Online Observations

Amazing drawings of fantasy lands

I always love to post about artistic and creative work that I encounter on the Internet, and here’s another such post. The artist is a Russian named Ksenia, and I encountered her work on Deviant Art. (I am making an assumption that Ksenia is a girl since searching that name on Google turns up a Wikipedia article about a Russian beauty queen). She draws landscape and architecture of places that you would have seen in movies such as Lord of the Rings. Below are some samples of her work, please visit her gallery on Deviant Art for more.

If you liked them, for some of them you can even order prints from Deviant Art.

Google Dashboard is just too good

Over the years, Google has entered our lives more and more (to some this is scary, to others like me, its great). We use Gmail, Orkut, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Google Docs, Calendar, and many more services. All of these services are accessed using one Google account that you have. So, it would only make sense that you should be able to configure, monitor, and access all these services from one single place. Till recently, this was not the case, but over a month ago, Google launched Google Dashboard. Yes, this is a place where you can doo all those things that I just talked about from one single place.

The Dashboard provides access to over 20 services. Not only can you configure the services from the single place, but it also shows you information about the service right there on the dashboard. For instance, for Gmail, it shows you how many emails, drafts, sent mail, chat, etc. do you have in your account and when the most recent one happened. Or for Google Docs it would show you how many documents are there in your account, and how many have been shared with you by others. There is all this data and much more.

Here’s a video that Google put up when it announced this feature on their official blog:

 

The Google Dashboard is part of the Data Liberation effort from Google.

Connect your camera to the Internet

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Eye-Fi. All opinions are 100% mine.

I have always been a fan of the Eye-Fi product. Let me first describe what this gadget is all about. We all have digital cameras these days, and each of these cameras uses a memory card. The Eye-Fi card is a wireless enabled memory card. It basically converts your camera into a wifi device, which can connect to your computer or to the Internet wirelessly through a wifi Internet connection. I could go on and on, but probably the best way to explain what this card does is to show you a video of how it works. Take a look at the video below:

 

Now that you understand, imagine how useful this can be. I am always misplacing my USB card reader, and looking around for it whenever I need to transfer photos. With an Eye-Fi, you don’t need a card reader anymore. Actually, there are a lot more advantages than this. One of the biggest advantages of modern camera phones (such as the iPhone) is the ability to take a photo and upload it seamlessly to the Internet for instant sharing. The biggest drawback is that a camera phone usually takes poor photos. With an Eye-Fi card, you can take your photos from your camera which is good at taking photos, and then upload the photo to the Internet seamlessly from your camera itself.

The card comes with a software which you can install on your computer to configure how you want the card to work. It allows you to setup automatic backups and organization of your photos.

With the Eye-Fi card you should be able to avoid all the nagging reminders from friends and family for sharing your photos, simply because it becomes so effortless to do it. The Eye-Fi is only available in the SD/SDHC format, and that is probably the only bad thing about it.

A great place to see which iPhone App to buy

The iPhone is all about great user experience. And one of the things that makes it great is all the cool and useful applications that you can download for free or for payment. The Apple App Store now boasts of over 100,000 applications – so it is almost a certainty that you will find what you are looking for (whether its an app that you need for some work or you just want to have some fun). But, here’s the big problem – its a certainty that you will find the app that you are looking for, but how do you even begin searching in a list of 100,000. Here’s where a website such as AppVee comes in handy.

AppVee is the definitive source (as they say) for iPhone application reviews. It’s a great place to read about the top apps for a particular type of application (for example, the Top Business Apps and new business apps are on this page, and here’s the page for the best and new photography apps). The website carries out daily reviews. They have a great blog and a forum. You can follow them on Twitter to stay updated with their reviews.

One of the reviewers on AppVee, recently guest posted an article on TechCrunch about the Best iPhone Apps of 2009.

I like AppVee overall for the content that they provide, although I think they can possible improve how information is accessed on their website. So, you may have to spend some time before you figure out how to get to the information that you need, but once you do that, the information is fairly useful.

A great place online for all your tools and utilities needs

If you are a person who has to provide IT support to your friends and family, then I have found just the thing for you, but before that, answer this question – how many times have you asked a family member to go download AVG and have them come back to you asking where to download it from? Yes, I though so. Well the person who has put together this site (hang on, I will reveal the name in a second) has had an even worse experience. His family member accidentally downloaded spyware when he asked her to AVG from FileHippo.

So, he decided that he had had enough, and he put together a site where he will start storing all utilities that you would ever need, so that he can provide safe links to his family and friends for downloading software. And he made it public so that others can benefit from this store as well. Allow me to introduce MSunderground – an add free repository of useful tools and utilities (and here’s the link to the incident with his family member).

This is the “promise” of the site: We want to provide the easiest means possible for people to get the software they need. Without ads, flashy banners, and built in adware.

And he intends to be free forever for this service. But if it becomes popular, all these files have to be stored somewhere, and all the bandwidth has to be paid for, and so he has a link where if you like, you can donate to the cause. I hope many people donate to him so that he can meet the cost of hosting and bandwidth for this great site.

And I wish that this site becomes larger than all those stupid money-grubbing download sites.

A little bit of OS humor

I came upon this nice and funny image below about how various OS fanboys see their OS as compared to other OSes. It is not clear who is the owner of this to me, since it appears on so many sites, so I will just give the attribution to the place where I first saw it, which is the blog of Joey Devilla. Here’s the image:

You can head over to his blog for other funny stuff (search for the funny tag), or for some techie stuff, which is also spread throughout his blog.

Seriously awesome and cool drinks

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Jones Soda. All opinions are 100% mine.

Although this is a sponsored post (disclaimer above), this is one of those things that I would have blogged about anyway had I got to know about it earlier. Jones soda, which allows you to customize the packaging of the soda that it markets, has come out with a Dungeons and Dragons series of their soda bottles. Take a look at the soda bottle to the left, wouldn’t you like to get your hands on one of these bottles? I would love to see them in my refrigerator.

And looking cool is not the only thing that Dungeons and Dragons Jones Soda is good about. Take a look at the flavors: Potion of Healing, Sneak Attack, Dwarven Draught, Illithid Brain Juice, Bigby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer, and Eldritch Blast. Can you even imagine what these taste like?

Let me try – Sneak Attack will be a drink which starts off mild and you would think, hmm.. this doesn’t taste like anything, but then suddenly as you are thinking that, comes and after taste that takes your breath away, and you want more… heh heh, probably not, but it would be cool if these drinks were something like this – magical.

Anyway, I think they are still very cool, and the names are perfect. This set of bottles is perfect for gamers and fans of the genre. As I said, I would love to have some of these in my refrigerator. Each flavor has a bottle which is potentially a collector’s item, with distinct graphics on the labels. Follow that link to check out each one of them.

If anyone’s tried any of these flavors, let us know in comments what they taste like. If not, then try to guess what each one tastes like (not wild guesses like I did, on second thought, go crazy). Anyway, if nothing else just visit that site to look at the really cool bottles, and have a great day.