Techtrends

If you are experiencing slowness with your Internet connection you may interest in testing your broadband connection speed. Visit Speedtest, which is a free broadband speed analysis tool with servers located all over the world.

It measures the performance of your broadband connection and presents the download and uploads bandwidth speeds. The tests are performed completely within your web browser over HTTP.

You can choose like your continent – country – state- city – to test broadband speed. It will provide all ISPs connection speed that country or state represent, so you can compare your results with others.

. Read full story .

Soundsnap is a free online sound library and community. People can upload sounds and share them with the world. Browse through the directory by tag or by category and find out required sound for download. The site offering a large collection of free sound stuffs and are of good quality. You can preview sound befor downloading.

The main way that users participate is by submitting sounds and loops. People can also create a small profile that will feature their top personal tags, their email and website. You have the option of commenting on a sound or making it a 'favorite'

In order to download a sound you have to have sound results on your page. You can search for sounds via the search bar at the top, browse by category or browse by tag. On the sound 'teaser' click on the upper right corner and choose between mp3, wav or aif to download.

. Read full story .

The Perry-Castañeda Library, located on the University of Texas-Austin campus. The site also provides links to other site covering maps. Most of the images are JPEG images within the 200K to 300K range; however, some of the images are quite large. Maps are also available as PDF image to download.

. Read full story .

Still in beta stage, the site makes it possible to explore and filter 50 - 500 web pages, images, videos, and blogs in a single display that guides toward relevant info in a structured way. Information most likely to be relevant is placed close the display center

SearchCrystal also offers you a powerful competitive intelligence tool. You can embed it as a Widget on your site or blog to share personalized crystals, or use it to find out what is popular on Wikipedia or use the Search Analytics Toolbox in your browser as a powerful competitive intelligence tool.

For a try and details visit Searchcrystal

. Read full story .

. Read full story .

You can experiment with this online program to create your personal sleep-aid or relaxation tool. The free relaxing music and nature sounds on this website have been carefully chosen for their ability to aid sleep, reduce stress, and provide a relaxing atmosphere for activities such as yoga, tai-chi, and meditation. They provide description about the ability of sound found on this site to reduce stress or promote good sleep.

For example,

1.Rhythmic drumming creates a hypnotic effect to help induce sleep.

2.The sound of the vibraphone is calming, and may reduce stress.

3.The sound of steady, rhythmic ocean waves provides a sensation of relaxation and calm.

4. Rain acts as a white noise machine that masks household noises such as refrigerators, heaters, and creaking floors…and more

They also give some good tips for sound sleep. For example, reading, meditation, yoga, or listening to music, before going to bed and perform this activity in a dimly lit, stress-free environment. A regular routine helps to promote quality sleep.

Have a try at Sound sleeping

. Read full story .

The new Drawing-Interface provides a lot of possibilities. Create a new drawing using a custom document-size. Zoom in up to 300% and drag the Stage with the Hand-Tool. Use Guides for better lay outing. Check the context menu above the Rulers, Stage and Drawing-Pane. Quick navigate with help of keyboard-shortcuts or upload a Background-Picture for Re-Painting.

. Read full story .

Amos latteier, called the “Best Fake Professor in Portland,” and a self-confessed lover of pigeons, made a battery out of 500 pounds of potatoes. Each potato generates about 0.5 volts and 0.2 mA current, he explains. Amos connected groups of potatoes in series to increase voltage, and then connected these groups together in parallel to increase amperage. The entire 500 pound battery generated around 5 volts and 4 mill amperes. He then hauled the battery onto a truck and drove it around town, powering a sound system off it.” Don’t eat potatoes after using them for a battery,” Amos advises.

Visit Amos latteier

Source Digit

. Read full story .

If you visit David Pye’s site, you should be fascinated by the contents. According to him everything here is completely free for the taking. He claims that “There are no pop-ups, no viruses, no webpage redirection and won't be begging for any of your money”!

Following are a few contents from his site. And of course there is lot more.

GoogleDavo- A mini Google earth- where you can type in almost any city and country in the world and see a detailed road map or satellite photo of the city.

Gif animation- Over 15,000, absolutely free animations for your website.

Web graphics - A tad over 29,000 absolutely free graphics for your website.

Desktop wallpaper- A tad over 7,000 (1024x768) wallpapers in 52 categories that you can use to spice up your computer screen background

Font - Over 3,650 assorted true type fonts to help jazz up your DTP, web pages, graphics projects etc.

Play games- Bored with surf in'? Got time to kill? Here are 101 assorted games to play online, and they're all free.

Trivia and Jokes- over 12,000 assorted facts, jokes and trivia.

The list is not ending. Visit his site for a free stuff

. Read full story .

Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles. The site will teach you how to make electronics and electric toys using with common materials found in our junk.

You can build an electric motor, a radio and many more other projects with detailed explanation of “how” and “why”, photos and diagrams that make it easy to understand even for a beginner! Visit the site Scitoys to build scientific toys and teach your child.

. Read full story .

>>Mixercast allows you to mix your photos, videos or sound to create embeddable player to display them. The output can be email to friends, post it directly to your MySpace Blogger or take the embed code to paste it on your own webpage. If you have a lot of images to share this are a fun and easy way to do it.

>>With pre-made templates, it is quite easy to build Mixercast. After uploading your images, drag and drop them were you want to be in. The site will currently allow you to upload from your computer, download pictures from a stock photo site, Flickr, and record a video with your webcam. You can also upload video from YouTube, MySpace.

Visit the site Mixercast

Source downloadsquad

. Read full story .

