Raspberry Pi: A Tiny But Powerful $25 PC, Coming Soon

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Scheduled for public release in January 2012, the foundation plans to release two versions that range from US $25 to $35 . It is intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools.
The design includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, 128 or 256 megabytes (MiB) of memory, intended to run Linux or RISC OS. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for long-term storage.




The final Raspberry Pi will come in two flavors: A $25 version with 128MB of RAM and no network connection and a $35 one with256MB and Ethernet. Both versions will have USB and HDMI ports as well as analog video and audio outputs. It’s driven by a The 1080p video magic is driven by a 700MHz ARM processor, and the whole thing is powered by a 5-volt power supply.

The whole idea behind creating a small, decently powerful computer is to provide something cheap enough that anyone can afford — even kids in developing countries. The key is that it’s also programmable, letting owners hack and modify the 1.4-ounce machine at will. Of course, if someone just wants to use it as cheap machine for everyday Web browsing and email, its ideally suited for that, too.
The site promises to auction off the recent crop of boards before Raspberry Pi goes on sale next month.



Features
The foundation plans to release two models at launch. Model A will have 128 MiB memory, one USB port and no Ethernet controller, and will cost US$25, while model B will contain 256 MiB memory, two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller and will cost US$35. The Raspberry Pi will use the Linux operating system. Debian GNU/Linux, Iceweasel, KOffice and Python are planned to be bundled with the Raspberry Pi.
Specification

WinGrooves is the Best Desktop Player For Grooveshark Music

Lets face it, GrooveShark is pretty cool. Everything is there from popular songs to really great covers of songs, all for free. One inconvenience is needing your browser open all the time.

WinGrooves is the best application available to bring Grooveshark onto your desktop. Take a look and see how it works and why it has the potential to be your default Music Player.

WinGrooves is essentially a browser-free version of the GrooveShark site. If you were to look at them side by side, you will be hard pressed to see any differences. That being said, lets dive into what you can do with WinGrooves.

The difference between the GrooveShark desktop application and WinGrooves is with the GrooveShark app, you need to have Adobe Air installed. If for what ever reason you do not like or want Adobe Air on your PC, WinGrooves is a great app to fill that void.

Layout

If you have been using GrooveShark via a web browser, you will be very familiar with the operation of WinGrooves.  For the noobs, here is the lay of the land.

The left sidebar is the main control area. There are a couple of sections you will want to play around with because you will be using them a lot in the beginning. The first area is My Music.  This is how you will access and interact with your library of songs. There are options to manage all of your music right from the sidebar, including creating and managing playlists and the option to upload music. If you are in the mood to see what others are listening to, you can click Popular and possibly find a new favorite.

The next area is your Playlist. As anyone who has a lot of digital music can tell you, playlists are a must have. They help you separate your songs in what ever way makes sense to you, be it by mood, genre, time period or something else. All that matters is having the perfect pairing of songs that blend together seamlessly.

Scrolling down a bit, you should see a bunch of genres. These are different internet radio stations. These are great for finding new music too. Choosing a genre like indie will play a lot of lesser known groups, while Rock will play everything from Classic Rock to modern songs.

If you’d like to add more, you can do just that by pressing the + . There are currently 26 different genres available in the Stations section.

At the very bottom of the application, you will see the player. This is where all of the songs will be displayed.

Searching for music

The search function is really cool. You don’t really need to know what you are looking for. You can type in keywords or phrases. The search results will show a bunch of songs that will have something to do with what you searched for.

Controlling WinGrooves with Keyboard Shortcuts

Part of what makes WinGrooves great is the customizable hotkeys. By making a hotkey combination to skip songs, pause, hide/show the window or others will make controlling your music much easier than having to open the window each time you want to like a song or skip to the next one.

Uploading your own music

Uploading your own music collection is super easy with WinGrooves. By clicking on the Upload button near the top of the left sidebar, you will see your browser open and you will be whisked away to the GrooveShark site to upload your songs.

Quickly Switch Your Default Browser With Click Of a Button

We have already seen how to set your favorite browser as default on your system. There are some times where you will need to quickly change what browser the links open in. Having to open the desired browser and setting it as your default can be an inconvenience. The folks at the aptly named site, ChangeDefaultBrowser.com made a simple application to solve the problem.

