Technology. Without Error

We live in an age where we need to Google everything and anything we need to know about. But Google is after all an index of all that lies on the internet. What if you wanted to buy something and didn’t really know where to look for? The internet might be able to help you but its usually not that helpful. Asking your friends might be really helpful, but what if your friends didn’t know either? Most probably, their friends might know.

Aardvark does just this. It creates a network of friends and their friends across which you throw around your questions and delivers their answers to you. It’s a bridge between the person asking the question and those who have the answers.

It involves extensive usage of the friend of a friend (FOAF) concept which is currently one of biggest trends in social networking. LinkedIn and Facebook already show you friend recommendations based on this concept. But Aardvark has been the first to put it to use in answering your questions.

You sign up for a free account with aardvark and then add your personal details(so that your friends can find you) and your topics of interest. Linking it to your Facebook account lets you import your interests from your FB profile. Add aardvark bot to your IM client and you are good to go. Questions on topics of your interest could flow to you and you are free to, answer, pass or refer them to your friends. The conversation happens freely through IM, with the Aardvark bot ensuring that you always know what keyword to type in.  Your dashboard on Aardvark has a list of all your questions and answers, asked and answered. If IN is not your thing, you can even ask questions and answer them on the site or via Twitter.

Time required to get answers is around 4 minutes usually, But then it all depends on the question. Many questions might remain unanswered, but most objective questions are answered promptly. Aardvark would do well to bring in a reward system of badges similar to the one found on Stack overflow.  Your questions are not always recognized as questions and you might be required to tag them or rephrase them if Aardvark doesn’t understand them. In spite of these trivial issues, Aardvark is a service which shows tremendous promise and is a must have bot for your IM client.

Thanks to @kushmakarsharma for recommending the site.

You need to edit an image real quick and you are working either on a netbook or someone else’s machine which doesn’t have a copy of your favourite photoshop. Or maybe you never had photoshop in the first place.
Adobe Photoshop has become the premier digital one stop solution for image editing and it should come as no surprise that more than a few would have attempted to ride the photoshop success wave with their own clones.

The first clone which I have been using for a while is the Aviary Phoenix online image editor. Mind you, this has even support for layers and can handle almost anything you might want to get done with an image. Its completely on the cloud (and free as well) and all you need is your trusty Firefox (or any other browser) by your side to edit your image. I guess there’s a sign up required but that’s not so cumbersome. Being a web app has its advantages, such as being able to capture any webpage easily and Aviary even has a firefox addon. Aviary has a complete suite of applications for every possible form of image editing requirement online.

The second is a very light weight application called the Artweaver. Now artweaver is a fully functional free image editor. Users of photoshop would find themselves completely at home because of the interface. What’s more, it even supports export/import as Photoshop format files (PSDs).
The Artweaver interface (I love GITS!!)

Artweaver even has a portable version which you can run off a USB key. You can further enhance artweaver with a number of plugins (which you can find on the download page), you even get to extend it to use XnView, the freeware image viewer.

Both these applications would not be able to replace Photoshop for power users. But when it comes to basic image editing, they get the job done quite well!

Get your copy of Tour de Flex and jump start your Flex experience. Learn with easy examples. Anyway, its better than looking at your boring HTML help!

Oh! You’d better get some AIR before you do that!

While browsing the web, we do come across pages in other languages…Google translate is one of the best and has been my friend when I encounter such pages. Yahoo’s Babelfish does a decent job as well..

But what if you wanted a lovely web 2.0 interface and just wanted to translate phrases into multiple languages? Support for language auto detect and translate as you type too?

Enter Nice Translator…A smooth clean interface with the use of light shades of green makes you want to translate phrases even if you don’t need them…

That was quite a short post. So, ????? or rather goodbye for now…

I actually stumbled upon this one…Updating.me. First thing that impresses me is the interest domain name. And the site does just that. It is for all those microblogging fanatics who have got an account with every microblogging site in the universe….

Now, Its similar to ping.fm. But, different in many ways…I personally prefer updating me over any other simultaneous posting service…Plus it supports all those services which I need…Right now, they support

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