k_nitin_r
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Posts posted by k_nitin_r
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Has anyone seen the new 2014 Toyota Yaris sedan? With the existing Toyota Yaris design that is on sale, they have what looks like a cut-price model just as the Nissan Tiida, but for Nissan, the Tiida is their entry level model so they have been raking in the sales while Toyota has not been doing too well with their Yaris models. The new look and lower price should help Toyota bring back customers to their stores. The car doesn't look like a cut-price model any more and bears the front grille of the Avalon and Camry, and also the 2013 Corolla. The 1.5-litre engine of the Toyota Yaris makes it feel less underpowered. The Yaris still has a 4-speed automatic transmission, but that's not much to complain about considering the price at which the new Yaris is offered.
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Next year, we'll probably be seeing the return of fan-less computing so if you can hold out till July next year, you'll be able to get a computer with no moving parts - a solid state disk drive instead of a conventional hard disk drive, and a processor that does not require a fan. If you are planning on getting a desktop, you can probably swap out the power unit for a fanless unit too, though the all-in-one units have laptop-like power bricks too.
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What you need is a Canon Eos camera. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg, but you can get Eos cameras that can keep taking pictures while you have your finger pushing down the button with a configurable delay running from ten photographs in a second to two photographs in a second. They let you shoot the American way - at least that's how Sean Connery described it in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Keep shooting all over the place till you get what you want.Photographing black dogs requires brighter light to make sure that you are able to capture the detail in the photograph. You could apply something to make their coats shine if you do not have enough light, or you could set your camera to use longer exposures or higher ISO settings. Higher ISO settings almost always cause grains in the photographs, which is why I find it surprising to see cameras providing very high ISO settings. With longer exposures, you would need the dogs to stay still to avoid blurry shots. It's a three-way triangle with light on one end, ISO settings on the second, and exposure length on the third, so you have to balance the three to get the perfect shot.What you are experiencing with photographs of the white dogs is white balance. White colors can either be balanced toward yellow or toward blue. Most people prefer the yellowish colors because they create softer tones. There's even a sepia camera filter for creating yellow shots. The camera would have a setting to change the white balance to reduce the yellowish color and make it seem like a more natural white. -
Whenever I had to get a set of tyres, I would drive to a street with automotive accessory stores right from one of the street to the other and there are three consecutive tyre stores owned by the same individual but sellin different brands of tyres - one sold Bridgestone, the other had Michellin, and yet another had Apollo. They actually needed the space because they provided wheel balancing services and their staff is quite sluggish. They would have been able to make do with lesser space if they managed to train and motivate their staff to get the job done sooner. When buying tyres, I always manage to get Bridgestone to drive on rough roads. Apparently, Michellin makes their tyres of a compound that provides better grip but their tyres have thinner sidewalls when compared to Bridgestone so if you were to drive on roads that seem like they are built for SUVs instead of sedans, you ought to get a set of Bridgestone tyres. Common tyres sizes are for 13, 14, and 15 inch rims. Many cars are sold in different parts of the world with one size larger rim sizes as the top-end variant so it is possible to fit a rim and tyre that is a size larger than that used on the base variant, depending on whether the vehicle was bought.The recommended approach is to replace tyres in pairs so you can get both front tyres with the same level of wear and use the old front tyres for the rear. Some people question the convention wisdom and suggest using the newer tyres on the rear instead, but having the wheels used for steering continue to function was the intended goal. The wisdom of newer rear tyres comes from the specific scenario when cornering on ice or slippery roads but what's the likelihood of a tyre bursting at that exact moment? Most of the driving is on straight roads and having the front tyres intact would help avoid spinning off the road. -
I think I know what you are talking about. If I were to visit Google.com, then go to Yahoo.com, and end up on Bing.com, I used to be able to click on a dropdown next to the back button to go directly from Bing.com to Google.com without going to Yahoo.com. They still have that feature, but it is now operated by holding the mouse button down on the back button for about a second for the dropdown list to appear. It's a context menu invoked by a long mouse down operation. They wanted to save a few pixels so they decided to change the way that it works. I'm pretty sure they got the idea from observing Apple and Android devices where you have to hold your finger down to get a context menu.
