Helen Fisher on TEDTalks

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist who has studied gender differences and human emotions for over 30 years.

Many think that men & women are alike but she says we are more like two feet who are dependent on each other with the many similarities and differences. The brain itself is hard wired with big gender differences between men & women. And she talks about what romentic love is all about.

She talkes about 3 basic brain systems used for mating and reproduction.

1. Sex drive / Lust (attrack humans to a range of partners)
2. Romantic Love (focus the mating energy onto one individual)
3. Attachement (tolerate the human being one is in love with)

This is a podcast from TEDTalks by Helen FisherTo download high quality click here

The Future of Online Operating Systems

No hard drives, no Windows installations, just a browser that opens the door to your online OS is for the most part only fiction for now. YouOS.com has released their Alpha version of their online Web OS. It is not trying to copy Windows but definitely feels like an operating system. It has different kinds of applications that you can use and configure. For now I cannot this is not yet useful nor too user friendly and still too limited. It is good that some are investing their time to push such ideas forward but it is still a long way to go. Go try it out if you like at www.youos.com

String Theory in a Visual Format

Ever wonder what the 5th, 6th, 7th ... 10th dimension looks like? Maybe you have the same difficulty imagining such a high count of dimensions as I do. On Bob Bryanton's website that is promoting his book called Imagining the Tenth Dimension he has a short animated visual explanation of all the dimensions. Click here to go to the website and click on Imagining the Ten Dimensions on the navigation bar to view see and listen to the explanation

Update: Google Desktop

Google Desktop (v4.2006.1002)
(http://desktop.google.com/)

With Google Desktop you can search your computer, emails, and web history as efficiently and as quickly as you do the internet. You can add Google Gadgets can can let you share pictures, view your calendar, weather, play games, display news, ... you name it.

Size: 2.03MB (installer)

click here to download

Update: Foobar2000 0.9.4.1 beta1

Foobar2000 (v0.9.4.1 beta1)
(http://www.foobar200.org/)

Among the updates are:
- works better with Vorbis Comment and APEv2 tag
- gapless playback of MP4 files encoded with new iTunes
- and as always bug fixes

Best music player but it sure is not user friendly. It is 100% customizable. It will do whatever you tell it to do and it will do so better than any other player. It is extremely RAM efficient and plays back all music file formats I have ever tried.

Size: 1.61MB (installed)

click here to download

Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion

Rumors have turned out to be true. Google officially bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion, its largest acquisition yet. It will be a stock to stock transaction taking place in the 4th Quarter. YouTube will operate independently and keep its own brand name as well as offices.

YouTube has just over 60 employees and was founded in 2005 and has already a higher population reach than MySpace. Google will soon incorporate it's ad system into YouTube. How it all will play out in the future is still uncertain. YouTube is an active copyright infringement machine giving place to possible copyright lawsuits. Lawsuits or no lawsuits, Google will end up with an increase in profits and lay the foundation to their online video market dominance.

For official Google press release click here

New Added Google Reader Features

1. Now you can choose start page.
Go to Settings->Preferences->Start page
as you can see in the screenshot below








2. Hit u key will make the right panel disappear.

3. Every few minutes Google Reader will now auto refresh. You can always press refresh at the bottom of the side panel to do so immedialty.

4. My favorite: Hit space bar to mark a post as read and go to the next

And as always there were a number of bug fixes.

For a complete list click here

Small Free Checksum

MD5 Fingerprint (v1.1)
(http://www.nazgulled.net/?lg=en&id=md5fingerprint)

To verify that a file you downloaded for example is not damaged you need a 32 Hash code. You copy that Hash code into MD5 Fingerprint and open the file you want to check. Right after that you will be notified if the Hash matches the file if it does not then either the file is damaged or you used the wrong Hash code. This is extremely useful when downloading large files, like a Linux installation or when you send files to others.

Size: 152KB (installed)

click here to download

Three Flash (*.flv) Players

nFLVPlayer is the best of the three flash players. It has the most functionality and also has the smallest size of only 680KB.

nFLVPlayer (v1.1.4)
(http://www.zeraha.org/dload.php?action=category&cat_id=12)

Plays almost all *.flv file without any problems.

