Tricks 2 Trick

Google has released to the public: Mail Goggles. This feature is designed to prevent you from sending stupid e-mails in the small hours, when you’re most likely to be inebriated and at risk of making a complete idiot of yourself. When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email.

And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

If you can solve simple math problems even when under the table, there’s an option to ramp up the difficulty of the questions, but sadly they remain in the mathematical realm and don’t drift into interesting algebra or calculus.

To activate Mail Goggles, go into Gmail’s settings, and turn on Mail Goggles in the “Labs” tab. Then adjust how and when it works in the “General” tab.

Security is becoming more and more important as new viruses and worms (Lovesan Worm, Blaster Worm...etc) keep being unleashed. That's why it's important to make sure your system is protected.Put your system to the test. Here are some great websites that will test your security:


Hackerwhacker.com

GRC

Testmyfirewall

Auditmypc

Image Surfing on the net is not as secure as the average internet user may think. Your identity and what you are doing can be monitored easily. This is especially true for those with Wireless networks, those who browse the internet from their work computer and those that browse dodgy (red flag) websites. The solution is to use an anonymizer when you surf the net.
Anonymous Surfing redirects your web traffic through secure servers, hiding your online identity. Identity thieves, aggressive marketers, hackers and online snoops are prevented from accessing your personal information and viewing your Internet activity.

The Anonymizer (includes a Free Tool to browse any website anonymously)

Surf Secret

Proxy 7

Virtual Browser

Hide IP

Site Tunnel

Surf Anonymous

From reading some of the information on these sites, you may be shocked to realize how little privacy you actually have….even with a Firewall. If you have concerns with identity theft or monitoring of your online browsing without your permission , I suggest you take a look at these sites and decide for yourself.

GAudi is short for Google Audio Indexing, and it’s the latest experiment to be added to the Google Labs. This service lets you do a text search for spoken words in videos of YouTube’s US politicians channels. The functionality was previously already available as part of an iGoogle gadget.

Search videos on Gaudi here


Searching for videos

To find a set of videos, simply type a query in the search box and press the "Search videos" button. The results of your search will appear in the left column. You can refine your search using channel filters, the active filter showing in bold. A channel filter corresponds to one or more YouTube channels. In the context of the US election, you can choose videos from the McCain channel, the Obama channel or from all YouTube political channels. For each result, a thumbnail of the video, its title, the time since it was published, the duration and the number of times the query terms are mentioned (i.e. spoken) in the video is provided. By clicking on a result, the video will be displayed in the right column. If you need to see more results, you can navigate between result pages using the links at the bottom of the left column (previous, next, etc.), just like on most Google Search products.



Watching a video

Once you have selected a video, it will appear on the right side of the screen, in the embedded YouTube player, with the list of mentions.
Google Audio Indexing enhances the YouTube player to display mentions of the query terms as yellow markers on the player timeline. For space reasons, we cannot always display all the mentions on the timeline. The top 10 mentions are displayed as a list under the player.
To read the transcript for a given mention, just mouse over the corresponding yellow marker. To listen to the corresponding audio, just click on the marker: the player will automatically jump to the right time in the video. You can also click on the play button located on the left side of the mention.

Searching inside a video

With Google Audio Indexing, you can also restrict your search to the content of a given video. By default, the "Search inside this video" uses the same query term as the video search.
To search for a different term, just type your query in the text form under the video player and press the "Search within this video" button. The mention results are displayed underneath. The yellow markers on the timeline are updated accordingly and you can access the information just like before, using mouse over.

After two years in development, VLC, the universal media player, has moved from the 0.8.x versions to version 0.9.2. The release, named "Grishenko", is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other operating systems, is available to download . The most visible new feature in the Windows and Linux versions are a new user interface and support for different file formats.

Download VLC 0.9.2 here


The new interface uses Qt4, replacing the previous wxWidgets-based interface as the default interface and allowing for better internationalisation and a richer set of graphical controls.Most of the improvements are to be in VLC's support for different file formats. Media support, with the help of FFMpeg, has been extended to include variants of Flash video codes, the BBC's DIRAC, Real Video, H.264 PAFF (Picture-Adaptive Frame/Field), VC-3, Fraps and M2TS camcorder formats. Audio support has also been extended, with the inclusion of support for Atrac 3 and lossless APE audio, and better support for media metadata. The playlist management has been enhanced, with support for album artwork, live searching and submission support for Last.fm. The playlist is also scriptable, allowing video from YouTube, DailyMotion and Google video to be displayed under script control.

New audio filtering allows for playback at different speeds while maintaining the pitch, while Replay Gain support allows more consistent loudness and a spatializer allows audio to be made more three dimensional. New video filters support colour extraction, sharpening, logo erasing and blue-screen effects. While previous versions of VLC have supported analogue TV devices, now it supports digital TV formats with the addition of DVB support for recievers with BDA drivers on Linux and Windows. Mac users will also find support for the iSight camera as a capture device.

Check out this video featuring VLC 0.9.2


VLC media player 0.9.2 - Grishenko from Antoine Cellerier on Vimeo.