When are you going green?

Of course I don't mean the color, but what the color represents. Going green simply represents shifting towards  environment friendly technology. To say a true fact, it is already late to go green.

Well, the good news is that the world is started concentrating on greener and healthier environment, so should we. While some countries have already started their own strategy to improve green technology, it always is not enough for the damage we have done to our home, earth.

The above graph will help you understand better. So, what is your part in making our attitude towards environment better? If you are asking what you can do to go green, read on....

• ------> The best way to start off with is by using solar energy. It is undoubtedly the most powerful source of energy since the birth of milky way, but how efficiently are we using it? Solar energy is being utilized in almost every field available today. For a regular house, you could install solar water heaters, which are very effective. To go more greener, you could get solar panels that can be hooked up to batteries to provide energy for the house. It might be difficult for the whole house, but you could start with providing solar energy for the inverter system or the back up power system or if you are in a multiphase house, you could replace one phase with the solar energy. Solar panels are varied by specifications so make sure you purchase one that suits you.
• ------> Whenever a product is produced by using green material or recyclable materials it definitely gains popularity in the Internet. Get to know these products and support them by either directly purchasing it or suggesting it to friends. Spreading the awareness is a very good deed.
• ------> Support recycling by making sure that a recyclable waste product goes to a recycling center.
• ------> Do some research on how much green and how much environment friendly a tech or a gadget is before purchasing, this can be done by all of us, right?

The whole world has started thanking earth for its protection it has provided for us all these centuries. We dont want to miss them right? So lets start acting.

Image courtesy: http://s.wsj.net , http://4.bp.blogspot.com

iTunes Error 1601 , 1602 , 1603 FIX

I wished to upgrade my iPhone 4 from iOS 4.0 to 4.1. I downloaded the firmware file and got it all ready to do the upgrade on my Windows XP laptop. I didn't want to upgrade it directly, hence I started with restoring it. When I hit the restore button, iTunes verified the restore file and put the phone into recovery mode ( the phones screen was showing the connect to iTunes logo) and iTunes showed the status message – “Preparing iPhone for restore”. When the phone went into recovery mode, the found new hardware window pepped up on Windows XP. Didn't know what to do, so just left it as it is. Then iTunes showed up the unknown error 1601 message. So, I tried the whole process again, no success, same error. Tried it again on my Windows 7 desktop, same error.
When I checked my device manager, it showed two “Apple Mobile Device(Recovery mode)” devices as unknown device with an exclamation mark. I started searching the net with all the possible keywords. Many fixes showed up stating to reinstall all the iTunes services and changing the USB chord, but none of them helped. After a few trial and errors, error number 1602 showed up once. I knew that all the errors were due to unrecognized hardware. I thought installing the device driver manually would help and started on working on it. My guess was right!!!
Initially it was a failure, but after following the instruction on the following the instruction on the following page : support.apple.com/kb/ts1538 ,it worked .
To fix this error,memorize how to install a driver manually and follow the instructions below:
1.When your phone is in recovery mode, go to the device manger.
2. You will find two apple mobile device drivers in an unknown mode and a USB composite device which will be installed automatically.
3. Disable?Uninstall the apple mobile device drivers.
4. Depending on your system, you might find more than one USB composite devices. One of them is your iPhone, to find which one it is, note down the device ID by checking its properties and then disconnect the phone to find it out.
5. Once your have found out which one it is, right click it and select update driver.
6. Now do the manual software install process and in the list of drivers select the iBoot driver, this will make the phone recognizable by iTunes.

I would suggest you to make the phone go into DFU mode, make iTunes recognize it in the DFU mode and when the restoration process starts, wait until you see the message "Waiting for iPhone" to come on the iTunes status area on the top, and then do this procedure, once you have successfully completed it, the restoration process will continue on.

Note: This error is most common among jailbreaked devices that have AppSync for installing cracked apps on their devices.

Any doubts, feel free to comment……

HTML 5

The Internet is all on rage about HTML 5. Every one might have at least heard this name once. So, what is this and what makes it special, read on to learn.
HTML 5 is the latest standard for webpage markup language. The previous version was HTML 4.01. HTML 5 really packs up large and exciting improvements than the previous standards. The following are the new features that it provides:

• This is one of the two most exciting feature: support for video playback. Previous versions needed a plug-in like flash player to play videos in websites such as youtube and others. HTML 5 doesn't need these plug-ins, it can directly play videos. This feature becomes a plus in cases of smart phones that don't support flash.
• The next and the second most exciting feature is the ability to render 2-D and 3-D graphics on your browser: This feature called canvas and it allows users to interact with graphical elements. This can also lead to better graphics in games.
• It supports Drag and Drop feature that can be used for better data input with a enhanced visual style.
• Another great feature is improved offline storage.
• HTML 5 also supports geotagging, which can be used with GPS devices, such as mobile phones.
• Improved protocols.

