HP Magic Giveaway

hp in its celebration of this holiday session and the thanksgiving will give 50 bloggers a six thousands dollars valued package to share with their visitors. !!!

so what does this package include ?

According to hp magic giveaway site , windows connected , Jake Ludington’s and GearLive Blogs

Hardware

• HP TouchSmart IQ816 PC
• HP HDX 18 series Premium Notebook PC
• HP MediaSmart Connect
• HP Pavilion dv4 series Entertainment Notebook PC (with Windows Live)
• HP Mini 1000 (with XP)

Accessories

• HP Photosmart C6380 Wireless AIO (printer)
• HP 564 Photo Value Pak

Software

• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate/Home Premium or Microsoft Windows XP pre-installed on all units (Mini 1000 runs XP)
• Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition 2007 (Student-Teacher Edition) – 1 DVD with 3 licenses
• Microsoft Windows Live
• Corel VideoStudio X2

Entertainment

• Kung Fu Panda (2 widescreen DVDs; 1 widescreen Blu-ray disc)

an interesting package isn't it ?? :)

for the complete list of blogs see this link.

it is worth mentioning that each blog will define its rules to win the package ...some will choose randomly others will require you to register in their site ..etc. but the what I have noticed is that the common rule in many blogs is that you will have share your prize with others..windows connected blog says "impacting a number of peoples lives with the hardware will get you the best chance to win" also bleeping computer blog require that you share at least one computer with some one who is in need of it...

Another thing to know is that not all of the blogs will start in the same time..each blog will start on a certain date and choose a winner after a week..I found an excellent article in istartedsomething blog which lists all the blogs and their starting dates in a fancy Google calendar :)...

and yes this giveaway is global and not restricted to USA citizens..so go ahead and don't forget your friend :)

Good Luck For Every One...

Typealyzer

While I was searching for something I stumbled upon this interesting site ..Typealyzer which still in beta analysis your blog posts and determines what kind of person you are...i give it a try and here are the results.. :D

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

it also gives me an analysis of what part of my brain was dominant while writing !!!! really interesting.

it is worth mentioning that it still in beta..and the results might not be very accurate at least for me..as I am sure that I don't enjoy risks or driving race cars !! :D

Hot upcoming PC games

This article was written  By Mohamed Mostafa our guest for today , if you are crazy about games like him :D you might find this article interesting.

you can reach Mohamed at "shockoshocko@hotmail.com"

1. Grand Theft Auto 4, release date: Nov 18, 2008

I know that some people already have GTA 12, but let’s not talk about that, this is the long anticipated GTA 4 hitting PCs on Nov 18, you will play as “Niko Bellic” a recent immigrant to Liberty City who finds himself immersed in a world of crime and tries to make the best of it.

2. Need for Speed Undercover, release date: Nov 17, 2008

The next installment of the very popular street-racing series you will be playing as an undercover cop, offering some new interesting features, it will be great like “Most Wanted 2”.

3. Prince of Persia (2008), release date: Dec 2, 2008

The prince is back, in a new storyline, art style and gameplay, the events in Prince of Persia occur in a completely separate timeline from the Sands of Time trilogy.

4. Call of Duty: World at War, release date: Nov 11, 2008

After “Call of Duty 4” whose scenario was about modern warfare, “Infinity Ward” decided going back to World War II, this new entry will be using Call of Duty 4 engine, it should be great.

I think we will not have time to study after all this games :D if you have another game or opinion you want to share , don't hesitate to post it in the comments.

Me , My Friends and a Hard Disk Drive :)

we ( me and 5 more friends )  had to prepare a presentation for our college about How Hard Disks work ,  the subject it self isn't that hard but the problem was in TeamWork , how can all of the team members cooperate  in the same project effectively without wasting time in non-useful arguments.

At the beginning we have faced a lot of problems but finally we managed to get over it by avoiding -as much as we can- to be like one of those people.

• people who don't do any thing.
• people who want to do every thing using their own method or style.
• people who like to manage the team but they actually work less than they talk. :D
• people who are used to be followers, waiting for orders to start doing something

however we managed to make something that is not bad for students in the first year.

you can Download the report from here and the presentation from here

by the way ... we also had a lot of fun :)

Project Touchless

Touchless is a free open source application hosted by CodePlex and built using .Net technologies , it enables you to do some touch tricks by using a webcam that tracks color based markers.

According to the project main page it is divided into two parts:

-Touchless Demo is an open source application that anyone with a webcam can use to experience multi-touch, no geekiness required. There are 4 fun demos: Snake - where you control a snake with a marker, Defender - up to 4 player version of a pong-like game, Map - where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers, and Draw - the marker is used to guess what....  draw!