I only recommend to use the Flash Movie Player if VLC Player fails to play your *.flv file.

Size: 680KB

click here to download


Riva FLV Player (v1.2)
(http://rivavx.de/index.php?id=422&L=3)

Plays almost all *.flv file without any problems.

I only recommend to use the Flash Movie Player if VLC Player fails to play your *.flv file.

Size: 2116KB

click here to download





FLV Player (v1.3.3)
(http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated)

Plays almost all *.flv file without any problems.

I only recommend to use the Flash Movie Player if VLC Player fails to play your *.flv file.

Size: 1454KB

click here to download

Flash (*.swf) Movie Player

Flash Movie Player 1.4
(http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/flash_movie_player/)

Plays almost all *.swf file without any problems. It requires you to have the Adobe Flash Plugin installed. (IE here & Firefox here)

I only recommend to use the Flash Movie Player if VLC Player fails to play your *.swf file.

Size: 420KB

click here to download

Update: GSpot 2.60 b01 Build 20061008

GSpot (2.60 b01 Build 20061008)
(http://www.headbands.com/gspot)

GSpot is used to identify codecs of video files. It recognizes almost all audio and video codecs of most file types. No installation required. It works like a charm.

Size: 968KB

click here to download

Where to Search for Blogs?

http://blogsearch.google.com/

http://search.blogger.com/

Both blog searches above are the same Google blog search but with different interface styles.

www.technorati.com

The other one that is good and has all blogs organized by human input is Technorati.

Wondering what a Blog is? Read On!!!

Blogger's guide explains wonderfully what a Blog is all about. To read their simple & easy explanation click here


But let me also give you 10 good reason why to start a blog:

1. It is simple & free! You have nothing to lose & everything to gain.
2. Share your ideas, information, professional knowledge
   
3. Let family and friends know what is going on in your life
4. Talk about a specific topic (i.e. news, books, movies, health ...)
   
5. Share information of your interests, profession, hobbies ...
   
6. Create a closed, private community (invitation only)
   
7. Keep a diary, notes, record of events
   
8. Keeping in touch with others.
9. Company updates, changes, innovations ...
   
10. Or simply have a free website for any purpose you choose.
    

Powerset trying to pull a Google?

www.powerset.com



Powerset is an upcoming search engine that will organize the internet by a natural language structure. If there is anything to this than this could become a promising way of intuitively searching the web without having to conform to search commands. I love the idea but for now it stops at that.

Don't let Google.com change it's language

Since I am studying in Thailand it is a common thing that www.google.com takes me to Thailand's Google page. If you are in a country who's language you don't speak than you know how annoying this can be.

The simple solution for this problem is to change this set your default home page to http://www.google.com/ncr

Hallucination Movie

No I won't tell you what this does, just try it. Ideally download the video and play it back in full screen. But it should work if you just play it back below.

Download:
.avi (best quality)
.mp4 (for iPod)

Update: Firefox 2 RC2

Firefox 2 RC2 (Release Candidate 2) is available now.
If you are not using Firefox 2 yet than I recommend you to get it and if you do than you should update.

Most likly the changes are only bug fixes and security hole fixes but I don't know of any official changes in Firefox 2 RC2.
What I do know is that the Portable edition received a new faster launcher. So you will notice Firefox 2 RC2 Portable to start faster than it used to before.

Download the new Firefox 2 RC2 Portable edition here.

Don't be concerned about losing your settings. Just install the Portable Edition over your current Portable Firefox and it will preserve all your settings.

Backing up your profile: go to PortableFirefox\Data\profile and make a backup copy of it. For a complete guide on how to back up all your Firefox data and how to upgrade between previous Firefox 2 Portables click here

3 Google Players to Embed And Play Audio & Google Videos on Your Website or Blog

Google has 3 web-based flash players that let you embed, on your own website or Blog, any Google Videos and any MP3 audio file (such as podcasts) that you have a URL to.

