Must have Google Wave Robots - Full List Google Wave Robots

Must have Google Wave Robots - Full List Google Wave Robots

Q.: How to add a bot to your list?

A: You will see a + sign on the lower left hand corner of your wave window, just click on it and in the popup box paste the name of the bot (eg. blog-wave@appspot.com ) and click submit.

Here is a list of the robot that I have discovered so far as well as where you can find them.

Amazonbot: Get an Amazon search by typing amazon:keyword (ex. amazon:camera) amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com

AmazonMP3bot: Get an Amazon mp3 search by typing music:keyword (ex. music:nirvana) amazonmp3-withwaves-com@appspot.com

Bloggy: Manage all of your google blogs blog-wave@appspot.com

BotURL: Replaces a full URL with a shortened hyperlink (ex. http://www.google.com becomes [google.com]) boturl@appspot.com

Bouncy: Remove bots from your wave bouncy-wave@appspot.com

Eliza: A bot to talk to when nobody will elizarobot@appspot.com

Emoticony: Make emoticons in your wave emoticonbot@appspot.com

Graphy: Creates a flowchart when the correct commands are typed (go to this website for a demonstration) graph-wave@appspot.com

Hangman: Records and plays Hangman games in a blip wavehangman@appspot.com

Madoqua: Embeds waves into blogs blog-bot@appspot.com

Polly: Create a poll for your wave polly-wave@appspot.com

Read-Onlie: Makes your wave read-only (I haven't actually tested this one) readonliebot@appspot.com

Rssybot: Watch RSS feeds from Google Wave (doesn't update after you install it) rssybot@appspot.com

Sweepy: Automatically deletes empty blips sweepy-wave@appspot.com

Syntaxy: Syntax highlighting for waves, put #! (e.g. #!python) at the start of a blip to enable syntax highlighting. kasyntaxy@appspot.com

Tweety: login to your twitter account from Google Wave tweety-wave@appspot.com

Talk Like A Pirate: Translates all your blips into pirate language. YARRR! (more info) talk-like-a-pirate@appspot.com

WaveAlpha: Allows you to query Wolfram Alpha's Computational Knowledge Search Engine (ex. [answer to life, the universe, and everything]) py-robot@appspot.com

WaveGroupy: Group aggregator for public waves wavegroupy@appspot.com

WaveVotely: Allows you to vote public waves up or down wavevotely@appspot.com

Wikify: Creates a link to wikipedia via (ex. ) wikifier@appspot.com

Yelpful: In wave interface to Yelp.com yelpful@appspot.com

Watexy: Allows you to add equations to Wave watexy@appspot.com

Add any bots that you have that aren't on this list.

Google Chrome Opened Google Search When Trying to Open Yahoo.com

I typed http://yahoo.com on my Google Chrome tab and it opened Google Search every time.

HiPhone -Review

HiPhone -Review

Overview: The HiPhone, otherwise known as the CECT 132, the C-002, or the HiPhone i32, is among the latest Chinese iPhone clones. In case you are not familiar with this line, they have all of the features of the iPhone, except they've added bonuses like dual sim (two phone numbers), a removable battery, additional surround sound speakers, and a slide unlock feature which makes the phones accessible to any plan or carrier. You are not stuck with AT&T with this phone. More, this new model has added the very popular shake and tilt technology which means you can advance any media (songs, video, pictures, and wallpaper) by just shaking the phone. You do not need to scroll or look down. When you want to go to a full, wide screen, you only have to tilt the phone.

Appearance: Of all of the clones available, the HiPhone looks most like the original. It is sleek and modern. It's "99.9% iPhone" slogan is very accurate. It has the silver casing on the back with black on the front. However, it does not have the knock off apple logo on the phone. The name of the model is printed on the back of the phone and this serves as the logo.
Features: This phone has all of the features which makes the iPhone popular: Bluetooth, a 3.5 inch finger touch screen, MP3/MP4 players, a 2.0 mega pixel camera, a video recorder, fully functional smart phone capabilities, web browsing with WAP, GPRS, SMS, MMS, and voice mail, and 512 MB of memory with an additional 2GB that can be supported externally. The addition of the shake and tilt technology makes this phone very popular.

Functioning And Quality: This phone is very solid. It does not feel cheap in any capacity and it makes very good on its 99% iPhone promise. Of all of the clones available, this one performs as good as or better than any other.

Pricing: This model starts at about $150, but can vary greatly depending on where you get it. However considering all of the features and the AT&T savings, anything under $200 is probably a pretty fair price.

In a nutshell, this is a high quality phone with the latest technology available. It is very user friendly and has all of the sought after iPhone features with many extras that make it a great phone in its own right.

Samsung Ultra Touch - The 3G Mobile

Samsung Ultra Touch

At the GSMA World Congress, Samsung ensured that touch-screen phone fans would not be disappointed. Besides the Omnia HD and the Beat DJ, the company also introduced the Ultra Touch.

