A B. Tech student, lives in bhubaneswar, orissa. From Jamshedpur..
Loves music basically heavy and death metal..
Interested in open source applications and coding..
Hoping a career in software development or multimedia designing field..
For mainstream, YouTube is the most favorite video sharing website online. And It became popular very soon for its ease of use, availability of videos, interface… But Is it the only interface we can use? No, there’s another interesting thing to try out here..
Simply.. Go to Warp Speed’s Youtube Landing page and then click on any video thumbnails.. You will go full-screen and all video links turned out into floating balls, with dark background. Now, Isn’t it another good interface?
Hover your mouse pointer over any circle and YouTube‘s ‘related videos’ feature will show you other videos in a new funky way, putting the first one in centre. Clicking on any circle will play the video in new way.
You can see that similar videos are color coded, the circles around them should have same colors. If you watched a video then the color tag of the circle will be placed at top-left corner of window as a dot.
If your are continuing watching videos one after one then you can see all videos you have seen connected by lines, isn’t it amazing??
[Editor’s Note: This is a post written by our Guest Blogger Umesh Mahato. He is a student from Jamshedpur and passionate about opensource.
We come across a huge number of software nowadays to fulfill our daily needs. The amount of softwares are increasing very fast today. All of them provide different type of customization and features.
But not all the softwares are really essential or our need. Today, with increasing version numbers the size of these softwares in increasing also. And some of these are nightmares for old-aged PCs like Photoshop CS4, winamp, Adobe reader. And that’s the point I want to raise here.
Do we really need these software?
Most of the softwares available offers lots of features which are of no need to most of the people. And this is because softwares codes are written by large number of peoples and this increase in size due to bug fixes and updates.
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If we need a basic editor which can crop, retouch, apply basic effects then why we need a bloat like Photoshop which is out of reach to many due to its big price-tag. Even a mainstream popular media player like winamp is also becoming a bloat these days with forced Net-Based services. And the most popular PDF reader ADOBE READER which sends usage information to its server, do we need it?
SO, WHAT CAN WE DO?
We should opt for free and small-in-disk alternatives. Because they will fulfill your needs and won’t interfere with your system performance. And most of these are free or open-source softwares. There are some recommendations.
Image Editor: Some the basic image fixes can be done by Picasa and it support face and geo-tagging now. Paint.net can also do the same
Media Player: VLC player is everything, you don’t need to install any other players since it plays almost everything you can think of. For audio players try Foobar2000, its gaining popularity rapidly.
Being Onling: Use pidgin if you have more than one IM accounts. Eudora for E-mail client. Free Download Manager has inbuilt torrent support so no need of separate torrent client.
Image of Pidgin
Office Software: As MS-Office is an expensive investment. The alternative is Open-Office which can also be a resource hog. If you only need basic editing then try Abiword, its tiny word processor. Foxit Reader is good for handling PDF files being small in size.
Another good thing is that, Google offers web-based services. If you have internet connection then some basic things can be done online and there is also good things that user can work with their files anywhere in world
Remember, the listed softwares are alternatives to the behemoth ones and will not do everything you want. MS-office and Photoshop are huge because they offer lots of feature to work with. Foxit Reader does not support everything like Adobe Reader and VLC is a not good in Library managing.
Different people, different opinions. I just want to know what you think about it?
[Editor’s Note: This is a post written by our Guest Blogger Umesh Mahato. He is a student from Jamshedpur and passionate about opensource.
Here are some tricks and suggestions you may like. I’ve tested these on XP platform….
1. A VIRTUAL DIARY
You want a quick diary on your pc, but dont want to install a separate program for this purpose. And writing notes in a word processor by giving date-time everytime isn’t a good idea.
Open ‘NOTEPAD’.
Type .LOG (remember .log or .Log wont work)
Save the file with any desired any name and close the notepad window.
Now everytime you will try to open this notepad file….the current date and time will be already placed there. So, this way it’ll become a virtual diary.
2. HIDE ONLY FILE-NAMES
Consider, you have some bunch of files like photos or music files. Those are not private but you want to hide only their filenames from others. Its easy, just hold down the ‘SHIFT’ key while selecting ‘THUMBNAILS’ view from ‘VIEW MENU‘ of the window. Amused?? All names are gone.
Its cool, but only works when others dont know this trick. If they already know then they will bring up the filenames by repeating the process again. Anyway it doesn’t hurt to try at least.
3. WIN ACTIVE DESKTOP
Its a good idea to work on your PC and simultaneously check the current stock quotes, match scores or mail feeds. You don’t need to open another browser window for it. Just add a web item to your desktop by using Windows Active Desktop feature.
Open display properties by right clicking on desktop and selecting ‘properties’
Click ‘Desktop’ tab then click on ‘Customize Desktop…” Button.
Click on ‘Web’ tab, select ‘New’. Here type the website url e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk
Click ‘OK’, let it synchronise…click ‘OK’ twice and you are done.
Dont forget to mention the update interval so the page refreshes itself.
You can put this web item anywhere on your desktop and be updated.
4. VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
If you have a file or something which could be potentially dangerous to your PC and you have to run it. Then you should run it in virtual machine instead of directly. Virtual Machine creates a virtual hardware platform on top of a software layer. This way, if virus or worm tries to initialize, it will only infect virtual machine and your OS remains safe..
In the above image you can see a virtual machine (VMware is used) is running XP environment upon Vista platform.
5. RESTRICTIONS TO UNWANTED
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If you use Internet via your admin account then your PC have more chances to get infected by viruses or worms. Due to the fact that, if a virus got installed during web surfing thru your admin account, virus will have full access to admin rights. It can interfere with your security rules and internal configurations.
Instead, opt using ‘Limited Account’ to surf web, so the incoming worms will have limited rights, because OS restricts it to do admin activities.
