Apple unveils their new Intel Mac Mini and more

We all know that Apple has been switching over to Intel chips instead of PowerPC chips, and now they are another step forward towards their goal. They've successfully managed to get their Mac Mini (well Intel ones) out and about in Apple Stores and online today. They are promising that it is going to be 4 times more faster than it used to be, which is good news for potential customers like me. Since last year I seriously wanted to get a Mac (iBook or Mac Mini) for myself but then I heard about Apple switching to Intel, which would definately lead to something better. And I apparently was right...

The Mac Mini comes with 1.5 Intel Core Solo or 1.66 Intel Core duo, for only 699 ($599 US) along with that you can get 60 or 80 Gb of Hard Drive space and 512 MB. But the most interesting feature has got to be the 10/000/1000 Ethernet (and yes that 000 is not a typo by me, however it is a typo by Apple, however it has be changed to 100 today) You can take a look at this picture if you don't know what I mean! The only thing that bugged me was the graphics, it's only 64 MB shared, however Mac Mini's weren't designed to play a lot of games and all that (looking at the size or hard drives)

They also released something called the iPod Hi-Fi which is like a sterio for iPods (I believe this way they can sell the iPods and the stereos!) I think Apple might be a little late on the stereo because there are a lot of other competitors out there already, and many might have made their purchases from companies like Bose and so on.

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Photography is hard work...

Is photography hard work? Well, I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that I'm going to find out real soon. Photography has certain rules that we need to follow to make the pictures that we take even better. These rules are like rules when you follow whenever you do a website and so on, and some rules are pretty basic, however it is important to follow each and every one of them properly... So here are some thing that I found on Photoinf.com. Make sure you remember for the next time you are going to take pictures (these can be handy when you are taking pictures)

1. The rule of thirds- This is one of the key rules that many professional photographers use (or that's what I've been told). This is also helpful while doing graphic designing (that's why pro graphic designers say that it's always better to set guides before you start).
In this rule all you do is make sure the focus point that you are trying to capture is in the center of any of the thirds If you wan't illustrations of what I mean you can look through this page... I think they did an excellent job in explaining what needs to be done.
This way your eyes always follow the important points that are intended to be looked at (you get the idea right...). Plus it gives differentiates the amateur photographs from the photographs that professionals take.

2. Keep it simple- Keeping it simple is apparently called simplicity by the pro's. But hey, I'm not a pro, so I'll stick to using things that stick to my mind... In this basic rule all you do is keep unnecessary stuff out of the picture... Hence I call it keep it simple.
If you have too many things in one picture, it loses the effect. You can go through this page for more examples.
Here's a simple example: Instead of taking picture of your family in front of some tourist destination, take a picture (or take another picture if you wish) of the monument (I'll use 'monument' as an example here) on it's own, keeping in mind the rule of thirds. This way your picture is going to come out better. Besides you don't need a picture of your family... You see them everyday anyways.

3. Balance and Composition- This rule might be confusing, but all you need to understand is that you are looking of something interesting in the picture, that is going to interest somebody who is looking at your picture (make sure it isn't boring). And you make this interesting there are some thing that you can do, such as set it up in a different way (or abstract way) or set it up in a geometrical shape and so on. Just pay this page a visit and before you know it you'll have a complete understanding of this concept.

4. diagonal Lines and Discussion-Whenever you take a picture try to make sure that you're thing (or person) that you are trying to capture, is diagonal, which basically means that you are trying to make the viewers eyes going the way the picture is angled. Simple eh? Well, if you want to get more in depth understanding of this then make sure you read through this page

5. Framing- No by the way I'm not talking about real frames, or framing someone. I'm talking about this trick in photography, that is used to give more depth (to separate the focal point and the foreground). So that the person who views the photograph gets a sense of what he/she has to look at and a good foreground.

6. There are many other rules that I've not covered in here, but I'm sure you can find more rules here and here, and many other places on the net.

7. The camera and how you use it- This is pretty obvious, the camera that you use has a real big impact on the picture. If your camera is good that you are going to have good quality pictures and if it isn't than you're picture isn't going to be all that good (especially if you're planning to make it bigger for prints and so on). The settings of the camera is also very important, for example the exposure and the flash and so on, so make sure you know how to tweak those settings, so that you can get the best pictures possible. And one more thing try to get your hands on a tripod. I don't know about you but whenever I take my pictures, they seem to be a little blurry, which isn't good (of course!) so I highly recommend a tripod if you can get your hands one... and there' more things that are pretty self explanatory (such as set your camera to the right setting, if possible) the list just goes on and on...

