May 21, 2010

Google

Whoo! Almost missed this: Google celebrates 30 years of Pac-Man



Unlike other Google Logos, this one is actually playable.

via ReadWriteWeb

Facebook Privacy

For those of us who are worried about our privacy on Facebook, Lifehacker has two great links:

There is an article which shows you how to find how much of your privacy is made public by Facebook. That article was published some time back.

But today, Lifehacker has published an article which links to a bookmarklet which, at a click addresses your Facebook privacy concerns.

This should be useful.

May 18, 2010

Lazyfeed: the Maximum Exposure Feed Reader for Bloggers.

In case, you've noticed, I don't give more than two or three tags to my post, because I feel too many tags make the cloud look messy. But look here- lots. That is because of Lazyfeed.



I am the kind of person who hates chaos, and wants to keep things under control. Lazyfeed gives me a reason to break the pattern- you just can't keep anything in control when you use Lazyfeed as your RSS aggregator.

I think a brief introduction to Lazyfeed is in order: unlike other aggregators, Lazyfeed brings you feeds by tags- now you know, don't you!- I want this post to get into Lazyfeed through many windows, so multiple tags.

And that is the reason bloggers should help Lazyfeed find its feet: it is relatively new with its redesigned user interface, and it could do with your support: and you could do with its.

There are only two ways for me to get into your feed reader: either you subscribe to this blog, or in case you use Google Reader or Netvibes, I follow you and hope that you follow me back and read my feed.

But with Lazyfeed, there is hundred percent chance that everyone who has subscribed to the tag that you add to your post will get a chance to see it. For bloggers, this should be a godsend. This sort of random exposure is likely to earn you a good amount of readers if your blog is any good.

So, I hope Lazyfeed finds strength. The more people sign up, the better it is for us.





That is just one reason. Lazyfeed is a sort of misnomer, it is busy. Imagine you have subscribed to just about ten or twelve tags, like, social media, twitter, friendfeed, facebook and so on- and consider the amount of writing that is given these tags: there is no way you can keep track of all the posts that are generated all over the web. They all come into Lazyfeed. And it lets you subscribe to any number of tags you want to. Chaos.

I hated it in the beginning: before I could finish reading a post, three more would have come in. It was stressful, and frustrating. My feed reader is Google Reader- it is as static as static can be. Lazyfeed is nothing like it- if Reader is a docudrama, Lazyfeed is a disney film.

Don't think of Lazyfeed as a feed reader- no matter what they say. It is more like Luckyfeed. Because there are literally thousands of posts streaming into your feed everyday. What happens is that you get to read some of the feeds that get updated in realtime while you are at Lazyfeed, and it is your luck that decides what you get to read.





Sounds crazy, right? But not so. Many of us haven't heard of RSS, and of those who have, there are many who hate feed readers. It doesn't look right for them. And here is Lazyfeed, trying to turn the basic purpose of feed reader on its head: I use my reader to keep track of blogs and news, Lazyfeed would have none of it. It is a stream, and you go fishing, and there are lots of fish out there, just cast your net- you are sure to come up with what you want.

It works, actually.





So, I'd like you to sign up at Lazyfeed. If you are a blogger, you should- because it gives you and me and people like us greater exposure than what we've got till now. And if Lazyfeed thrives, it works better for us. So, support Lazyfeed, no question about that.

And then, if you don't have a blog, but post on Twitter and Facebook, Lazyfeed will help you find and share good stuff. You can connect your accounts to Lazyfeed, and update them with a couple of clicks.

Here are my suggestions on how to use Lazyfeed:

  • Don't try to read every update in every feed. Relax and enjoy the reading experience. If you have subscribed to the tags that interest you, chances are that, you will get more than what you have bargained for.
  • There is a way to get around the randomness, though. If you 'bookmark" (subscribe) to the posts (shared items) of the people who share your interest, you'll get to look at what they have shared: this works like curated content. For instance, if you subscribe to that of thirty people who share content on Social media, there is no way you'll miss anything important. In fact, whatever is important, you are certain to get by way of your friends.


