Facebook’s New Features Get Animated [VIDEO]

The Taiwanese are at it again! This time the humorists at Next Media Animation (NMA) have turned their computer-animation reenactment efforts to the latest Facebook changes.

NMA takes on the latest updates from the f8 conference including the new Timeline and music features.

As usual, NMA nails it.

Check out some images from the event below.

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A Xobni Alternative for your Microsoft Outlook

Xobni, if you are new, is a popular Microsoft Outlook plugin that lets you know more about the sender of an email. You get to see the sender’s picture, Linked profile, tweets and, if public, their Facebook profile right next to the email message. Xobni probably uses the sender’s name and email address to bring this information and it is quite efficient at that.

If you write the word Inbox backwards, you get Xobni. If you write Evil Xobni backwards, you get Live Inbox – that’s exactly the name of a new Outlook plugin which is showcasing itself as a better alternative to Xobni. The feature set is similar and so is the UI - compare the screenshots of Live Inbox with Xobni below to get an idea.

If you have used Xobni before, you’ll have absolutely no trouble getting to speed with Live Inbox as this new program has lot in common with Xobni.

Once you install the plugin, you need to connect it with your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It then offers a rich profile of the email sender in the sidebar, much like Xobni, and if there are multiple matches, you can pick any of the matching profiles manually.

The bottom half of the Live Inbox sidebar displays a list of email messages and file attachments that you have exchanged with the sender in the past. Xobni does this as well. There’s a unified instant search box to help you quickly find contacts or one of your old emails. The Live Inbox website says that it returns search results “50 times faster than Outlook” though I did not experience that difference in my testing.

Live Inbox is expected to become available for $29.95 though you may use this link to download the free 30-day trial right now. Xobni is available in both free (that’s what I use) and paid edition that costs $9.99 per month.

Live Inbox does mostly work as advertised - I tried it on Microsoft Outlook 2010 running on a Windows 7 machine - and, because of the one-time fee, it may appeal to Xobni Pro users who otherwise have to pay $9.99 per month. If you are using the free version of Xobni, I see no reason for making the switch. That said, I find it amusing that the company, which has only created an almost exact replica of another successful product without much innovation, is still calling their inspiration “evil.”

Here’s an ET Now video where Mahesh Murthy and Sudhir Syal discuss Live Inbox from the funding perspective. The website has no information about the founders but it looks like a product of Instacoll, the same team that worked with Sabeer Bhatia in the past to create Live Documents, an online office suite.

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Microsoft Has Sold 450 Million Copies of Windows 7

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7, its flagship OS, has sold 450 million copies worldwide.

Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft’s Windows division, also announced that Windows 7 is now (finally) being used by more people than Windows XP. Sinofsky made these announcements at the Microsoft Build conference in Anaheim, Calif. Tuesday.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Launches Windows 8 [LIVE]

In addition to announcing 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold, Sinofsky also boasted that 542 million people are now using Windows Live.

While the growth of Windows 7 must be pleasing to Microsoft executives, the big show today is the unveiling of Windows 8. Stay tuned for more on Microsoft’s next-generation operating system.

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A Desktop Search Tool for your USB Drive

You like to carry all your important files and documents on a USB drive but when you plug that drive into another computer, you are unable to search the contents of that external disk through the built-in Windows search as the files have not been indexed yet.

Rather than wait for Windows to index your files for searching, what you may do is carry a desktop search utility in the USB disk itself that knows everything about your existing files and thus you can use search as soon as you plug the drive.

One such utility that you may want to give a try is Dropout – this is a portable Windows search tool that requires no configuration or installation. You just need to copy the Dropout.exe file to your USB disk’s root folder (home directory) and it will let you instantly search all the files in the current directory and those inside sub-folders.

When you first run Dropout, it creates its own search index inside an hidden sub-directory and thus it won’t have to re-index files when you use the USB stick on a different computer. The search index updates itself in an incremental manner whenever you run Dropout next so your new / updated files are automatically included.

And Dropout just doesn’t let search files based on their names or extensions, it even lets you find files based on their content (full text search) just like the real Windows search. Get it!

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Scientists Turn Brain’s Visual Memories into a Mind-Blowing Video

Ever dreamed of recording your dreams and turning them into a video clip? The technology that enables you to do that is near: UC Berkeley scientists figured out a way to turn the way our brains interpret visual stimuli into a video, and the result is amazing.

To be able to do this, the researches used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure the blood flow through brain’s visual cortex. Then, different parts of the brain were divided into volumetric pixels or voxels (the term might be familiar to those who remember early 3D games which were based on voxels instead of polygons which are more commonly used today). Finally, the scientists built a computational model which describes how visual information is mapped into brain activity.