Now I hope you realize (just like I did a while ago) that if you see any picture, there is a lot of hard work going in making it. Hopefully you too can remember all these rules and use them when you're taking a photograph!
photography, digital camera, camera

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Does anybody use blogger spell check?

This is a thought that has bothered me for long enough and since I see spelling mistakes on blogger blogs all the time (including this blog) I always wonder if anybody uses spell check or not... And for those who don't read on.

Okay, using spell check in quite simple actually. All you do is click on the button that says 'ABC' and has a check mark underneath it. Then it pops a window open in which it tells you possible suggestion and so on... You'll get the hang of it... Once you start using it.

The next time you write a post don't forget to check all the words... It might be really helpful for your readers if you tend to make a lot of mistakes.
grammar, spelling, tips

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What's up with the smiley faces

This might be old news to all of you (including me) but over the past few days I've really started to wonder why so many wordpress.com blogs seem to have the stat trackers with the 'smiley faces' ? It is to cheer up the mood of the reader? Or perhaps is it a smiley face just for fun... but now since so many blogs have the smiley faces, I think my blog needs one. So I guess I'll have to get my self a smiley face as well.
Update: The smiley face is now on my blog as well !

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Google Page Creator is here

Google Page Creator is a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.

The Google Page Creator is here... if you want to explore about it yourself then go ahead I won't stop you. Basically it is like a tool for creating web pages, and hosting it on google's servers. Sort of like Geocities by yahoo, except better (it has a few components, such as ajax and bigger storage space that make it way better!) If you want to read my thoughts (call it an extensive review if you wish!) about it, then why not go look at it in my experimental website!

google, ajax, web sites, web, page creator

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A list of things that I'm working on right now...

Okay, as a tech enthusiast I can't stop working on something that I've started already. Unfortunately, because of school all of these projects have to wait, my teachers seem to be going crazy (pehaps because March break is oh so near) and giving us as many projects as they can and not to mention the tests... However I still think that it is kind of cool to keep a list of my future coding (and graphic designing) project so here's a list of what's coming up...

Projects:
1. The Beyond Tecknology RSS Widget (for Yahoo Widgets and Dashboard)
2. A little bit more complex widget for Tech Rx (for Yahoo Widgets and Dashboard)
3. My very own chat bot (if possible)
4. Scripting in blogger to have emoticons (I'm to totally sure but I have a feeling it is possible, with javascript)
5. A new site layout, well I'll alter this layout itself and probably outsource the CSS and so on... basically make the page faster and less buggier
6. My long awaited Password CheckR, which is not all that good right now in detecting so I still need to fine tune it. It won't be as good as the other ones out there, but oh well atleast I'm improving my coding skills

Reciepes (for the best tutorial site in the world Tech-Recipes.com)
1. The photoshop tutorial that I've been working on, but haven't quite gotten around to finish the screen shots
2. Perhaps a few gimp tutorials
3. How to unclutter the desktop
4. Make posts shorter in blogger (i.e. add the 'Read More' link)

Well that's all I can think up of right now that I'm doing... If you've got more ideas feel free to tell me!

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Uni rocked by marking fiasco

A UNIVERSITY graduate student abandoned the institution in frustration after a marking fiasco during which a lecturer told him to produce "more smarter writing".

Okay, this is a very interesting story (a true incident) in which a marketing student isn't given the mark he is supposed to get. One things for sure when Universities start doing this, their reputation is definately going down the drain! Why would anybody want to deny a student of a mark the student deserves... this is totally wrong.

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My Gmail now has smileys :)

Finally, when you use the Gmail Skins extension, you can use smileys in Gmail in the compose mail section... and to be honest, I seem to like the semi glossy emoticons. They seemed to have changed the expressions of the smileys a little bit, but they are pretty much the same. I can't wait to use them

Oh yeah and they've also added an 'Insert Image button' which is kinda cool, if you are a person who likes to include pictures in emails. So if you really don't want to change the look of Gmail all that much but would like to use emoticons I strongly suggest that you get the extension.

So if you haven't seen it yet get the gmail skins extension to experience the emoticons :)

google, gmail, smileys, web

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The dunk contest was awesome

Today I was really mad at myself for not remembering that there was a NBA dunk contest, and other interesting stuff as well. Instead I was busy opening up my computer and tweaking the DVD and CD drives so that I could use a Live CD more often. However I did manage to remember that there was a dunk contest and finally watched the ending of the dunk contest (the final round). I was surprised at how good people are in dunking... me... I can't even dunk donuts properly ;) Nate Robinson was Awesome. Now I have a feeling that my fried Nate Robertson (an excellent ball player!) might now change his name to Nate Robinson, that would be interesting.