-Touchless SDK is an open source SDK that enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input, geekiness recommended.

they provide a nice video which demonstrate all the features off the project.

the first thing you might need after launching the demo is to set webcam and ensure that it is working then you will need to create markers, you should use a distinguished one so the camera can easily recognize and you can create more than marker , actually you will need more than one to play the demo's included.

the demo that I liked most is called the image demo were you can rotate , move and resize a photo with two markers like pictures in iphone or Microsoft surface.

and here is a screenshot where I was able to control a picture with two screwdrivers :D.

the second demo is a small snake game.

there is also another game that you can play with three other players

the last one is a paint demo where you can draw with markers.nice drawing,isn't it ? :).

Finally I hope you enjoy Multi touch with Touchless :D.

Analogy Screensaver

Screensavers were made originally to protect old CRT monitors from a problem called Phosphor burn-in which occurs when static image or text is displayed for long periods of time however they were used later on for other purposes like entertainment and security.

Modern CRT's are less vulnerable to burn-in problems and LCD screens doesn't face this problems at all so screensavers have lost their main goal that they were designed for , another thing is that screensavers consume power as when running computer normally and it causes screen aging.

According to wikipedia :

A typical LCD screen loses about 50% of its brightness during a normal product lifetime, if left on continuously

So the best thing to protect your screen is simply to turn it off when not used or configuring your computer to set the screen into a lower power mode and that could be done from power management in most modern operating systems.

However , sometimes you need a good or useful screen savers to be displayed if you are going to be idle for few minutes...

and here comes Analogy (the reason this article was written) a useful screensaver that displays a nice hybrid format clock into your screen.

Analogy is available for windows and OSX and can be downloaded from here.

Robot Band

I found this funny video on youtupe..hope you enjoy it. :)

WebMail Notifier - Firefox Extension -

If you are a firefox user and you don't use mail clients like outlook or evolution then you might found this firefox extension useful.

WebMail Notifier will notify you when you receive a new message in your mail inbox and I found it great because of the following reasons :

• Simple and just do what it says.
• Supports Many mail services like gmail , hotmail and yahoo and others..
• Low memory usage compared to installing a complete standalone program.
• Much more better than using mail notifiers found in Chat Clients like MSN , yahoo ....

The Preference dialog is easy to understand and edit.

Hope you found this extension useful.

Search Google in 2001 !!!

the Giant Company Google is Celebrating it's 10th Birthday, and in the honor of this occasion Google will give you a one month chance to search entries found in their old index (January 2001) where

"ipod" didn't refer to a music player, and "youtube" didn't refer to much of anything. !!!

the search page is found here.

Another thing is that it's not 100% like that of 2001 results as they have removed some sites also you will not find ads in search pages.

also when you search for a page you can see it's old archived version by clicking "View old version on the Internet Archive ", for more information see this FAQ page.

Compile and Execute Java Files using a bat file

I started to learn java and I needed a fast way to compile and execute small java programs that I wrote on notepad or my favorite Notepad++ and command prompt is considered a very fast way if you know that you Don't have to rewrite the command each time you want to compile or run a java file , you can just write them in a .bat file and execute all this commands with a double click.

All what you have to do is to write the commands in a text file and save it with .bat file extension.

An example of .bat file that compiles and execute a java file in my desktop :

@echo off

rem      delete the old class file to avoid executing it
rem      if there was an error in the new java  file
cd C:\Documents and Settings\Ahmed Kotb\Desktop\
if exist a.class del a.class

rem Compile the java file(s)
cd C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_04\bin\
javac "C:\Documents and Settings\Ahmed Kotb\Desktop\a.java"

rem Execute
cd C:\Documents and Settings\Ahmed Kotb\Desktop\
if exist a.class java a

pause

any comments or questions are welcomed
Hope this was useful.

Happy Ramadan !

for those few who are reading this humble blog thank you :D and Ramadan Kareem.

My First Program

While I was organizing some old files I found this,My first program that I have made 6 years ago using visual basic 3 !!! (yes it was my first language) unfortunately I haven't found the valuable source code to share however the screen shot is enough to make you laugh :)

Snooze your mail

Most of us know about snooze feature in mobile alarms and other accessories but now with HitMeLater you can snooze your mail and receive it after a while , this service could be useful in many cases , for example if you have received an email about an important event or meeting next Wednesday and you want that email to be on the top of your inbox on that day ...the best part is that this service is free and doesn't require registration.