In practice, test subjects viewed some video clips, and their brain activity was recorded by a computer program, which learned how to associate the visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Then, test subjects viewed a second set of clips. The movie reconstruction algorithm was fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, which were used to teach the program how to predict the brain activity evoked by film clips. Finally, the program chose 100 clips which were most similar to the movie the subject had seen, which were merged to create a reconstruction of the original movie.

The result is a video that shows how our brain sees things, and at moments it’s eerily similar to the original imagery.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published in the journal Current Biology.

Recording our dreams and “reading” the minds of coma patients requires a lot of work still, as current technology only enables scientists to interpret brain activity while the test subject is watching a movie. Ultimately, it could be used to decode how our brain processes visual events in everyday life or, perhaps, our dreams.

Check out another video, which shows the movie reconstruction algorithm at work, below. More details about the study can be found here.

[UC Berkeley via Gizmodo]

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10 Unique Creations Made From Computer Hard Drives [PICS]

On this day in 1956, IBM introduced the IBM 305 RAMAC — the first computer with a hard drive. It boasted capacity for less than 5MB of data stored on 50 24-inch disks.

Fast forward to today. The progress achieved in the computer storage market is quite astonishing. Although necessary, storage itself isn’t something that normally gets us excited, but we’ve decided to mark this important anniversary by exploring how people have gotten creative with hard disk drives.

SEE ALSO: Media Format Flops | Vintage Games Console Ads | Vintage Apple Products

From upcylcled drives made into jewelry, to discarded drives transformed into sculptures, we’ve found 10 interesting examples of hard drive creations from all around the world. Take a look through the photo gallery below and let us know in the comments which you like — and why.

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Italian artist Franco Recchia takes apart computers and "breathes new life into their component parts by reusing them to build ingenious skylines." The skyline pictured is Recchia's recycled view of Manhattan.

Made up of five small washers salvaged from old hard drives, this delicate necklace gives storage a second chance.

Cost: $12

This stunning vase can rotate 360-degrees thanks to its unique base, made from the insides of a hard disk drive.

Image courtesy of Jalex Studios

We've seen plenty of hard drive clocks, but this vintage version is special. Its disk platter dates from the early 1960s from a pack used in IBM's 2311 disk drives.

Cost: $129

One of the best DIY HDD projects we've seen, these hard drive wind chimes are a great use of old platters, which apparently make a lovely sound. There's a complete how-to available if you feel inspired.

Image courtesy of Windell Oskay

Staff at the Russian IT store VIST hand-made a range of toys created from old hard drives. Sadly our Russian isn't good enough to determine whether they're for sale or were a special side project.

The amazing Hard Drive Coffee Table features an original 26-inch diameter hard drive platter manufactured by Bryant-Excello back in the late sixties. With creations this stunning, we're almost sad storage has shrunk so much.

Hard drive spacers make up the planetary rings of this unique designer jewelry.

Cost: $38

The 86th Expeditionary Communications Squadron's sys-admin Miguel Rivera made headlines after being featured on Wired for his sculptures made from hard drives. Cars, bikes and even a robot were featured in Rivera's unusual series.

Finally, this example is a little different. Here, the external hard drive is presented as art by Manuel Palou. 5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte is a sculpture that consists of a 1TB hard drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded software, games and books. Interesting, but is it art? Have your say in the comments below.

Image courtesy of VIST

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Friends Can Help Recover Your Facebook Account

There are a couple of simple but important steps you may take to ensure that your Facebook account is always safe and secure from hackers.

For instance, you may associate a phone number to your account and Facebook will send a text message whenever someone logs into your Facebook account from a new location or from another computer. It also helps if you can add an alternate email address to your Facebook account as a backup in case you lose access to the primary email address.

Trusted Friends is one of the other useful security related feature of Facebook that some of us may not be aware of  (video).

You choose any 3-5 friends, who you trust, and Facebook will send them recovery instructions for your account in the worst case scenario where you have forgotten your Facebook password and have also lost access to your email accounts and your mobile phone.

To set up a trusted friends list for your Facebook account, go to your Account Settings –> Security –> Trusted Friends and pick any 3-5 close friends.

If you ever get locked out of our account, Facebook will send recovery codes to all these trusted friends. Next you need to call your friends, collect the codes and submit them to Facebook. After you submit the security codes, you'll have to wait for 24-hours before you can log into Facebook again.

Here’s a quick video detailing how you may specify Trusted Friends in Facebook.

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