Awesome Techs

3D was there for a long time. Lots of movies came with this technology, but nothing could make an impact like the blockbuster “Avatar” did. Now 3D got a publicity like even cable providers are starting to launch 3D channel.

In UK region SKY will be the first one to provide a dedicated 3D channel. One of the largest Cbale TV provide SKY has announced that they are launching a dedicated 3D channel SKY 3D in coming April.

“The first 3D live sports event will be a football match between Arsenal and Manchester United. There will be one Sky Sports broadcast completely devoted to the 3D showing, with 8 different 3D camera setups. ”

The Afterdawn Reported.

If you have 3D – HDTV, and you are a SKY HD customer, then you can start watching the SKY 3D from their homes as well starting in April. The programming will be free and current set-top boxes are capable of receiving 3D content.

In their efforts to co-create the brand together with the community, Tata DOCOMO has announced a first of its kind ‘CREATE Music Contest’. The contest is the latest one to be introduced on the Tata DOCOMO CREATE platform. The CREATE platform invites talented individuals across India to play with the brand elements of Tata DOCOMO and create various kinds of brand communications.

The CREATE Music Contest is meant for those who have aspirations in the field of music and especially for those who have a passion for music but never had an opportunity to showcase it. The core idea is to allow participants to re-create the Tata DOCOMO brand signature tune into a 30-60 second long tune, keeping the opening and ending the same as the original brand tune. Thus the participants will have to re-create the ‘in-between’ part by means of re-creating it, remixing, singing or any other creative way.  All entries should then be uploaded in an mp3 format on the CREATE Music Contest page.

The philosophy behind the contest is respecting the power of ‘DO’, whereby TATA DOCOMO is felicitating the individual prowess by the way of opening up its brand and asking people to play with it. It is also a massive encouragement for the aspiring musicians in India, who are presented with the opportunity to showcase their talent on a big platform. The winning entries stand to win INR 1,00,000 and also gets a chance to be showcased across all brand communication platforms. The Contest will run from the 14^th of January till the 31^st of March.

The CREATE Music Contest details can be found at ‘create.tatadocomo.com/createmusic’

To find out how to begin participating in the CREATE Music Contest visit: http://create.tatadocomo.com/music-what-to-do.aspx

To listen to the latest CREATE Music contest entries visit: http://create.tatadocomo.com/hear-the-do.aspx

For the CREATE Music Contest, one winning entry will get a cash award of INR 1,00,000 and 10 shortlisted entries will receive a cash reward if INR 10,000 each!

Star Viewer is a web-based tool for peeking at some of the most interesting and vivid sights in the night sky.

Star Viewer is not as complicated as, say, the previously mentioned open-source and feature-rich astronomy tool Stellarium; the interface, however, is easy to use, and it allows you to quickly navigate to many interesting points in the night sky you’d never be able to see standing outside with your naked eye.The interface won’t take any time to get used to, either.

The project uses Google Maps to drive its navigation. You can pan, zoom, and explore the night sky the same way you would Manhattan. If using Star Viewer has you interested in checking out more astronomy-related tools, we’d highly recommend checking out the aforementioned Stellarium as well as another previously mentioned web-based tool, Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope.

via – LifeHacker

Now facebook gives its users a  “via” feature that lets repost another user’s shared items, with a “via” link attached for attribution. This feateure is likely to available for everyone. To try it, just go to a friend’s posted item in your news feed, click “share,” and you’ll see a “via [your friend’s name]” with an option to remove it. After sharing the shared item will appear on your profile, with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feeds, creating the viral loop just like the twitter retweet.

Currently, the feature only works for posted links. See the below posted Pic for knowing how this works.

The one thing that lacks in Linux when compared to windows is the media players. In windows we have lots and lots of choices for media player and that even with high quality. But in Linux the number is very less for a quality media player. But still there are options which are ok kind of. So here goes a list of some nice media players.

1. Amarok

Amarok is a great music player for Linux and Unix. Amarok’s interface is very intuitive. It’s a free music player for GNU/Linux and works with UNIX as well. Right now, Amarok is the most popular audio player for Linux.

Get it in ubuntu by typing – sudo apt-get install amarok

Download
Official Website

2. XMMS

XMMS (X MultiMedia System) is a great multimedia player which works on almost all systems but it has some special items which only works inLinux. XMMS can play media files such as MP3, MOD’s, WAV and others with the use of Input plugins. It’s a free software audio player very similar to Winamp,‭ ‬that runs on many Unix-like operatingsystems.

Download
Official Website

3. RhythmBox

Rhythmbox is an great audio application for linux. It’s free of cost and it can play and organize digial music easily. It’s inspiration comes from Apple iTunes and it worked pretty amazing under the GNOME Desktop while using the GStreamer media framework.‭

Official Rythmbox Website
Download Rythmbox:

4. Audacious

Audacious is a free media player for Linux or Linux based systems. Supporting immense portion of its features to plugins, including all codecs. With Audacious, On most systems, a useful set of plugins is installed by default, giving you the ability toplay MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files etc.

Download
Official Website

5. Exaile

Exaile is a free software audio player for Unix-like operating systems that aims to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but based on the GTK+ toolkit instead of the Qt toolkit Amarok uses.

Download
Official Website

6. Banshee

Banshee is an free audio player for GNU/Linux operating systems which uses the Helix and GStreamer multimedia platforms to play, ‬encode,‭ ‬and decode Oggs,‭ ‬MP3s,‭ ‬and other formats.You can play and import audio CDs, play and synchronize music with iPods and share your music easily.‭ Banshee also have the capability of reporting played songs to a user’s Last.fm playlist.‭ Another cool feature of Banshee is that it can Rip CD’s, support podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, burn audio and MP3 cd’s and much more!

Download
Official Homepage

7. Beep Media Player

BMP is also known as beep media player. BMP is a free audio player based on XMMS multimedia player (Mentioned above). It looks like Winamp and also supports it’s skins, including XMMS’s. BMP supports most of the audio formats that XMMS does, main difference is between plugins that these both players use.

Download
Official Website

The Computer Security Giant McAfee along with the Social Community Networking Giant Facebook are taking a big step to improve the security of normal computer users. Today USAtoday posted anews saying,

Tonight, they announced McAfee will make a complimentary six-month subscription of its Internet Security Suite software available to Facebook’s 350 million users.

After six months, Facebook users will be eligible for a special discounted subscription for the software package, which offers PCs protection from viruses, spyware and other online threats.

All users should join the fan page for McAfee to avail this offer. McAfee Internet Security Suite will initially be available to Facebook users in the U.S., UK, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.