The Ultra Touch differs from the Beat DJ and Omnia HD by offering a numeric keypad for those who favor physical controls. Alternatively, you can use a virtual keypad when the phone is closed for texting and dialing.

The Samsung Ultra Touch in blue.(Credit: Samsung)
The 2.8-inch display supports 16 million colors. It's bright and vibrant, and you can take advantage of Samsung's TouchWiz interface. Below the display are Talk and End buttons and a diamond-shaped Back button. The first two controls are flush but the latter is tactile. The flat keypad comes in either red or blue.

You'll have to slide up the phone to expose the camera lens, self-portrait mirror, and flash. The rear face of the slider matches the keypad. A Micro-USB port and a camera shutter sit on the right spine, while a volume rocker rests on the right spine.

Features include a music player, an FM radio, assisted-GPS, stereo Bluetooth, and an 8-megapixel camera. For more pictures, peruse our Samsung slide show.

Nokia's messaging is free for Now

When Nokia launched the E75 in India, it also announced in its sidelines, the launch of its messaging service in the country.

That however was the official launch which of course meant that the service was available for us to use much before its launch . In far away Europe, Orange has tied up with Nokia to offer the same services, this time co-branded. The service is called Nokia Messaging By Orange and the intention is to provide access to push e-mail to all. The agreement for this was signed back in February and both the companies have agreed to expand the services to eight more countries.

Nokia's messaging service offers users single interface to access up to 10 email accounts on the same device. You can do everything you can do with a normal POP3 email account with the Messaging Service (branded or not!). You can read, send, forward and reply to emails, access subfolders, download and read attachments or attach files to emails.

Now, that is interesting. At the moment we are unsure about the charges that end users will need to shell out for using these branded services. Note that users usually pay a premium for branded services like this which usually have little to offer to users over what the plain-jane version (like the one available in India now) has.

At the moment, Nokia does not have any tie-up with an Indian operators so you can enjoy the services without paying premium charges. But note that this one is a data intensive application and you might end-up with a nice bill at the end of the month if you are on a data capped connection.

For those who are lucky (like me) who are on an unlimited connection, enjoy while it lasts! Head here to download and install the application. The site has a list of supported devices as well.

Samsung Omnia Review

No longer does Windows Mobile alone a capable smartphone make. The platform's core is as relevant, powerful, and well-supported as ever, but that's not the problem -- the real issue is that it's just plain hard to look at. The days of WinMo looking even remotely modern in its stock form are long gone, and top-tier manufacturers clearly recognize that; everyone from ASUS to HTC has taken matters into their own hands to craft custom skins that kill off as many of the ancient visuals as possible while still holding onto everything that makes Windows Mobile great.

Enter the Samsung i900 Omnia, a phone that submits to design direction forced upon the industry largely by the iPhone -- full touchscreen, no keyboard, you know the drill by now -- and does pretty much everything in its power to overcome WinMo's limitations to make it competitive in the year 2008. Did Sammy succeed? Read on.

Thanks to the good folks at Wireless Imports for the hookup!

On paper, the Omnia sounds like a smartphone dream: 7.2Mbps HSDPA 2100, quadband EDGE, 5 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.2-inch capacitive WQVGA touchscreen, GPS, Windows Mobile 6.1, WiFi, and 8 or 16GB of Flash with microSD expansion, all wrapped in a tight little brushed metal case. One glance at the carbon fiber-look case tells you that Samsung is trying to position this thing as a premium product, and there's no question it has the specs to back up the claim.

Unfortunately, the phone has to get slapped with the usual word of warning that you won't be able to latch onto any 3G in North America, because Samsung (in its infinite wisdom) saw fit to forgo a triband 3G chipset. These days, we're not buying any justification for this, particularly in a phone that sits this far up into the high end. Want to sell this only to your European customer base? That's fine, Samsung, but many of those folks are going to be traveling stateside on occasion, and they're going to want fast data when they do. Radio gripes aside, we had no problem latching onto our relic of an EDGE network and going about our slow-ass business.

Spec-wise, the phone wins by a neck over its nemesis, the Touch Diamond -- but the big difference, and the thing you're going to be affected by more than any other day in and day out, is the user interface. HTC's TouchFLO 3D is already pretty legendary in the WinMo world, solidifying itself as the skin to beat. Samsung comes to the table with TouchWiz, a name that drills home the fact that Sammy wants you touching this screen, not tapping it with a stylus. Not loud and clear enough? How about this, then: the Omnia has no place to stow a stylus. None. Insane, we know, because even as WinMo licensees are trying to wean themselves off stylus dependence, they still come in handy from time to time. Alas, Samsung says you're fingertippin' it with the Omnia whether you like it or not -- so the interface had better be built to match, and it had better be deep.

