NOW CHARGE YOUR MOBILE WITH A CUP OF HOT COFEE

         A new device that can charge your mobile phone with a hot cup of coffee or a cold beer mug has been developed by a US company.

The company claims that the two-sided Epiphany  converts the warmth of your hot cocoa or iced beverage into power for your phone. The lightweight device is portable enough to store in your purse or day bag for emergencies.

The device uses a Stirling engine powered solely by heat disparities to generate the electricity to keep your phone up and running, Gizmag reported.

Stirling engines were actually invented in 1816 as a rival to the steam engine, but its use was limited to low-power applications for a long time.

Epiphany Labs is using modern materials to use the technology in a rather different way. The most obvious evolution comes in terms of size.The working prototype of the Epiphany onE Puck is not much larger than the bottom of a cup, so it's small enough to carry around easily.

The device has two sides - a blue side for cold drinks and a red side for hot drinks. According to its creators, a hot drink is the optimal way to charge a device.

It comes with a USB port that can charge any device that draws 1000mA or less. This means it can charge iPhones, Androids, iPods and other USB-based devices. 

Epiphany Labs claims that, in ideal circumstances, the device would be able to charge your phone at the same speed you would see plugging it in directly to a wall.

It will also work in less-than-ideal conditions, but if you are not placing a fresh hot drink on the Puck, you will have to wait a little longer for your device to receive a full charge.

The team from Epiphany Labs has a working prototype, and is turning to Kickstarter to get the funding needed for production.

NOW SHUT DOWN YOUR PC FROM REMOTE OR AUTOMATICALLY

So, you want to head to bed… time to power down the PC and call it a night. But wait… that downloadhasn’t finished yet. You could stay up and wait for it to finish, but then you will miss out on sleep. You could leave it running, but that’s a waste of electricity. Or you could do is turn to Shutter, which gives you a couple of alternative options. This is a free tool that may not look like anything special, but it has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it well worth checking out.

Used at its most basic Shutter could be configured to automatically shut down your computer in an hour’s time, or however long you think it’s going to take for your download to complete. This in itself is useful, but there’s much more the app. Grab yourself a copy from the website and get it installed.

Launch the app and prepare to be distinctly underwhelmed by its appearance – but looks can be, and in fact are, deceptive.

Click the Event drop down menu and you will find that there are a number of triggers for you to choose from. These include a simple countdown timer or an alarm-style time trigger, but there are also more interesting options such as low battery and the closing of a window or the termination of a particular process.

Depending on what you choose from this first menu, you will then have to configure additional settings. If you have opted for a timer, this involves little more than specifying how long the timer should run, but you may also choose which windows Shutter should monitor, the battery level to watch out for, or the processor activity level that should act as the trigger.

The Action menu is where you can select what should happen when your chosen trigger occurs. We are interested in using the Shutdown option for now, but restarting, hibernating, sleeping, sound muting and more are also available.

Hit the Start button and you can walk away from your machine safe in the knowledge that the shutdown or other action will happen in your absence. If you have opted for an alarm or sound muting/unmuting instead, you can use the Now button to have a dry run and ensure that it is going to work as expected.

You might well be wondering why you would want to take the time to configure Shutter to do something that could be achieved by setting up Windows’ task scheduler instead. Shutter is far more flexible than Windows’ scheduling tool in terms of the different events that can be used as triggers, and it is also able to trigger a wider range of events. But it does not end there.

We recently looked at how you can re-enable the hibernation feature in Windows 8, but if you right click the Shutter icon in the notification area of the taskbar it’s possible to access the various power down states from the Now sub-menu.

But arguably the most useful element of Shutter is its remote access option. Click the Options button in the main program window, or select this from the system tray menu. While you are here, you might want to select the autorun option so that the program starts with Windows.

This is important if you want to ensure that your computer always shuts down on a schedule or you want to have the remote access option available at all times.

Moving to the Web Interface tab, you can turn on a very useful option.  Tick the Enable box, select your computer’s IP address from the Listen IP menu and then choose the port you’d like to use.

You are required to secure your remote session, so enter a username and password before clicking Save.

Assuming you have a firewall in place, you will need to grant Shutter permission to make use of yournetwork before you can continue with this feature of the program.

Returning to our scenario in which a lengthy download is getting in the way of going to bed, the remote access option is particularly useful. You could head off to bed with your laptop, watch a movie or catch up on emails beneath the sheets and log into your other machine via Shutter.