Remember, I have only given the most exciting features in HTML 5, there is more to it than what is given here. Coming to browser support, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+,Opera 10+,Google Chrome have already started to support most of the features of HTML 5, where Safari 4 supports most of the features. It looks like Internet Explorer ( current version: 8) needs the next version even to support some of the basic features. If you want to check your browser's score for HTML 5 support, visit www.HTML5test.com .

3D in Games

Wouldnt it be cool if you were able to play games in 3-D. This might seem like a new idea, but this piece of technology has already been around for a while.

We all know about the company called Nvidia ( for those who don't know, it is a major graphics processing unit manufacturer ). This is the company that had released the revolutionary product called the Nvidia 3D vision. There are two modes of 3D vision available to use. One of them is the anaglyphic ( passive ) 3D and the next one is  active 3D. In the anaglyphic 3D mode, there is no need to have any special hardware, just a pair of read-cyan glasses as shown in the picture below is needed.

Since there are two sets of colour filters , they will cancel out the corresponding colours and hence you will see the game in 3D. This technology will be explained in detail later. This mode of 3D gaming is called Nvidia 3D Vision Discover.

The next mode of 3D vision required the use of additional hardware including a special monitor. The below show the 3D vision kit from Nvidia.

This uses the LCD shutter glasses to project 3D. The difference between the previous version and this one is that , the LCD glasses don't use color filters , hence the original color of the image is maintained. More details about the principles of working will be released in the next post.

3D on the Screen

Everyone knows that movies have been released in 3-D, almost all the movies at hollywood are coming in 3-D. We also need to wear special glasses in order to see them in 3-D. Have you ever wondered how this works?

First of all lets consider the human eye and know how it perceives 3-D. We are able to see the difference in depth in real time because of the fact that we have two eyes. Because of viewing two sets of visions from each eye, we notice the depth difference. Try this little experiment. Take your hand and place it in such a way that the palm is facing your face and go towards a wall. Stay a feet away from the wall. Now look at your palm. Now close one of your eyes and look at the palm. This time you will be able to notice the difference in depth between the wall and your hand. It will be easier to focus on both the hand and the wall than with both the eyes open.

All the 3-D technologies work on the same principle. The glasses that you wear make sure that each of your eyes read a different image from the other. The images that you see in one eye will be slightly different from the image that you see in the other eye. We shall see about the various technologies and how they work on another post.

Assembling a PC

My PC was assembled by me at the start of this year, and now it is smooth as a snail, but not as slow as it ! In this article I will to share my experience while assembling this PC. If you want to ignore the situation in which I started building this PC then skip the next paragraph and jump right ahead to the specifications part.

My dad always insisted me to build a new PC for a long time, suddenly by the end of December, I got this urge myself. I referred the net and noted down some of the specifications that would fit into the budget that I fixed and mailed it to dad ( He resides abroad and comes home for the holidays ). All of the parts that I wanted were available at the shop except the graphics card. Thus I had to stick with the card that was available at the shop. To make sure that I would be happy with the card that dad purchased, I began surfing up and down youtube for the performance of the card before dad brought the card to home.

SPECIFICATIONS :

1. Processor : Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 , 2.4 GHz
2. Motherboard : Intel DB33GU motherboard
3. RAM: 4 GB Kingston RAM, 800 Mhz, DDR 2
4. Graphics Card : Zotac Geforece GTS250, with 1GB DDR 3 memory
5. Power supply :  Phoenix 650 Watt
6. Optical Drive : LG

The overall cost came below Rs. 50,000/-, which included the cabinet and the Operating System CD (Windows 7)

ASSEMBLY

STEP 1: Fixing the Power Supply unit in the cabinet. ( Not a big deal )

STEP 2: Assembling the Motherboard. This is where the processor , processor's fan, RAM are all fixed on the motherboard and the board is placed inside the cabinet.