So is it? For starters, the screen is plenty bright and crisp, and the display has a nice feel with no give -- perfect for touching. Like TouchFLO 3D, we found that TouchWiz let us spend our average day without really seeing a native Windows Mobile screen, and that's a good -- nay, a great thing. It doesn't have the bedazzling spit and polish of TouchFLO 3D, but what it lacks in sparkle, it arguably makes up for in raw usability and functionality. Flick gestures work great where they're implemented; unfortunately, they don't seem to be prevasive throughout the software, and it's pretty much a gussing game figuring out where they're going work and where they aren't. We'd like to see Samsung take the bull by the horns there and finish what they've started.

The shortcut menu and program list are perfect for fiddling through with fat fingers; no complaints there. Not the prettiest by default, that's for sure, but they can be reskinned to your liking.

Where TouchWiz really shines, though, is with the Today screen's widget bar. It's brilliant, it's useful, and we're going to miss it on any phone that doesn't have it or something like it. The concept is simple enough: a collapsible bar on the left side of the display presents you with a pretty wide selection of information and / or control widgets that can be dragged onto the background and placed however you choose. There's a pretty good variety of widgets available from the get-go, but we'd love to see Samsung release new ones or market an API very, very hard to developers to get them to create widgets of their own.

Oh, notice that mouse pointer up there? Yep, the Omnia borrows the optical d-pad concept from the i780, which can be used in a traditional four-way mode or turned into a desktop-style mouse. We were skeptical of the whole thing -- and maybe we're crazy, but we ended up loving it in mouse mode. We got used to it quickly, we didn't really think that it was slowing us down much, and it essentially negates the need for a stylus for those times when a finger just won't do (like those pesky "X" and "ok" buttons in the upper right of apps, for example).

We wish we had the same love for the soft keyboards. Samsung provides its own input methods to override Windows Mobile's own, a QWERTY and a SureType-style deal. No complaints there -- the default ones have to go. Sadly, we ended up hating both; of course, your mileage may vary. The keys on the QWERTY were too narrow to be reliably and consistently pressed accurately and there was no pop-up to indicate what key was actually being pressed until we'd already pressed it. The auto-correction is annoying, overbearing, frequently wrong, and implemented in stupid places like Opera Mobile's address bar (try typing "engadget.com" -- we dare you). SureType, on the other hand... well, it's SureType, which we've always found challenging to use. Pearl owners may disagree.

In the final analysis, despite its faults, the Omnia's strengths vault it to the head of the WinMo class for the moment, particularly in this form factor. We think that a slide-out QWERTY version would do very well for Samsung as well -- as would a true world 3G model, of course.

Ways to recover damaged data

Bad things can happen to good data. Hard drives can crash. Memory cards can be formatted accidentally. CDs or DVDs on which important files are stored can become scratched and unreadable. But there are steps you can take to try to retrieve damaged data. The course you take will depend upon the type of media on which the data is stored as well as how severe the damage is.

Washington: If the scratches aren't deep, it's likely that you can at least improve the playability of the disks simply by cleaning them. Just mix up a solution of water and window cleaner or other gentle detergent, such as baby shampoo. Then use the solution to dampen a soft, lint-free cloth.

Use the dampened cloth to wipe the data side of the CD. Sometimes what appear to be scratches are actually just smudges, and these can often be removed in this fashion.

For more stubborn smudges and superficial scratches, another homemade remedy can work wonders. First, locate the scratches on the disk by looking at the data side at an angle under a bright light. Then place a small bit of toothpaste, which contains a gentle abrasive, on a cotton swab. Use the cotton swab to gently scrub the disk in the area where it's scratched.
After a few seconds of scrubbing, rinse the disk off with water and then dry it with a soft cloth. You might want to perform this entire operation in the bathroom, where you'll usually have all the supplies - and light - that you need.

At a computer store, you'll find plenty of CD and DVD cleaning kits. Some of these can be quite effective for stubborn scratches. Generally these kits consist of one or more cleaning solutions along with a micro-fibre cloth. Some even automate the cleaning process for you. Don't expect miracles, however: it's possible to scratch a disk beyond any means of repair.

Sometimes you can't. Hard drives occasionally just go bad, refusing to start up one day, either emitting a clicking sound or no sound at all.

Other times, though, there are warning signs. If your hard drive starts making noticeable clicking noises or you begin to experience random data loss or have very slow drive performance, a drive failure may be imminent. It's best to begin copying all-important data off of the drive immediately.

Sometimes shutting down your PC for a while or rebooting the computer may eliminate the problem. But don't assume it won't return. Take any opportunity to safeguard your data as a gift, and start preparing to replace the drive.

Most drive manufacturers have drive diagnostic software tools that are freely downloaded from the manufacturer's Web site. These can run exhaustive diagnostic tests to determine the health of a hard drive.

You can also try the free HDD Health utility, which should work with all recent-vintage hard drives, regardless of manufacturer. HDD Health uses the self-monitoring and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T) built in to all recent-vintage hard drives - those made within the past few years - to predict hard drive failure.

PhotoRescue has been around a long time now and has a good reputation. It can recover photos that have become damaged on flash cards, and it will even recover photographs from a flash card that has been formatted. There are versions available for Windows and Mac, and you can try it before you buy it. A license is a reasonable $29.