And actually the way he dunked over Webb was totally crazy, and he didn't even have to slouch because Robinson had some major air... totally mind blowing. And it was interesting that it was the first ever tie in NBA history, it looked to me like the judges actually wanted a tie. Igudala was marvellous as usuall and I believe that he did an awesome job, but it was interesting to see that he didn't get rewarded for it properly by the judges. Oh well what do I know...

Anyways I can't wait for the All Star game tomorrow, it's going to be very exiting.

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Fixing Windows or Linux With Knoppix

Extreme Tech had published a few articles a few days ago on how to use Knoppix to rescue Windows, and now they've published an article on how to rescue Linux with Knoppix. Honestly, I never thought that anybody was actually going to need to save windows files, because usually people back up things, just incase something happens because you never can trust Windows, come what may. However I was suprised today when I saw a laptop that was running knoppix and my computer teacher (a long time techie) was apparently trying to rescue files (pictures and so on I believe) from the laptop because the hard drive suffered some physical damage ... now lets see how much data can actually be rescued from a damaged hard drive. [to be continued... (as soon as the data is recoved)]

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Am I good at graphic designing?

When it comes to creating graphics I think I need to put in a little bit more work... right? Especially when creating websites (like this site or this site) it is hard to create lots of graphics so I usually just make a header graphic. But this is soon going to change... soon enough when I get enough time to do some designing I am going to go all out and work really hard. The next redesign for beyondteck (for experimental purposes I keep redesigning) is going to be pretty soon.

It is going to feature a lot of graphics and new things that you've probably never seen in a blog before (it's top secret, so I can 't reveal plans to any one :-) ). This time beyondteck is going to have a lot more 'bling-bling' as you might say, everywhere in its design. For now I'll leave you all with this little header that I created, do tell me how it is.

(okay, I admit... I took some inspiration from goowy, but don't tell anyone though, make sure you keep it a secret)

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Using IE 6 along with IE 7

Microsoft's new (beta) browser Windows Internet Explorer 7 apparently gets rid of IE 6. And as a developer I believe that Microsoft should never have done that... because it is important to check your site designs in IE 6 along with IE 7. Remember... the most of the people still use IE 6 and even if you are using IE 7 because it is better the rest of people might now.

So if you want to run IE 6 along with IE 7 just go to tech-recipes... well it hasn't been published yet (I don't know why it's taking so long) but it'll probably be published soon.

Update: The article has been published now

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How the internet works and what it does

Recently, if you've been subscribing to Security now, you might have already heard the How the internet works podcasts (part one and part two) by Steve Gibson and Leo. I seemed to like both of the podcasts equally, because I know about terms like TCP and UDP and so on before, so I didn't have a problem to understand what Steve was talking about. And since Steve's explanation wasn't exceptionally good (well atleast it looked to me like many people might now have grasped the major concepts) I decided to make my summary of what Steve talked (or explained rather) about in the podcasts, and yes it was also an assignment. This post is a little big so just browse through it and just pay attension to the bold words if you are like me and hate reading through a heap of information.

To understand how the internet works we need to understand that internet is made up of.

The internet is basically a network of computers and routers in which data is transferred from one point to another. The data is called 'packets' in this case, because the data is grouped together when it is sent from one point to another.

In order for this data to go from one place to another the packets have to follow a set of rules (well sort of) and thats why there are something called 'protocols'. Protocols enable packets to be sent in an orderly fashion and in different ways.

The internet is based upon something called the Internet Protocol or commonly referred to as IP, which is basically a set of rules that governs the way packets are moved across the network. It takes care of where the packets should go and so on. IP is a very vast term so I could just go on and on, but I'll just stop here, and perhaps make another post on IP only.

In the Internet Protocol there are several other protocols that govern the specefic parts of how packets are transferred and where there are transferred and so on. You can read about them here. All of the different protocols are part of the Internet Procotol Suite and were invented for a specefic reason (and each protocol has its own way of doing things)

The different types of protocols:
Transmission Control Protocol (or TCP)- This is one of the main protocols, that is used a lot on the internet. Its main job is to exchange packets, or to transfer packets. Something like this happens in the TCP when we use it to transfer packets-
- The host computer and the computer that you are on make connections. Then the data is sent in manageable packets, and the packets are cut up by the protocol to be sent. This means that TCP is doing a lot of work for you and you don't need to worry about the size of packets and so on. This means that the transfer of packets over the network is going to be taking more work from the protocol, and that's why it is called a heavy protocol by Steve in the podcast.