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The time this thread was created was when Tata Motors (the Indian folks who own Jaguar and Land Rover) mentioned about their trials with the Tata Nano being powered by compressed air instead of by an internal combustion engine. They never really went about commercializing it, probably because carrying a tank of compressed air means that you would have a dwindling power source. Sure, the pressure gauge would read at a few hundred psi but when the tank is half-empty, the car would struggle to carry to loads that it did when it was full. Think of a family being able to get to the market only to find on half-way back that they would have to toss out their shopping bags to be able to get home. (I'm sure what they decided to put into the car is nothing like this and they'd already have thought about it when they went to trials because of the marvels of mechanical engineering, but for a layman, this is one of the thoughts that comes to mind when thinking about a vehicle powered by compressed air).Recently, Tata Motors did announce the sale of the Tata Nano that would be powered by both petrol and compressed natural gas. By the way, for a car that small, guess where the compressed natural gas tank is - that's right, it's under the passenger seat. It reminds me of the old days when cars were engineered to have the fuel tank located away from the passenger cabin rather than right between the knees of the passengers.PS: The Suzuki Eeco has the engine located under the front passenger seat. Just a fun fact for people who have a fear of being around internal combustion engines or anything to do with fire :-P -
I've been looking for a solution to get half a dozen old laptops to do duty as hosts for a virtual machine because they have too little RAM (4GB max, which is the minimum requirement for the app, but it's quite slow) to run an enterprise application on their own. I looked around and the only solution for combining the RAM of host computers to run a single virtual machine is for Unix/Linux only and requires Infiniband to hook up the computers together through low-latency links. Sounds fair enough, but Infiniband is only available for server-grade systems and costs much much more than a new tower server loaded with memory would cost. Virtualization can only cut down larger systems to smaller systems and not the other way around, sadly.
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If you are looking for a laptop-tablet-convertible, Toshiba and Asus have been building innovative products. Lenovo has the Ideapad Yoga and the cheaper Ideapad Flex, and they take a different approach to the laptop-tablet-conversion by simply having the keyboard flip over (the Flex doesn't do this all the way - it simply stays up as a 'tent' or has the keyboard act as a stand; it's they way of positioning it as a cheaper variant and preventing it from cannibalizing the sales of the Ideapad Yoga). These convertible units cost only a slightly more than the average laptop so why stick with just a regular laptop with a screen and keyboard?
PS: Does anyone remember the Asus AIO Transformer desktop-tablet convertible? That would convert into an 18" tablet! Just perfect for folks who need to read PDFs and find those tablet screens too tiny to read documents.
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Kolkata, a city in the North-East of India, just banned bicycles because the were causing traffic congestion. I don't blame them - the folks riding bicycles are careless and are quick to start up a brawl in the hopes of getting paid compensation for no damage at all. Often, the accidents are intentional with the greed of making extra cash off the motor vehicle owners.On the flip side, requiring everyone to own a motor vehicle even for a short trip is like asking people for more smog in an already polluted city. Kolkata has a lot of old taxis, many with rust flaking off the doors, so one can imagine the pollution they must be causing by having the city keep them on the streets. There's another small town a few hours from Kolkata where motor vehicles are discouraged and all the locals have bicycles or use boats instead (not that the boats use clean-burning engines, but they are used to transport many more people). -
Cooking seems a whole lot of fun when you see Yan cooking. He had an old cooking show in the 90s and he would always use the tag line, "Yan Can Cook, So Can You." The all-purpose Chinese knives that he uses are a kind of a multi-purpose thing - you can use them for chopping, and you can use them sideways to smack down on the cloves of garlic. Most cooks have such skill with the knife that you always wonder how they manage to do it. I've barely cooked a dozen meals because the seasoning that I add is a hit-or-miss.In recent years, I haven't looked at a recipe book. Pretty much everything is available as a YouTube video and if there isn't, well there's an opportunity to cook something up and put up a video on YouTube. -
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Howdy demonboy!
