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.

December 22nd, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Shooting mosquitoes with lasers

While this is old news, I don’t think many people have heard of this project. Intellectual Ventures (which is an inventions company) is working on ways to fight malaria. While they have plenty of things going on, the one that I find the coolest is a Sci-fi style laser system which can kill mosquitoes (which are malaria carriers).

image Their lab is conducting experiments on identifying mosquitoes flying through the air and then guiding a laser through a computer to hit the mosquito and burn it to oblivion. They are backing up this research with a lot of other information on mosquitoes.

For example, their system differentiates between male and female mosquitoes since the females are the ones that bite humans and transmit malaria. So, the laser only knocks out the female blood suckers.

Malaria claims a lot of lives worldwide every year, and any idea that is working towards solving this problem, no matter how whacky, deserves support. The ultimate goal for this research is to be able to deploy these lasers as a photonic fence which can be used to surround habitations. These fences will be safe for anything other than a female mosquito to pass through.

To read more about the experiments on this topic by Intellectual Ventures, visit the following link: http://intellectualventureslab.com/?tag=malaria.

November 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment

Interesting Links – May 24 08

I have been away a lot and so the posts have been few lately. Here are a few quick links which I find to be very interesting:

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May 24th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interesting Links – Apr 23 08

LinksToday’s links are really varied in terms of their subject topics. A lot has been happening around the Internet and I haven’t got a chance to blog too much in the past few days. Here are some of the more interesting amongst the ones I visited lately:

  • Using Laptops as Earthquake Sensors – This is an article on MIT Technology Review which talks about researchers using data collected for a network of laptops to predict earthquakes. This is possible because a lot of modern laptops have built-in movement sensors to protect hard disk damage.

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April 23rd, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interesting Links – Apr 19 08

Alright, as explained earlier, here’s a list of links that I have been wanting to write about, but haven’t got a chance to. So, read on.

Here are the links for this day:

  • Adding a safety switch to TinyUrl Urls – Digital Inspiration talks about the newest feature of TinyUrl (the popular Url shortening service) which allows you to set it up so that you preview the actual Url that the tinyUrl is pointing to.

Read More …

April 19th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interesting Links – Introduction

Links From today, I am going to start a series of postings called “Interesting Links”. I go through a lot of web sites on the Internet on a typical day and cannot write about all of them. So, for those that I cannot write about, I will start putting the links with short introductions as soon as I have 5-10 links collected.

These will typically be things which I would have liked to write about in detail if I had the time.

April 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment

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