Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Pogie awards celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys.   Here's a paraphrased summary of the winning ideas: Power Nap is a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. It lets the laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos) & allows the network activity to chug away even when the lid is closed. In Windows Phone 8, Kid’s Corner is a sanitized version of the operating system that contains only apps, music and videos that you’ve handpicked in advance. With this feature web browsing, e-mail, phone calls  and in-app purchases can be made off limits for kids and it can be activated with a quick left swipe from the Lock screen The Ciago iAlert and Cobra Tag are Bluetooth keychain fobs that communicate with...

Vocabulary.com does a great job of "gamify-ing" the process of building your vocabulary through its adaptive learning system It is among the PC Magazine's Top 100 Websites & the Time magazine's top 50 websites of 2012   The site's main attraction, the quiz, has some 100,000+ questions and the answers are educative. The site reportedly contains over 100 million sentence examples. The site is ad free Their dictionary is blazing fast. In an unscientific comparison, it seemed to beat another contender, thefreedictionary.com with the print layout , for the title of world's fastest, smartest dictionary.  Often, it has light-hearted word definitions and explanations that make learning new words more memorable. Sample this explanation for  filibuster, which means "to obstruct legislation by talking at great length."  As a parliamentary tactic, the filibuster dates back to at least the first century B.C.E. The rules of the Roman Senate required tha...

From his interview in the Economic Times - "We, as Google, are not in the search business. We are in the business of knowledge." - Google's Senior Vice President for Chrome and Apps & IIT-ian, Sundar Pichai  (40) A few facts - About 20% of the queries we get everyday are new. Our user base for Gmail has grown to 50 million users in India.  Chromebook will be available in at least two countries in the Asia Pacific region, excluding India, by March 2013.  It appears that Sundar Pichai likes taking potshots at Microsoft. Samples - "Windows 8 breaks the backward compatibility of its own end-toend ecosystem." "...we are constantly changing the Gmail code. It is like refuelling a plane in mid air. It happens on a day-to-day basis. If you compare it with Windows, one gets to see only four versions of Windows in five years." 'IE 10 makes available cloud experience but they (Microsoft) expect you to use Windows." Sundar ...