Long time, no see. I haven't been on the forum much since last month. I've been trying to catch up with technology and it just keeps getting ever more elusive. Things are getting a whole lot cheaper though. With the new Intel Haswell processors around, the older computers are being sold at a clearance. No, I didn't buy anything because I didn't find what I was looking for, but seeing a 6-month-old gaming-class laptop for $700 was quite tempting. Not that I plan on playing games, but they come with enough memory to run 2 virtual machines and have a hard drive RAID setup with high performance drives.
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That wreck ended my career as a cab driver.
After having to give up driving a cab with a major accident, you sure are in the best of health, managing to tend to the plants, and look after the pets. Some of the youngsters who I know that are still in their twenties don't get as much physical activity as you do.
I have been looking into the tech that goes into premium cars (the ones costing over $100,000), and they have a lot in terms of safety that we've been missing out on. When you start thinking about the cheaper stuff, there's the parking sensors, rear view camera, and adaptive cruise control that has been making its way into Ford vehicles. The Chevrolet Impala features blindspot monitoring, and lane departure warning, while still costing under $30,000. Padding along the doors is something that the cheaper cars don't really consider - if somebody bumps his or her head, such as during a sudden maneuver, that could cause an injury and adding padding is something that the cheaper manufacturers ought to do too. The really expensive stuff comes in the form of an additional inch of steel reinforcement of the passenger compartment, the use of a transparent compound instead of glass that can prevent any metal shards from entering the passenger area. Back in the early days, we had 2-point seat belts, which were then replaced by 3-point seat belts, but for greater safety, there's the 4-point 'safety harness' (which they don't want to call a seat belt any more) which fastens a passenger into the seat like the child seats or booster seats do for kids. Reinforcements around the fuel tank and compressed air tanks to keep water out in case the vehicle gets tossed off a bridge go further in passenger safety and are probably if the routes that the vehicles are expected to travel on demand it. When I heard that statement, I started to wonder if they actually would consider buying a different car to travel on a different route. Having one car for the city and one car for the highway is hard enough to find parking for, let alone one for each adult member of the family.
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If you are like me, a regular average Joe-Schmoe with a bunch of laptops networked together, then then only way you are sharing files between the computers is with Windows Shared folders (okay, for the technically inclined, it's "SMB shared folders"). Well, some people may be using FTP instead but that and SMB are pretty much it.
For folks who can afford to shell out cash for some serious hardware or get to salvage the old equipment from server rooms and network closets, iSCSI storage is one really cool way to get files across computers. iSCSI network attached storage devices act as block-level shared devices unlike SMB shared folders which are simply file-level shared resources. What this means is that you can access the disk, format it, re-partition it, and do pretty much anything that you would do with the disk if it were attached to your computer. You get to have your files in-sync across computers because although you are accessing them from different locations, they are essentially the same files (just like with SMB or FTP, but this is better integrated). Linux can share disk devices as raw storage using the iscsitarget package.
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sheepdog,
I seem to have been missing out on all the action in this thread. Reading sounds like you have excellent material to start working on a book, with robbers, arsonists, and trailers.The fire department is demanding $350 for looking at and certifying a burned down trailer? Oh, okay, you mean the volunteer fire fighters. That's different. The most you can do is file a lawsuit for arson, if you can find any evidence that the trailer was intentionally burned down, but then again they might just turn around and say that the trailer was never meant to be a place for people to stay.BTW, how are the water supply, sewage, and electricity for the trailer hooked up? Is there anything that you can salvage out of the burned trailer? I would come over to lend you a hand with trying to rebuild the trailer, or turn it into a shed, but hopping over international borders gets complicated - they just don't appreciate hobbyists catching a 14-hour flight to work on something, make a YouTube video out of it, and encourage other folk to do more DIY. -
A lot of what we think of as a computer is present in the cars of today. There is an on-screen keypad available with the GPS navigation systems, some vehicles have a trackball-like mouse instead of a touch screen (the Lexus CT200h has one). There's a hard disk drive that stores the maps for the GPS as well as the GPS software itself. Android or a similar touch-interface-friendly operating system is typically included as well. There are after market kits that can install a Windows PC in the dash, though the resolution would be too low and the touch interface on a small screen would be difficult to use in Windows.