Usage:

all what you have to do when you receive an email that you want to snooze is to forward it to HitMeLater in on of the following ways:

• Wednesday@hetmelater.com to receive the mail next Wednesday and off course you can replace Wednesday with any day in the week.
• 3@hetmelater.com to receive the mail after 3 hours and again you can replace 3 with any number of hours.

Search for faces !!!

looking for someone on the net ? you can start searching for faces not only names using more than one search engine which provides this feature.

Google image search:click on advanced image search link near the search button and choose faces in content types.

Windows Live image Search:do a normal search then choose Face in the menu at the right that will filter the results.

there are also search engines that provide face search as its main function like www.facesearch.com which has a nice interface.

another one is PolarRose where you can sign in and start naming people.

if you have time you can check Exalead and Reuters Labs , the last one Also provides search for faces within videos.

hope that information was useful.

Protect your eyes with EyeDefender

if you sit in front of the computer for a long time you will find Eye Defender a great useful application. the main function of EyeDefender is to remind you to take breaks and relax your eyes after a fixed intervals of time which will help in reducing Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS)...that includes according to their site many bad symptoms:

CVS symptoms include eyestrain, blurred vision, delayed focusing, headaches, back and neck aches, dry and burning eyes, light sensitivity, distorted color vision, forehead heaviness, and sore eyes.

After Downloading and installing the program you will notice that its main interface is simple and self explanatory.

the program gives you for four options for Break notification :

• A beautiful picture that you might change if you Desire.
• A visual trainer that is supposed to relax your eyes.
• Lunching the default screen saver.
• Showing a popup balloon.

Whatever option you choose EyeDefender is a useful (free for non-commercial use) application that deserves a try.

Have you tried Phun ?!!

Phun is a -free for non-commercial use- 2d physics sandbox , it proves that Physics Could be Fun :) with lots of tools that you can use to create great simulations or machines.

According to their main site:

Phun is a free game like 2D physics sandbox where you can play with physics like never before. Children, students, engineers, artists, university professors, and many others, use Phun for telling stories, learning, constructing amazing machines, creating games - or just for the plain fun of it.

for more screenshots and Videos visit phun media page http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Media.

Phun is available for Windows (xp/vista),Linux and mac OSx and It can be downloaded from the main site www.phunland.com also the site provides a great and comprehensive tutorials found here.

hope you enjoy Physics now :)

Computer Uptime

Do you want to calculate your Computer Uptime ?
According to Wikipedia:

Uptime is a measure of the time a Computer system has been "up" and running.

in Windows you can follow one of the following methods :
The first one:
click start >> run and write cmd then click ok
write "Systeminfo" without quotes and you will find the system uptime

Update: there is better method suggested by Ahmed Barakat in the comments : instead of typing systeminfo and search for uptime in the results you can type ( systeminfo | find "System Up" ) to get only the system uptime thanks :)
The Second Method:
this is a great method if you dont like command line.
u can use an application to calculate uptime for u and there are alot of free great apps to do such thing one of them is Winlife 1.0.
it can be downloaded from here it is free and Small in size.
For linux users there is a command called uptime that u can use just write it in terminal and it will gives u something like this >>

Muslim Prayer Time Reminder

Do you sit a lot in front of your Computer and forget about prayers ???
here is one solution for this problem : a program that sets in your desktop and reminds u before each Prayer.

For Windows users :
Ela Salaty (towards my prayer) is a great prayer time reminder as it offers many features but unfortunately it comes with arabic interface only.

installation :
-Download a free copy from "http://www.ela-salaty.com/"
-installation is easy just lunch the installer and follow the instructions

Pros:

-Great and easy user interface. -Different ways to alert you to prayer time.
-Play athan with more than one voice.

-The possibility of printing times of prayer for the full month or Hijri calendar. -The ability to listen to radio stations via the Internet. -There are more features that you can find at the site or discover your self :)

Cons:

the main drawback as stated before is the lack of english user interface so if u dont speak arabic there is another free program called athan basic that supports English and you can find it here http://www.islamicfinder.org/athanDownload.php
or http://www.download.com/Athan-Azan-Basic/3000-2135_4-10206122.html

it offers the same features as “ela salaty” Plus the English user interface.

For Ubuntu Linux Users :
there is a small simple application that u can download from the official Ubuntu repositories.
Installation:
-click Application >> Add/Remove
-choose all open source application from the list in the top
-search for Minbar and install it

now u can open it from application >> accessories >> Minbar

Pros:
-Very simple application.
-Relatively low memory usage approximately 10.5 MB.
-Determine Qibla Direction.
-play athan.

Cons:
-it lacks a lot of features found in “ela salaty” and athan basic.
-it doest come with athan sound file so you will have to search for one.