User Datagram Protocol (or UDP)- This is also a protocl in which the packets are transferred from the source (the place from where the packet is sent) to the destination (the place where the packet is supposed to reach). However this is a little bit different from the TCP protocol because in this protocol the data being sent is not looked after by the protocol, the protocol just sends the data to the source destination so it doesn't bother (well, that's the way the protocol was designed to be) to break it up and send it piece by piece. This makes this protocol a much more lightweight protocol and because you need to look after what data is being sent and so on.

There are may other protocols that are designed for a specific purpose for different needs, like VoIP (for voice) and FTP (for transfering files), however I won't go over them in much detail.

What are routers?
Routers are used in networks (like the internet) to pass on the data, so basically whaty a router does it get the data and transfer it to the destination (the place where it is supposed to go to) How a router sends the information where it is supposed to go is also something very interesting.

What a router does is looks at the first digits of the IP address (the address which is assigned to a device) and then it forwards it to the other router, then the other router looks at the next digit and forwards the packets to the next router. It's just like mail... we first look at the country and the mail is sent to that country, then we look at province and the mail is sent to that province and then we look at the city and the mail is sent to that city and that's how the routers narrow it down until the last router sends it to your computer. And there are also different kinds of routers such as NAT Routers and so on.

What is TTL? And why do we need that stuff...

TTL or Time To Live is something that programmers (the first creators of the internet) have included in the Packet. What this does is limits the packets time until it can be used. When the time expires the packet is discarded, or sent back by the router. The router sends it back to the source (it knows what the source is by looking at the header in a packet... always remember a packet always has the source and destination address in it!) This can be useful when you want a packet to expire... like for security reasons. TTL can also be used for something called trace route... it is basically trying to get to the host by getting the address of the path it takes, because when you send a packet and it expires the packet has the IP address of the router that sent it back to you. So if you repeat this step for every router (increasing the TTL value every time) you can find out the host, which is not good for the host of course.

The history of the internet
Sometimes it is easier to understand stuff if you know the history. Well okay may be not... but it is always good to know the history of where things come from and so on so here is how the internet came into existence...
Long long ago people wanted to connect computers together, and then the genuis people at MIT and Stanford (I think) came up with the ideas of packets. Data that could be sent through a network from one place to another. And that's how they developed upon this idea and finally came up with the Protocols that we have today.

So now you know how much work went into creating the internet and this post doesn't even talk about all the things that make up the internet. I hope that now you too can appreciate the internet as you use it in your everyday life!

Note: Steve also talks about the Kama Sutra virus in the podcast (heh, the name is pretty funny) and how malicious it is. I didn't say much about it in this post since it is 'yesterdays news', if you are still curious you can hop over to Gazotto, and read about the virus...
internet, routers, protocol, history

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I won the most plagiarized award

A few days ago, my teacher told me that my blog had won the most plagiarized award... so I just had to make a post about it! I agree that my blog is the most plagiarized blog, mainly because all the people in my class are lazy. I don't know about you but for me most plagiarized can only mean one thing *cough* the best blog in Woodbine (that's the name of my school)!

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I'm not all that impressed by IE 7

Windows (because it's for Windows OS's only!) Internet Explorer (IE7) is the next version of Microsoft Internet Explorer... and so far I think that it is awesome allright. I've had a couple of crashes alredy and I don't like the way how IE 7 displays sites... even though it is in beta right now I think it still has a long way to go. WIll write more, when I get the time to do so...

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Did I just hear the Songbird chirp?

Songbird, is the latest iTunes rival that is based on the engines of Firefox and Thunderbird. And did I mention that is open source (i.e. free!). I downloaded it and gave it a spin, and even though it had a few flaws I liked it. The user interface was also somewhat intuitive, and was just like iTunes (and I've got to add that it is a piece of cake to skin it's interface since it uses .png files). The feature that I loved (which is just one feature amongst its huge list of features) was that you can browse through websites (because it's based on Firefox) and it lists all the music content on that page. This makes it a breeze to just listen to the songs without going through all the other stuff on the page.

It also has other features like the mini player (like iTunes, however a little different). I really don't use this feature much because I prefer to just minimize the player while I'm listening to songs.

The xulrunner, however bugs me because it uses up too much memory. So when you are running about 10 apps similtaneously, it tends to take up to much system resources. But since this is based on XUL, there is not much you can do about it, as XUL is the main component that is running Songbird.
Songbird is great, considering that it is still in the preview stages and chances are there are going to be a lot more features added to it later on. For now until songbird gets better I'll just go back to using iTunes or Windows Media Player, however I will be still using Songbird occasionally...

songbird, windows, firefox, music, audio, itunes, mp3

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Performancing Ver 1.1.1 (beta) is just awesome!