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Hi!If you are out looking for a new computer, you should get yourself a Windows 8 computer because the interface is here to stay. It is actually pretty good though you have to remind yourself that the Start Menu is now the Home Screen (or at least that's what I like to call it). You could launch applications by clicking on them in the home screen just as you could with the start menu. The difference is that the home screen gives you a lot of information from applications that are not running - they can tell you the temperature, the stock prices, items on your To-Do list, and the news. The old start menu wasn't even close to being able to do that - the nearest thing we had was gadgets in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but Microsoft decided to discontinue support for gadgets. They always get rid of all the cool stuff.You will be able to use most of your old software if it ran on Windows Vista or Windows 7 (make sure it's regular Windows 8 and not "Windows 8 RT"; the RT edition is for smartphone-like devices). I still use the Windows Vista display driver on Windows 8 because my laptop manufacturer decided to not support Windows 7 or Windows 8. You may have to use a newer version of MS Office on Windows 8 (Office 2013 works; I'm not sure if Office 2010 would work; anything older is going to be a write-off).The touch interface is great for working with the Windows 8 home screen, and for some apps that are built for Windows 8 (not too many; it's just the phone-like apps). Instead of an all-in-one, I would choose a laptop because those all-in-one screens are huge, most often with 23" or larger displays. Back in the 90s, we had televisions that were larger than 21" and computer monitors that were about 14"/15". -
Hi!If you can try to connect the printer directly to your computer and give it a go, and check if there are any warning LEDs on the printer indicating that it is out-of-paper or out-of-ink. I've had a couple of printers tell me that they are out of paper if they don't have at least 30 sheets of paper in the paper feeder. It's probably just a design defect that the manufacturer does not want to admit, but it exists no matter what they would want to say.To get the printer running, the NAS would have to detect the printer. Then, you would attempt to connect to the printer over the network at which point the computer gets the drivers installed automatically from the network (though sometimes you have to do it manually). In either case, if the NAS says the printer is connected and the computer says it is able to 'see' the printer over the network and view the print queue status, that's a first step. Try to print some text entered into Notepad to check if the printer responds (some printers have issues printing images).The IP address of the NAS is used to connect to the printer. If you are accessing the NAS as a shared resource in Windows, you should be able to get the name of the printer along with the names of any shared folders. Double-click on the printer to view the print queue. The printer does not have a separate IP address because it is simply plugged into the USB port of the NAS. -
Gosh where is everybody? This post has been up for a day and a half and no replys? That sucks!
I miss the good old days when this board was really hopping busy and you could get all kinds of information fast and easy.
With the new one-domain-per-member-per-year rule for MyCENTs, most of my websites have been deactivated so I've been hanging out on FaceBook, WhatsApp, and Google Hangouts, and that's one way to see all your time vanish. Back in the old days, I used to look for stuff to put onto my blog and visit the forum often to post. I guess many other folk who were here for their websites were bitten by the new rule too.
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Hi!The Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 works in one of 2 modes - there is the tablet mode, which Microsoft used to call the Metro User Interface mode but after some trademark battle had to call it the Modern User Interface, and there is the Desktop mode.If you open Internet Explorer 10 in desktop mode, you get the regular Internet Explorer window with the address bar on top. If you open Internet Explorer 10 in the Modern user interface, you would get the address bar at the bottom and a weird looking user interface if it is the first time that you are using Windows 8. Also, if you install a web browser like Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, or Opera, and you make one of those your default browser, your Internet Explorer would lose the ability to open in the Modern user interface meaning that Microsoft insists that you set Internet Explorer as your default web browser. I'm surprised this has not got people picking up their pitch forks and demanding that they be allowed to use the Modern user interface mode of Internet Explorer - perhaps not too many people use it?It takes a while to get used to Windows 8, but once you do, you will not want to go back. -
the house is quiet, I am too tired from a hard day yesterday so it's a perfect time for posting here.