Pipl is an interesting search engine. You can find your friend with Pipl. For example, there are various reasons to miss your relative, classmates or old flame. Now it is very easy to find them, just enter the first name, last name, country and state in the search box and push the search button, you will get the result if they are, for example, in blog posts, or any where on the web.

Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine. Pipl's query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.

Interesting? Just try pipl at www.pipl.com
. Read full story .

Deraradio is an on demand online radio station. The sites data base includes English, Hindi, and Arabic and Persian music. Music can be select in deferent category like Pop, Film songs etc and there are online dedications, request shows and the popular Derachat. We can hear full length of music here - A hot spot for music buffs. You required Real player to play the music.
www.deraradio.com
. Read full story .

Netvibes announced the launch of Netvibes Universe. Every single Netvibes user will be able to create a personal Netvibes Universe, that is, a Netvibes page that you can build using the content and widgets that you want -- and make it available to the world at large.

Netvibes Universe allows users to create personalized home pages with widgets and publish them for public use. The widgets includes like RSS feeds, weather reports, Flikr Image searches, YouTube video searches, Blog search and a lot more. Publishers now also have the ability to add their own CSS and HTML to pages as well. Users can add public pages or portions of public pages to their own page and stay updated on changes.

Personalized Universe's have already been set-up for a number of popular news site like USA today, CBC news as well as popular musical artists such as Moby, Ben Harper, 50 cent, and Mandy Moore. Start discovering Netvibes Universes now!

. Read full story .

Cranky.com targets online audience in the age group of 50 and above. It is the old mans online stick. It is a search engine made especially for peoples who are pushing 50 and beyond.

The site is launched by Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, the online employment mine; this next venture also seems to be a winning innovation. It is an extension of Eons.com, a website that specializes in 50+ every thing.

Crancy.com is quite a pioneer in customizing a search engine for a specific age group. It has features that perfectly blend with the concept, like only 4-5 results per page for every search term which are displayed in big fonts and the colors are very easy on the eyes. Top 10 search of the day are also given on the home page for instant explorations. This seems to be a great solution for aging eyes who may easily get annoyed with the crowded pages of search results on Google or Yahoo.

Cranky.com has wonderfully inculcated the requirements of this age demographic from the layout of the webpage, to the available option like narrow and expands; with witch you can manipulate the result of the search.

Every single link you see on this webpage has been eased out; it has buttons for further simplification. It also gives the option of blogging for this age groups.

. Read full story .

Go2Web20 is a complete directory of web 2.0 site and services. The service is born around mid 2006 and around 1107 logos as of 15 April, 2007. The directory is laid out visually, with each sites logo in a rectangle. If you move mouse over any rectangle you get a tool tip like pop up that will show you further information about the site. Click on site and more information is displayed in a bottom pane that slide open. You can then choose to visit the site or move to the next one
. Read full story .

Wiredness is an online photo editing tool. It is a free and good service for your basic photo editing requirement. You can import the photos from your computer, from Flickr or from a URL directly.

Editing process is fast; you can easily resize or crop your image, adjust color balance, remove red eye, give photo effect or put some text on your image. Images can be saved in PNG, JPEG, or GIF format to your computer. Currently, it has no support to Picasa or Flickr to upload image but you can host your images to Glowfoto.com or Imageshack.us.

. Read full story .

InstaCalc is a new, refreshingly different calculator. This online calculator follows the web2 tradition and gives you the answer as you type. The calculator is very fast, we will get the answer without any delay or waiting to click a button.

You are not just restricted to numbers; you can use word to represent number. You can create graph, embed the results in your blog, and tag it using del-icio-us.

You can extend your calculation frenzy beyond numbers and start playing around with units.

Have look at – http://instacalc.com

. Read full story .

The world’s largest movie data base IMDb (internet movie data base) is s an online database of information of films, actors, TV shows, video games and production crew personnel. IMDb is updated frequently so we get latest information of movies around the world.

In IMDb you can search by Movie titles, characters, biography, names and more. For example, If you are search for a movie, The Godfather, you will get all details like actors and their biography, release date, director, video clippings, trailers, audio clipping, photographs etc. Just look the image below which shows when search for biography of Kate Winslet.

IMDb is a free site owned by Amazon, which requires a free registration to access complete range of data and activities and can also be search without any account but can’t vote for your favorite movie. More details for IMDb available from -

www.answers.com/topic/internet-movie-database

Visit IMDb

. Read full story .

If your modem (ADSL) connected through USB or NIC (Network Interface Card), there is a trick to gain more speed

This trick creates a special buffer which is in charge of better handling the interrupts between the NIC and the ADSL modem. This buffer properly works on computers with at least 256 MB of RAM.

Firstly get the IRQ for the NIC. Go to Start > Run and type msinfo32.exe which will open the System Information Console. Now go to Hardware Resources > IRQs. In the right panel, you will see all the hardware along with their IRQs. Look for your NIC’s IRQ.

For those using an USB ADSL modem, follow the procedure. Right click on My Computer and select Properties.

Select the Hardware tab and click on device manager. At the bottom of the list you got Universal Serial Bus controllers. Click on it to expand and there you can see USB root hub. Double click on it and go to power management. There you should find the USB ADSL modem along with its IRQ. If it is not located under this USB root hub just get the properties for another until you find it.

Next step is editing the system.ini file. To edit it go to Start > Run and type sysedit.exe. In the newly appeared window, select the System.ini window. Here locate [386enh], place the cursor after it and hit enter. A new blank line will be created. Now type IrqX=4096. The X represents the IRQ you obtained before. Go to file menu and save the new configuration. Restart the computer and you are done.



. Read full story .