Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If you like reading blogs in English in your native language but find having to translate them EACH TIME with online translation tools a hassle, then this Google Reader tip will come as a big time-saver. This tip will help only if your native language is one of the 21 languages that Google Reader currently supports. Here are the steps: Subscribe to the feed of your favorite blog with Google Reader In Google Reader, go to the Settings option that's on the top menu on the right In the Settings page, in the first tab Preferences, select your native language from the Language combo box. Click on the "Back to Google Reader" link to view the blogs you have subscribed to. If you have subscribed to multiple blog feeds, select a single blog Subscription from the Subscriptions panel on the left. In the detailed listing of Feeds in the main panel, click the "Feed Settings..." drop down that is in the section below the blog title. From the drop down list, choose "Tran...

"...many of the sciences are so abstract, and the amount of things you have to learn before you start connecting to those practical issues can be very daunting." - Bill Gates Microsoft Research has been releasing a lot of interesting projects this year - Songsmith , an improved Translator , WorldWide Telescope (WWT) and now Project Tuva . Some of them are offbeat and path-breaking. Project Tuva is an interactive educational video application built with Silverlight. Project Tuva is an interactive video experience that makes learning about science relevant and exciting through annotations authored by researchers and subject-matter experts. Project Tuva is launching with Richard Feynman's Messenger Series lectures, a cornerstone set of seven talks at Cornell University in 1964. These videos are enhanced with a number of different layers of contextual information: full transcripts and captions, fully searchable transcripts, time-synchronized contextual "extras" th...

Ever wanted to be a Web entrepreneur? Startup 101 is an online serialized book that shows you what's invovled in becoming one. "Startup 101" is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture....Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle - including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public. This is the tentative list of chapters - 10 things to be clear about before you start Are you really an entrepreneur? How first-time entrepreneurs can work well with investors Creating your vision, mission, strategy, and plan Finding the right wave to ride (secular trends) Working booms and busts to your advantage (cyclical trends) Building your team pre-financing Building an advisory board Finding a URL and company name Company registration choices The Capital-Raising Ladder How to pitch to a VC or angel How not to get screw...

Just in case you haven't heard of it yet or seen it, HOME is a documentary movie by Yann Arthus-Bertrand with breathtaking photography on how we can preserve the Earth before it's too late. It is available for free viewing on YouTube . Synopsis of the documentary: In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it is too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth's riches and change its patterns of consumption. If you are concerned about the environment, you should also take a look at the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World . It tells the thought-provoking story of the drinking water crisis across the world through 250 photographs by the world’s top photojournalists. You can download the book in PDF format for free from Amazon .

Pete LePage, an Internet Explorer Product Manager discourages running multiple versions of IE on the same box (he calls them "Frankenbuilds") using tools like IETester . There several free alternatives for testing your web application in different versions of IE - Install the Virtual PC (VPC) images of IE .  For help on using a VPC image, check this  step by step guide .  Update : Modern.IE offers several options for IE browser compatibility testing including VMs of IE for OSX, Linux or Windows WebPageTest.org  is an online web performance analysis service that lets you test your web page on IE versions 7 and above. Use Expression Web SuperPreview for testing across multi-platform versions of popular browsers . Update :  Microsoft Expression products are being retired and there is no new development. Also see:  HOW TO easily verify your website design in different browsers/OSs