And I'd like Lazyfeed to enable these two things at least:

  • Give an RSS feed to my posts and let me do whatever I want to with it- may be I'll autopost it to Tumblr, or use Twitterfeed to post to Twitter at regular intervals (if I share from Lazyfeed to Twitter on realtime, my followers will get about twenty links in one hour! They are sure to hate me for it)
  • Merge all my Bookmarks (Subscriptions to shared content on Lazyfeed) into a single stream. The way it is now, I have to click every one of them individually to view them one after another. Too much work for a lazy man. Fact is, most of us will spend less than a hour on Lazyfeed- it is hateful that there is no way to catch up with what has passed through during the rest of the day. Curated content, stuff by way of shared items, which you can access by timeline, is a way out to ensure that you miss out on nothing.





In case you wonder, I am not quitting Google Reader- I've gotten used to it, and it is too valuable for me in many ways- but I'll look to use Lazyfeed a lot more, especially for the innovative design of the user interface. It is drastically different from Reader.

Do sign up at Lazyfeed, it is likely to change the way we use feed readers. May be everybody has been doing it the wrong way, and that is the reason it has not taken off, and Lazyfeed is on to something momentous: it could bring in the paradigm shift that RSS needs.

May 15, 2010

Would Gandhi Kill for iPad?- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Honestly, I don't know what it is all about, but there is this interesting photo of Gandhiji, and provocative comments about what he'd do if you made a grab for his iPad, or whatever:



"...you can always think about Gandhi, who loves his new iPad and is totally downloading apps like a madman.
And by the way, Gandhi would totally break down your door if you stole something that belonged to him. He would fuck up your shit. Seriously."

May 13, 2010

Dhoni blames IPL parties for T20 crash out- he is right.

I respect Dhoni much more after he showed guts in blaming partying for poor performance in the World Cup T20 Tournament. It is not just that you lose sleep partying night after night after the end of the game- your focus is not what it should be.

"Most of the players were fit and fresh. Players also need to be smart, not only about cricket but about other things going around in the IPL. We have to respect your body and give some time for it to recover because there is more to it than playing matches. Attending parties and travelling takes a toll," Dhoni said after India's five-wicket loss against Sri Lanka on Tuesday that knocked them out of the event."
T20 WC debacle: We must not party too hard, says M S Dhoni




I am no admirer of IPL, as you might know. I think T20 is a terribly skewed format, and by insisting that every team should have four world class performers and four local performers- BCCI has made cricket look silly.

If you are not convinced, this is what Saurav Ganguly said,
"“The IPL is a domestic tournament and the standard is much lower than a world event where you are up against quality batsmen and bowlers. Some of the players have got a lot of opportunities, but have not delivered. They have been around for quite a while and the entire country wants performances from them,” said Ganguly."
- IPL an excuse, players weren’t good enough: Ex-captains
This is the man who qualifies in an Indian XV, chosen by TOI based on T20 performances this year:
TOI’s XV for World T20 based on IPL 3 form
Sachin Tendulkar, Murali Vijay, Sourav Ganguly, Saurabh Tiwary (specialist top order batsmen), Zaheer Khan, Ashok Dinda, Siddharth Trivedi, R Vinay Kumar (seamers), Harbhajan Singh (lone specialist spinner), Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Yuvraj Singh, Yusuf Pathan (batting allrounders), MS Dhoni, Robin Uthappa (wicketkeeper-batsmen)




But then, anyway, Dhoni doesn't party, it seems- he says he never did it during IPL.



Dhoni is good.

May 10, 2010

The Tharoor Bug Gets Jairam Ramesh

Jairam Ramesh seems to get everything wrong, on a single day- he brags that it was he who saved China at the Copenhagen Summit from being isolated... and then what?
We were critical to China at Copenhagen. The Chinese know, in their heart of hearts, that we saved them from isolation,” he said. “It is not an exaggeration to say that the top Chinese leadership acknowledges the Copenhagen spirit, and the cooperation between India and China, as a very positive outcome.
- The Hindu
I don't like him for that- or for this-
"Both the prime minister and the national security advisor (NSA) were gung-ho about preserving the Copenhagen spirit of friendship with China, but it was the home ministry that put up roadblocks with its suspicious attitude"
- DNA India.
The honourable minister is proud of the new formed friendship, and finds that our defence concerns hamper Chinese Industrial Development in India.

May 8, 2010

More on Prahalad Jani...

Hardcore readers of this blog will be aware of Prahalad Jani, the godman who neither eats nor drinks (and it has been revealed, nor defecates nor urinates) and the DRDO research project. We made a snarky post on it.