STEP 3: Fixing the Graphics card and the hard drives

STEP 4: Completing all the connections, which include:

• Hard drive - motherboard
• Graphics card - motherboard
• Cabinet START and RESTART buttons - motherboard
• External USB - motherboard
• Cooling fans - motherboard
• optical drive - motherboard
• PSU ( Power Supply Unit ) - hard drive, graphics card, optical drive, motherboard etc.

After this , the cabinet was closed and the operating system (Windows 7) was loaded and the necessary drivers for all the hardware were installed and VOLA! IT IS ALIVE!!!!!!!!

DIFFICULTIES

The only problem was that the CPU cooling fan wasnt placed properly and hence whenever the system was switched ON, it would switch OFF itself after few seconds. This problem was identified by the error message that was displayed whenever the system was restarted. The fan was adjusted and fixed tight on the board and the problem was solved.

PRECAUTIONS

The most necessary precaution is to make sure that your body is static electricity free. This is usually present in your body when you wear shoes or wear woolen cloths. We can drain this static electricity from our body by grounding our self. This can be done by touching the inner surface of the cabinet when it is connected to a switched OFF plug point.

DirectX - Behind Gaming

We all love to play games, we all have games, we all enjoy games, but what makes the games tick? What is the mechanism in which computer gaming works? How come a game works with many versions of an operating system?

The most important component that helps gaming in a Windows PC is DirectX. DirectX is a collective word used for Direct Music, Direct Play, Direct 3D etc. In short it is an Application Programming Interface ( API ),
which is related with multimedia operations. Thus, when a game is created, it has to only be interfaced with Direct X to work.

There are many versions in DirectX. The latest one is DirectX 11, which is present in Windows 7. The most popular one was DirectX 9, the one in Windows XP. DirectX 10 ( the version that was released with Windows Vista )  was not such a big success as it did not have any great advancement over its previous version. Both DirectX 9 and 10 almost look similar. But there are heavy expectations over DirectX 11 as it brings in much more realistic gaming. I will be discussing about directX 11 in the upcoming posts.

iPad

iPad - it is the latest mind blowing gadget from Apple, the same guys who brought us the iPod and iPhone.

Apple iPad

The iPad is nothing but a tablet computer which works on the same OS as the iPhone. Its technical specifications include:

* A 9.7 inch display
* It uses a 1 GHz processor chip
* Flash storage of 16,32 and 64 GB
* Wifi and 3G connectivity along with bluetooth connectivity
* The battery can last long upto 10 hours of usage and also up to one month in standby mode
* It also includes an accelerometer and a digital compass which comes along with the iPhone

Tablet computers are mainly aimed at more portable situations than laptops. The main usage is browsing the internet at a wifi hot spot and also document editing on the go. The iPad is very much similar to the iPhone as it has the same input techniques. The only major difference is going to be the size.But still, this gadget will definitely be an eye catcher.

New Mozilla Firefox 3.6

The latest version of mozilla firefox , version 3.6 is out. It has more enhanced security features than the previous versions. It also allows us to use more personas than before. For those of you who dont know what a persona is, read the last line. The new firefox also uses Gecko 1.9.2 rendering which makes rendering more faster. This version is also available in more than 70 languages. The browser also provides more stability than ever. As usual this version is available for Widnows, Mac and Linux.

To download this version , click here.

Persona:-Persona is like the dress that you can wear for Firefox. It is nothing more than a theme for your Firefox browser.

32-bit and 64-bit OS

The term "Windows 32-bit" is known to all of us, but we never really think of what "32-bit" actually means. Infact there is also another version called "64-bit". A 32-bit operating system uses 32-bits for data transmission, while a 64-bit uses 64. There is only one major difference between both of them. A 32-bit system supports upto a maximum of 4 GB RAM. So, if you have a 32-bit operating system and 4GB of RAM installed you will only be able to use 3.00-3.25GB of RAM since the system reserves 1GB of RAM for PCI devices ( Eg. Graphics cards ). On the other hand a 64-bit oeprating system supports upto 128 GB of RAM. Thus the major differnce is the memroy support. Other issues when compared between both systems are only minor improvments. Also remember that if you are planning to install a 64-bit operating system, make sure that the processor that you have supports the same. Some processors only support 32-bit.

Happy New Year

It has been a very  long time since I last updated my blog. Well, common, every man has his busy days.........but I will continue from now onwards.

Check out the blog for new information regularly..........Happy New Year 2010