Some companies need to use a specific browser for their web app to work properly or you may want to switch to another browser to test your website or application. Instead of changing the default each time you need to do some work, or suffering through the day using a browser you dislike, you can use this helpful little free application.

Believe it or not, there really isn’t any setup required. If you have more than one browser installed on your Windows computer, you are halfway there. After you download the Change Default Browser application, you simply run the .exe file.

When you get through the setup wizard, you will see all of the browsers installed on your computer listed. It will show the path to the .exe file to start the browser. You are limited to 4 of the most popular browsers. Chrome, Firefox, IE and Opera.

Click the box next to the browser you’d like to be your default. If you have any browsers open, you will need to close them. If you don’t you will see a popup asking you to close them before the changes can be saved.

That’s it.

You can follow the process detailed above to switch to another browser by running the program again.

Why this is useful

There are a many reasons you may need to change your default browser with some regularity. A good example is having a preferred browser for work and a different one for personal use. Many people who are work on the web use applications like Rescue Time to keep an eye on how productive they are. If you are using the same browser to play games on Facebook after you are done working, the results will be skewed.

Another reason is with Windows 8, there are still some applications who like to use IE as the default browser. Adding this simple little application helped aid in making the change 100%. You may get a popup window like this, but you can just choose the browser you’d like from the window.

Customise Your Windows Desktop with Rainmeter

Enter Rainmeter. A tool, or rather a platform, that allows for far more in-depth customisation that can give you more than just some visual satisfaction, but actually some extra scope for productivity right from your desktop.

What Is Rainmeter?

Well Rainmeter is actually a pretty complex set of tools, but put simply, it’s a platform on which many open-source skins can be built and customised for free. A great library of skins is available, and each can give you something different. They can be mixed and matched to your satisfaction, and once downloaded, you are free to modify them to your own perfect tastes, with a varying degree of complexity.

What Can Be Done?

There’s far too many possibilities to possibly go through in a single article, but just to give you a little flavour of the sort of magic which can be achieved by Rainmeter, i’ll go through a couple of my favourites.

One of my ‘must have’ tools on the Mac is an application called iStat, which effectively gives me live information on what’s going on inside my machine. Such things as cpu and memory usage, hard drive space and network activity can all be monitored from the menubar in a neat interface. Rainmeter is capable of giving you all this information and more straight from your desktop with a customisable look and layout.

One other pivotal use of Rainmeter, if you really want to get the most out of it, is to use it for mail notifications. Most notably GMail, you can customise your skin to give you a live preview of the latest emails to arrive in your inbox. Unfortunately, Rainmeter doesn’t have much interactivity, and rather serves almost as a constantly updating image, but it’s enough to let you know when something needs your attention.

Rainmeter also has the capability to pull information from the web, with sources such as Yahoo providing weather reports for your area and giving a live feed on your desktop in as much detail as you desire when it comes to forecast, temperatures and such. It’s not just restricted to weather either, you can grab clocks, calendars etc, yet most of these come as part of the basic skins you get with the initial Rainmeter download.

The skins can also house icons for your favourite apps, to-do lists, calendar events, social feeds from Facebook and Twitter for example, and even photo galleries. It’s a powerful tool, and one that can go as far, or as minimal as you need or just want to play with.

Why Would You Want To Do It?

Cast your mind back to the initial announcements of Windows Phone 7 last year if you can, and you’ll surely remember the phrase ‘glance and go’ coined by Microsoft to highlight how much help it can be to have basic information in front of your eyes, rather than hidden within applications.

Rainmeter offers this similar concept on the desktop, where Microsoft failed to do so in Windows 7. Chances are, if you use your machine for anything more than just browsing the web, you have various places to go to whether locally or on the web in software or websites to check for the latest information. The idea of being able to aggregate a chunk of this info onto your desktop, a space usually occupied by nothing useful or helpful in the slightest, is certainly making good use of spare space.

But ultimately, which ever way I spell it out, it’s a simple concept to grasp. There are various uses of Rainmeter. To make your desktop more beautiful, more informative, and to save you time and effort. The bottom line is, Rainmeter is a great productivity tool potentially, and it’s free, fun and fruitful.