• 1) Google Video Player
• 2) Google GMail Audio Player (primarily used for Voicemail)
• 3) Google Reader Audio Player
(used for embed audio files in RSS feeds i.e. podcasts)

1) Google Video Player
All videos from Google Video are played back with Google's flash based Video Player as you can see with the example below.

(Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class)

The Google Video Player can be found at:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf

Google provides the code for embedding every Google Video. There is no need to hand code anything for that.

2) Google GMail Audio Player
Google introduced the GMail Audio Player with their new feature of sending Voicemail with Google Talk. As far as I can tell there is no difference between the Google Video Player and the Gmail Audio Player. Everyone (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, & Hotmail users) who receives a Google Talk Voicemail, is able to playback their received voicemail messages with the GMail Audio Player as the screenshot below shows. (Notice how Google, in GMail, has cut of the Full Screen button and the Google Video button.)

The Google GMail Audio Player can be found at:
http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf

3) Google Reader Audio Player
With the introduction of Google Reader, Google also made a modified GMail Audio Player for it. The Google Reader Audio Player has two extra buttons that enables rewinding and forwarding, plus the volume control is longer. As opposed to the GMail Audio Player, Google this time completely removed the Full Screen and the Google Video button. And unlike the GMail Audio Player, the Google Reader Audio Player cannot playback any videos. Just see for your self below.

The Google Reader Audio Player can be found at:

http://www.google.com/reader/ui/2806928869-audio-player.swf

Editing Options
(follow the color correspondence)

<embed style="width: 400px; height: 27px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/2806928869-audio-player.swf?audioURL=MP3_URL" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" salign="TL" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" align="middle"></embed>

width & hight - Just change the number values to fit your website or Blog space.

id="VideoPlayback" - Both the Google Video Player & the GMail Audio Player have this set as id="VideoPlayback" but the Google Reader Player has it as id="audio-player-container player". I interchanged them, even entered some bogus text and nothing had changed. There seems to be no functional difference.

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" - this lets the web page know that some flash component is being embedded

src="GooglePlayerType+?docId=/?audioURL=+MP3_URL" There are three components to defining the the source (src) of the audio or video to be embedded

(scr="1+2+3")

1) There is a choice between the Google Video Player (http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf), the GMail Audio Player (http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf), or the Google Reader Audio Player (http://www.google.com/reader/ui/2806928869-audio-player.swf). I recommend to use the Google Reader Audio Player for any MP3 audio and obviously the Google Video Player for all Google Videos.

2) Add ?audioURL= for audio playback and add ?docId= for Google Videos.

3) For audio playback you enter the MP3's URL after ?audioURL= and for Google Videos you must enter the Id of the Video after ?docId=.

quality="best" - This refers to the Flash playback quality. Always leave this as it is. It will not affect the video quality but is meant for actual Flash animated content.

bgcolor="#ffffff" - (I am not sure what this does.) I would have assumed that this can change the background color of the video window by replacing #ffffff with some other color code. I tried it but visually nothing has changed.

scale="noScale" - (I am not sure what this does.)

salign="TL" - (I am not sure what this does.)

flashvars="playerMode=embedded" - This is another Flash embedding command that should always be left as it is.

align="middle" - This aligns the Video in the Google Player but this is only noticeable when the width and height of the Google Player don't match up the Video's aspect ratio. It can be changed to align="left" or align="right".

Update: Skype 2.6.0.97 Beta release

click here to download


Click to call ordinary phone numbers on any website.

Find and join Skypecasts in the Live tab.

Share your favorite links in mood message. They’re clickable.

For more detailed bugfixes, tweaks, and other changes click here

One of the changes I like a lot is the new feature of displaying Skype Bandwidth usage. You can turn it on by following the following 3 STEPS:

STEP 1

STEP 2
STEP 3

Google Gadgets For Your Website

Google made their gadgets available to everyone who wants to add them to their MySpace, Blogger, or any other website. There are over a 1000 gadgets available in categories such as news, tools, communication, fun & games, finance, sports, lifestyle, and technology.

Each gadget can be customized to fit your website's style and look.

go to Google Web-Gadgets