Fire up your web browser, enter the IP address of your computer into the address bar followed by a colon and then the port number you have specified – e.g. 192.168.1.67:802.

At first it may seem as though you have just been presented with a list of shut down options, and it’s certainly true that you can jump right in and remotely sleep your PC if you want. However, you may first want to check just what’s happening on the machine.

You can click the ‘Information on Computer’ link to view details of processes that are running – which may help you to determine whether a particular task has safely completed – but the ‘Screenshot of a Desktop’ link gives you a quick snapshot so you can see exactly what’s going on before you decide what to do.

And because this is all web-based, you can even use your phone to control your PC from bed.

This is a wonderfully useful little utility that can also be controlled from the command line, which opens up additional possibilities. Let us know what you think of the tool in the comments below.

NEW IMAGE TAKEN BY SATELLITE "EARTH FROM SPACE"

You may have seen pictures of our planet from space, but never quite like this. A new NOVA show on PBS, "Earth from Space," features amazing images captured by satellites used to observe the planet, and these pictures have given scientists a better view and understanding of the Earth than ever before. The NOVA program features photos, videos, computer models and other data that the show's creators have combined to create a comprehensive image of Earth's interconnected ecosystems.

A TOOL WHICH CAN EXTRACT SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR OF PEOPLE FROM FACEBOOK, TWITTER,

Raytheon, the U.S. defense contractor has developed new software that can extract social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook to track and predict users' behaviour, according to British media news outlets.

The story from The Guardian says that the key features of Raytheon's software, developed in co-operation with the U.S. government and delicately titled Rapid Information Overlay Technology are said to be an ability to separate through social media and figure out who your friends are and the places you frequent.

What is disturbing is that such a tool could likely end up in the hands of a repressive State, or a shadowy agency inside a more open State. Australia's Sydney Morning Herald today has a similar story on the same theme.

For instance, IBM sells “social media analytics” software that can “capture consumer data from social media to better understand attitudes, opinions, trends and manage online reputation” and even “predict customer behavior”. That's the same company that can lash up a supercomputer or sell you a scale-out NAS capable of storing multiple petabytes of raw information.

And customer service software firm Genesys sells “social engagement” software that “automates the process of social listening to your customers” and “extends business rules and service level strategies to the growing volume of social media-based customer interactions.
A quick mention of Big Data, daily and breathlessly advanced as capable of all of the above, and much more to more data, is also surely worth inserting at this point.

And then there are Google, Twitter, Facebook and others whose entire business is built on figuring out who you spend time with and where you spend or intend to spend that time, so they can sell that information to advertisers all over the globe.

Or hand over your data to the government, which seems to be happening rather more regularly if the social networks' own reports on the matter suggest.

We're not suggesting that Raytheon's software was designed as an instrument of State surveillance, but it's still worth pointing out that the company is far from alone in having developed software capable of tracking numerous data public sources, aggregating them into a file on an individual, and doing so without the individuals' knowledge.

And that the company has done so in full collaboration with the U.S. government should not surprise anyone.As for the spatial aspect of these allegations, the fact that photos contain spatial metadata is hardly news, nor is the notion that social media leaves a trail of breadcrumbs a novel-- it's a well-known fact.

One has only to revisit news from 2010 to be reminded of how pleaserobme.com pointed out how social media can alert thieves to the fact you've left your home.
Far clearer is the fact that you are the product for any free online product. Also very clear is that by using such services, data about you will be consumed by a large and diverse audience. The scariest thing of all may be how few of those that use such services care or even realize the vast implications this could have on their personal and professional lives.

TOP 5 MOST POPULAR DOWNLOADER OF 2013

1.Internet Download Manager :

Internet Download Manager increases download speed with built-in download logic accelerator, resume and schedule downloads. This one is the best download managers which is the most popular from past 4 years.

2. Download Accelerator Plus (DAP)  :

Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) is the worlds most popular download accelerator, giving you the fastest possible download speeds, with privacy, security, and ease of use.

3. Free Download Manager :

Free Download Manager is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager. Moreover, FDM is 100% safe, open-source software distributed under GPL license. FDM accelerates downloads by splitting files into sections and then downloading them simultaneously.

4. Orbit Downloader :

Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/streaming media from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare, support RTMP. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

5. VDownloader :

VDownloader is a powerful tool that can search, download and convertvideos from Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace, DailyMotion, Pornotube, Yuvutu, and many other similar sites, saving them in AVI or MPG format. It is also a powerful videoconverter.

Check and share these most popular downloader othe year 2013 and comment it.