It looks like we have to eat our words, for an interim report has come out: after fifteen days of close observation, during which time Prahalad Jani did not eat or drink anything- he is perfectly normal, in some aspects, better than normal, too.

Experts baffled as Mataji's medical reports are normal - dnaindia.com:

"Usually, if a person does not urinate for 72 hours, he faces grave chances of kidney failure, say medical practitioners. But Prahalad Jani, affectionately known as Mataji, who claims to have survived without food and water for 65 years, and on whom a team of 30 doctors conducted rigorous medical tests, has not passed stools or urine for 65 years. It has baffled medical experts and scientists."

We are sorry, Baba.

May 7, 2010

Tagxedo - Gallery

This is an interesting site- unfortunately I could not make a tag cloud, but here is a picture from the gallery.

Tagxedo - Gallery


The beauty of this site is that you can shape the cloud to your design.

via Dr. Deb 

Congratulations, Pathak


Internationally acclaimed Indian sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik from Orissa won Gold medal for People's Choice prize at 2nd Moscow World sand sculpture championship 2010, Russia.

No mean achievement, this.


Congratulations, Feasal.

Congratulations.
" The Kashmir Valley erupted in a spontaneous celebration on Thursday after the news that Shah Faesal, a medical graduate from a remote village in Kupwara, had topped this year's Civil Services Examination."


It is worth noting that Faesal's father, a school teacher, was killed by terrorists in 2002.

May 6, 2010

The Daily Tamasha- a Great Indian Blog

My favourite humour blog in India :)

Never disappoints:

 Sachin Quits Twitter As Too Many People Following- The Daily Tamasha

"Sachin had joined the site (famous for celebs telling salivating common-folks, through a series of photographs and 140-character tweets, that how lavishly ignorant a life they lead as compared to fucked-up ignorant of the common man’s) just 2-days ago, apparently by accidentally clicking a “Join Twitter And See My Hot Photos” request by ZOE_oO.  As it happened, the news spread and more than 10-Lakh followers joined forces to pester their “GOD”, forcing @sachin_rt (God’s twitter Avatar) to rethink his move."



Aliens on Earth

I don't know which is more scarier:

The apocalyptic warning of Stephen Hawking that there are aliens, and they are looking for food- and we are it: any close encounter will be the end of life for us as we know it is (Hawking has gained more confidence after this- he has now stated his conviction that time travel will one day be a reality- Helium)

Or this statement from the former Canadian Defence Minister, Paul Hellyer, who after accusing Hawking of scaring mankind about aliens, went one step further, and I don't know why he said this, but he went one step further- "“the reality is that they (aliens) have been visiting earth for decades and probably millennia and have contributed considerably to our knowledge," he is supposed to have said.- The Hindu.

It is worth noting that Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the governor of a Russian Region, has confessed too,  that he had once been kidnapped from his balcony and was interrogated in a space ship, he exchanged ideas with the aliens, but without making use of language.

May 1, 2010

Bharadwaj Rangan on Raavan Songs

Bharadwaj Rangan is disappointed with A.,R.Rahman in Raavan: the music is so complicated that some of the joy of losing oneself in music, it is lost- at least that is what I understood from this review, where he mixes admiration with criticism- do check it out: Head Games

"...after four or five listens to AR Rahman’s soundtrack for Raavan, were about how much head-music there was, and how much he’s completely abandoned the notion of catering to us heart-music lovers, we poor, sentimental fools....With Raavan, I couldn’t shake off the disappointment that, despite all the evident effort, there is no solitary dazzler, no Aaromale, no Rehna tu, no Rehnuma (and that was un film de Anthony D’Souza, for crying out loud)."

Roger Ebert on Film Criticism- its present nature and future.

Roger Ebert has great appreciation for bloggers, and today I found something that should be gold-plated and hung around places where people go, thinking I need to do something intellectual. This is about film criticism, and he is quoting David Bordwell, but it might well apply to every one of us:

"...Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.""
This, to a student who said he wanted to be a film critic.

We blog about anything and everything here, but if we take some time to impress on ourselves the value of developing our own ideas, then, together with our reading and interacting with people and ideas, good stuff might come.

I also felt happy to see that Ebert notes that "...large part of the future of literary English centers on the Indian subcontinent. "

I think Roger Ebert should me made the patron saint of bloggers. He is so generous.