Download The Windows 8 Developer Preview Today

If you are one of the many people who are eager to try out Windows 8, the latest Operating System from Microsoft, you’re in luck. You can now download the Windows 8 developer preview, install it, and give it a whirl right away.

Microsoft has made the downloads available on the Microsoft Dev. Centre. The downloads are available in both 32 and 64-bit versions, as well as a 64-bit version which can be downloaded along with the developer tools.

The developer tools version needs a clean install in the PC, but if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 on your machine, you can keep the accounts, files and settings with the new installation. In case of Windows XP only the accounts and files would be available.

Download Windows Developer Preview:

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64)

DOWNLOAD (4.8 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF

All of the following come on a disk image file (.iso).

• 64-bit Windows Developer Preview
• Windows SDK for Metro style apps
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview
• Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview
• 28 Metro style apps including the BUILD Conference app

Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64)

DOWNLOAD (3.6 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 79DBF235FD49F5C1C8F8C04E24BDE6E1D04DA1E9

Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 64-bit PC.

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86)

DOWNLOAD (2.8 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC

Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 32-bit PC.

System Requirements for Installing Windows 8

Windows Developer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
• Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch

In the next few days you would see a number of torrents that would let you download the Windows 8 ISO. Please verify the Hash against the files listed above – before you install from the downloaded file.

Datawind's Ubislate 7+ is available for all

If students missed out to register Aakash(Ubislate7) tablet, Datawind has launched a new tab to woo them back. Datawind's Ubislate 7+ is an upgraded version of Aakash which will be available in the last week of January.

Intrested buyers can book it in advance by clicking on the 'pre-book' tab available on the website of Aakash. They can also call on a Toll Free No: 1800.180.2180 for more information.

While Aakash was priced at Rs. 2,500 the new version is priced at Rs. 2,900. Ubislate 7+ supports 3200 mAh battery, comes with an operating system of Android 2.3 and enables Wi-Fi and GPRS functionality.

Unlike Aakash (Ubislate7) which is a student version tab, Ubislate 7+ will be available everywhere and to everyone. With the launch of another tablet from Datawind’s stable, the group believes that it is indeed the cheapest tab available worldwide.

Alongside these, the tab comes with lots of accessory options, ranging from car chargers and external antennas to keyboard case. Interestingly, it has 2 USB ports and can also be used as a phone. It also has an option of 3G as it supports an external 3G dongle.

For more details pertaining to its configuration read below:

Hardware

• Processor: Connexant with Graphics accelerator & HD Video processor

• Memory : 256MB RAM / Storage (Internal): 2GB Flash

• Storage (External): 2GB to 32GB Supported

• Peripherals: 2 Standard USB port

• Display and Resolution: 7 display with 800x480 pixel resolution

Software

• OS: Android 2.2

• Document Rendering

• Supported Document formats: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, ODT, ODP

• PDF viewer, Text editor

• Multimedia and Image Display

• Image viewer supported formats: PNG, JPG, BMP and GIF

• Supported audio formats: MP3, AAC, AC3, WAV, WMA

• Supported video formats: MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, FLV

• Communication and Internet

• Web browser - Standards Compliance: xHTML 1.1 compliant, JavaScript 1.8 compliant

• Separate application for online YouTube video

• Safety and other standards compliance

• CE certification / RoHS certification


Click Here to book Ubislte 7

Google Chrome Enabled Web Accelerator

Long ago, Google offered a Windows software called Web Accelerator that was designed to make web pages load faster in your browser.

Among other things, Google Web Accelerator would pre-fetch certain pages in advance in the background - like the top three links on a Google page - and the corresponding pages would thus load instantly as soon as you click on them.Google discontinued the development of Web Accelerator in early 2008 but some of that functionality has just been added to Google Chrome with Instant Pages.

Instant Pages

Google hasgotten much better at predicting what we are looking for - you know howaccurate Google Instant and Google Suggest are – and with Instant Pages, theyprefetch the links on a search page that you are most likely to click and makesthem available in the background. If you happen to click on one of these links,the pages would load with the blink of an eye.

You cancurrently test Instant Pages on Google.com using the dev version ofGoogle Chrome but going forward, the functionality can be extended to othersites as well.Thefollowing video compares the speed of loading web pages with and withoutInstant Pages.