...and it is also a perfect time to watch some episodes of Buffy, like you always wanted to. Or was it Charmed? It's either one or the other, but it is bound to get you hooked and you will want to watch the whole series after you have watched the first couple of episodes. Prison Break is another series that will have you wondering about what is going to happen next, but I'm guessing you have already watched it. Prison Break had a greater appeal because the protagonist is a male rather than a female, as is the case with the other two series.
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I recieved my bill for my web site yesterday, which was August 2. I was just wndering about the change of due date.
I have been getting my web hosting invoices and payment reminders every year, just as I have been receiving them all along. I didn't notice a change of due date, though there is a new policy on domain name registration - you can only purchase one domain name registration per year with MyCENTs and the rest of the domain names have to be paid for with real cash (or equivalent). Apart from that, I did not really notice any change.
forget about Velma
Deleted. Velma who?
They say that great warriors are meant to be remembered, and not forgotten, such that they serve as inspiration to future generations to come. With each fallen warrior comes another to take his/her place, and greatness shall once again be restored.
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Star wars, the whole first trilogy!! this morning!!hehehe:shock:
I watched all six movies from the Star Wars series last month, and it seems to make more sense to me when I watch all six of them in order. The last time, I watched them in the order in which they were released and with several months to a few years between episodes, so I never could really figure out what the story backdrop was, though I was familiar with the characters from the previous films that I had watched.BTW, I think there are some spinoffs of the Star Wars series too, or at least I remember reading about them. Some of the characters got to have their own movie, just like Wolverine got to have his movie as a spinoff from the X-Men series. Among the more popular spinoffs among television series is the Angel series that branched off from Buffy The Vampire slayer. A lot of people who I got to watch Buffy were totally freaked out after watching the first episode and decided that they were not going to watch it any more - apparently, it gave them nightmares, and we didn't even watch it on a large screen home theatre with surround sound... all we had was a portable DVD player and a DVD pack that somebody thought would make a great present (which it did, considering that Buffy was all the rage back then). -
The speech recognition software included with Windows 7 and Windows Vista is pretty much available to you at no cost since you bought Windows (either along with your computer as pre-installed software, or as an off-the-shelf add on, or perhaps even through an MSDN subscription or one of the free software give-away plans that Microsoft has). However, I have not been able to get it to work right. I ran the speech recognition software trainer and it still does not recognize most of what I say for the most part. It gets a word or two right, but that is what the old voice recognition software could do too, so I am rather unimpressed at how it works.There's another software named Dragon SimplySpeaking that I tried in the past and I did not have much luck with it either, but it did seem to have an all-voice interface to correct it and it could learn from its errors. I have not really had a chance to use one of the newer versions but unless I get to use something that works with a good deal of accuracy, I'm not placing any bets on speech-to-text software. The other way round, that is text-to-speech, typically sounds very monotonic and robotic and unnatural to hear. It's also quite distracting and sometimes annoying, especially when it is used to provide the narration for something like a Powerpoint presentation or a storyline.For now, I guess I'll just have to do things the old fashioned way. -
mycents updated today
More cents for my piggy bank! :-)
BTW, would it be possible to have a market place on the forums where members can sell services and products - perhaps something like photographs, software, and maybe even T-shirts and electronics - in exchange for MyCENTs, or would that turn into a whole government-regulatory affairs deal for money laundering? (speaking of "money laundering", I often wondered why they call it that... perhaps early money laundering efforts began in a laundry?).
Green It: A Measure To Preserve The Environment
in Science and Technology
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