master this skill meant that I constantly lost my selection, selected the wrong squares, or was only able to perform a partial edit before my fingers slipped.

As with many open-source projects, documentation is sparse and sometimes out of date. There is a forum for asking questions, and I did find it useful, but it uses very non-standard forum software that seems to have fallen through a timewarp from 1998, with a simple list of topics-as-links. There’s a wiki, but it consists mostly of stub articles and partially written guides that tend to make assumptions about prior knowledge.

A fairly basic scripting language (CubeScript) is also part of Sauerbraten. It’s intended primarily for trigger events (such as causing a monster to spawn when you cross a square), rather than scripting advanced AI or adding complex new features. The engine source code, though, is open source, so it is certainly possible to use it as a base for adding additional functionality via more traditional means.

If you’re interested in FPS map design–and aren’t afraid to get your hands a little dirty and experiment a bit to figure out what works and what doesn’t–download Sauerbraten and check it out. Just make sure your mousewheel finger isn’t as itchy as your trigger finger.

Links for Cube 2 users:

Quadropolis (community site for maps etc.)
Premier Sauerbraten League (competitive league)
Cube2.FR (French community site)
sourceforge project page (downloads/cvs)
Cube Server Lister (external browsing app)
Wouter’s homepage (developer/designer)
Lee’s homepage (developer)

Engine Features

6 directional heightfield in octree world structure allowing for instant easy in-game geometry editing (even in multiplayer, coop edit).
Rendering engine optimized for high geometry throughput, supporting hardware occlusion culling and software precomputed conservative PVS with occluder fusion.
Lightmap based lighting with accurate shadows from everything including mapmodels, smooth lighting for faceted geometry, and fast compiles. Soft shadowmap based shadows for dynamic entities.
Pixel and vertex shader support, each model and world texture can have its own shader assigned. Supports normal and parallax mapping, specular and dynamic lighting with bloom and glow, environment-mapped and planar reflections/refractions, and post-process effects.
Robust physics written specifically for this world structure.
Loading of md2/md3/md5/obj/smd models for skeletal and vertex animated characters, weapons, items, and world objects. Supports animation blending, procedural pitch animation, and ragdoll physics for skeletally-animated characters.
Network library designed for high speed games, client/server network system.
Small but complete configuration/scripting language.
Simple stereo positional sound system.
Particle engine, supporting text particles, volumetric explosions, soft particles, and decals.
3d menu/gui system, for in-world representation of choices.

Humorous Content Gets Quality Links To Your Site.

Sarv007 — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:58:25 +0000

A popular question on every Webmaster’s mind is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and here is our view point.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

Now, lets get to the point.

Humorous content is a very powerful way in the online blogging arena. In the noisy online world, it is vital to engage your website visitor, grab their attention and endear them to your brand. Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site.

Why humorous content?

If you can make your visitor smile, all the better. An engaged, smiling visitor will linger longer and will be more likely to remember you. The engaged visitor can also help you to market your brand by telling others about you and by linking to your website.

With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.

You need to please the search engines too. They are hungry beasts and must be fed premium meat. Their meal of choice is original content. By using original, engaging content that attracts back links you will be pleasing your visitors, the search engines and ultimately yourself.

How to make content humorous ?

Telling a joke, can be easy, but getting your humorous point out there can be difficult. Just follow these points:-

Keep in mind that good stand-up comedy writers are neither anointed by God nor born into it; they just write a lot. All you need to do it is a pen and some paper.
Understand that a joke occurs at the intersection of two ideas.
Pack more punches than you think you need. The readers are naturally going to think only half of your work is funny (at maximum) because everyone’s sense of humor is different.
(Only consider this point if you really a bad comedian)For the best results, consider outsourcing your content requirements to an experienced freelance writer with a humorous streak. By communicating your needs effectively to your chosen writer, you will be one step closer to having lively content that will engage your customers, get them talking about you and keep them coming back for more.
Keep your own sense of humor. Don’t try to be someone you are not. If potty jokes aren’t funny to you, don’t write them because they won’t sound natural coming from your writing style. Just like any other literary work, portray yourself (and your humor) In your work.
Use Funny Images.
Short and tingling title will do a great job.
Being funny in real life sometimes means lying, but this doesn’t works in blogging arena, make sure you make your readers aware of the truth.
Saying words in funny ways is funny. For instance, Sylvester the cat is funny because he talks with a lisp and spits at the letter ‘s’. When British people say “aluminium,” that’s funny. In fact, anybody with an accent that isn’t like yours is funny, and you should laugh to show your appreciation.

It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.

Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention.

Some funny content on this blog:

Take Credit Automatically, When anyone copies Content From Your Blog

Sarv007 — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:05:37 +0000

I Have Come across a great Website EmbedArticle.com, Which automatically gives a Source link to your Blog and adds a Adsense ad to it, When somebody copy content from your Blog.

If you copy text from an Embed Article enabled website, Their Widget Window will pop open producing a unique code snippet for you. It is preferred that you embed the text you copied by using this Embed Article code snippet.

This code, when pasted within your website’s HTML, will render out:

The text you copied
A link back to the article you copied it from
An ad

This is the preferred method for you to take content from an Embed Article enabled website.

What It is All about?
Many people have no problem copying content directly from the Publisher that produced it. Most do their best to comply with Fair Use, but some dont know exactly what that entails. Luckily we, like many other Publishers, took 6 seconds to register and integrate our Embed Article Technology onto our website. Now when any portion of this article is highlighted and copied, our technology will produce a piece of code which will render it out on any embedding website invisible to search engines, with a link back to the article source, as well as display an ad so that the Publisher can earn revenue from their text appearing on the embedding website. Below we did just that – take a look to see how the copied portion will appear on embedding websites.

You can even try it out yourself. Go ahead and highlight any portion of this post and try to copy it. Youll notice our Embed Article Lightbox activates and offers you a unique code snippet as an alternative to the copied text. Paste that code in your personal blog and see for yourself. Not only does Embed Article make it simple for bloggers to play by the rules, but this technology also makes it possible for any Publisher, big or small, to build SEO, earn extra revenue and control where their content ends up by integrating our widget.

Demo here (Try to Copy The Content)

Features Explained:-

Letting people embed your articles
Links back contained within each article embed
Ad revenue generated from traveling ad tags
Article SEO Protection
Reporting on who is embedding your articles
Turn off unwanted embeds with a click
Serve your own ads contained within article embeds

Coming soon:

Set character limits of embedded articles
Copy and Paste Activation
Monthly report of embedded article data

Register Here For This Service Free !!!

Watch Bollywood Movies on YouTube

YoPapa — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:48:18 +0000

Some great news for movie buffs.

You can watch some of the popular Bollywood movies on YouTube for free using this page. These are full-length videos so you can just connect your computer to the TV screen, grab a snack and watch movies from the couch with your family.

>>>Watch Bollywood Movies Here<<<

For example, here’s one of my favorite Bollywood movie — MP3 . I can watch this movie anytime, anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection.The movies are available in both High Quality and Standard Quality versions.