The bestest blogging extension for Firefox (and Flock) just got better. Thanks Jed for letting me know about this, because my blogging life is a breeze now. Version 1.1.1 might seem like a name for just a few bug fixes, but apparently this version has a lot more power (and bug fixes) than all the other versions! It's totally different (way better I mean) than what it was like before...

Here are the things that I find are better from the other versions

• There aren't any bugs like there used to be before (like the icon problem I discussed in this post)
• There aren't any delicious problems like there used to be before (I didn't notice that there were any delicious problems at all before Jed pointed it out to me...)
• You can save posts as drafts now (a feature that I will probably be using a lot)!
• You can now see the links in the preview mode! And clicking on the link in Rich Editing section will not launch the url.
• The Rich Editing section and the preview section now you sans serif fonts. I don't like serif fonts so much (although research says that it is easier for you to read serif fonts)
• There is a Strikethrough button! Cool! Awesome!
• The 'About' button is now the 'Performancing' button.
  

Awesome job Jed and thanks to others at Performancing who made this wonderful 'extremly excellent extension possible.

internet, flock, web, performancing, blog, browser, extensions, firefox

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Beyond-teck seems to be having problems

Beyond-teck, seemed to be having a lot of problems in the past few days. The Internet Explorer problem, the template problems and the publishing problem... the list just goes on and on. But I've fixed most of those problems now...

The template problem is something that I have been working on, and apparently there are problems in my script. My whole idea of changing the template from the previous one was to make it compatible, but I guess I just made it a little less compatible. And whenever you view this site in IE (IE 6 I mean) it seems that you might be greated with an error... IE 7 is a totally different story, if just cuts of half of my blog, well IE 7 can't even be called a widely used browser yet, so I won't worry about that right now.
As for the blogger problem, lots of my freinds and frequent visitors to my blog have been telling me that they can't access my blog- at all. Apparently that was a blogger issue (might be a publishing problem, I'm not sure) but now it just seemed to have resolved itself. So I don't need to worry about that problem either.
Well one thing is for sure, even if I manage to resolve all these puzzling problem, I guess there are always going to be new ones popping up...
internet, blogger, browser, problems, solutions, troubleshooting

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Performancing version 1.1 is here but...

Okay, so you probably already know this but incase you don't. Performancing version 1.1 is here, and as always it is great. I love using performncing all the time, because it makes it easier for me to look at a page and blog from it... Usually I use Firefox, but sometimes as I mentioned before I do use Flock, and you'll know that when you read my previous post. Version 1.1 is great but...

there is a little problem in Flock. I talked to Jed (the genius mastermind guy who is involved in this plug-in) about the bug in Flock that causes Flock to display 2 icons instead of one (this only happens in Flock), and he apparently fixed this. However, now its even more screwed up... yikes! Oh well, I guess its all right for me because I don't pay attension to such petty thigns while writing my posts but what about other people? What would they think? Jed looks like you have another lil' problem to fix in Ver 1.2...

internet, flock, web, performancing, blog, browser

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Ergonomics in Everyday life

We all know that these days manufacturers are breaking away from the usual trends and creating something that is more pleasing to the eye and easier for you to use (ergonomic). Is it really worth it? I mean people seem to find normal chair more comfortable than those executive chairs, and say that sitting on those funky ( and expensive) chairs gives them back pain. Then why make ergonomic stuff? Many people seem to hate them (for example the ergonomic keyboards)

This article by Franklin Tesser talks about ergonomics in laptops and how desktops are more ergonomic. I agree, laptops are small and ergonomics is not the main focus. When you buy a laptop you are looking for performance, I mean it needs to be portable and sturdy. You don't want a laptop that looks good but is heavy and eats up battery life. And chances are you won't be able to fit in one of those ergonomic keyboards in there as well, because you need to keep a laptop as compact as possible.

Ergonomics is not just used in technology, its used in other things like furniture as well. Like I said earlier those executive ergonomic chairs are become more and more popular (the price seems to be going up along with that) as time goes on. This article talks a little about office ergonomics, and how they focus on office furniture, putting emphasis on the seating. Well their claims look pretty marvellous, but many just prefer original chairs.

We are definately onto something big with ergonomics, and I'm sure people will keep finding out and exploring new concepts. And I'm sure that there are many out there who actually like ergonomics. But me, I just like plain old stuff- ergonomics are just too radical for me, hopefully this is going to change in the future...

Technorati Tags: ergonomics, design, Computers

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