ghacks Technology News
  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Feb 11th, 2008
  • Comments: None

Tips for hard-core English learners

English pwns. Whether you like it or not, we all need it daily. Those who additionally enjoy learning this interesting language could appreciate a few tips on how to improve their skills even more. Since I still need to keep learning as well as revising what I’ve already learned, I’ve been visiting some websites and services of ESL type and I’d like to share a few of those I came to like the best.

Let’s get started by taking a glance at an interesting website that accumulates English students from all over the world and besides providing some learning resources suggests ways to talk with the other learners world-wide using either Skype or MSN as the main framework. I think active talking is the biggest problem concerning foreign languages, all other activities seem to be much easier compared to it.

Speak-English-Today maintains a database of people who are willing to break the weird feeling of talking to other English learners and start improving their and their partner’s capabilities of self-expression. Experience conversation with people from different countries, it’s even fun sometimes. The initial courage will pay off in the end. Paid courses with native speakers are also available, optionally.

(more…)

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Online Services, The Web

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Jan 17th, 2008
  • Comments: None

Teac MP-450 by experience

I’d like to share my view of a very fine low-end (maybe mid) personal audio/video player I’ve bought recently, the Teac MP-450. I was lucky enough to get a 40% sale on it in an online store so that I got an awesome player for a really low price, great deal indeed. Nevertheless, even if you have to buy it for the usual price at about 100-130$ (1GB version), it’s still worth the money I would say. Now to the main features.

Although some reviewers expressed their doubts about its design, especially the placement of the buttons when compared to the high-end devices, I must say that I actually do like it and don’t have the least problem with the easy navigation at all. There are 3 color versions of this smallish block that you can choose from – black-silver, graphite and pink.

Since the size is really tiny (70 x 43 x 11.5 mm), you’d have no trouble carrying it anywhere.

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Categories: Gadgets, Music and Video

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Jan 13th, 2008
  • Comments: 1

A preview of the future

Knowing the position of every single particle in the whole infinite universe at the moment, you would be able to predict the future precisely some people say. Well, since our far advanced 2.0 technology is (and will remain for a while) still too lame to do such experiment at present, there’s no way to make predictions like that. But hey, who says we can’t attempt to guess what happens in the near future?

Of course the more people participate in suggesting what comes next the more accurate the suggestions can become. In order for this system to work, you need one place where anyone could express their idea about the future. There is such place and it’s called FutureScanner, a website (kinda Digg clone but with original idea) for collaborative future forecasting. Individual submissions are separated by category and a year when they’re expected to come true.

On the main page you can display the most popular or new items and also use advanced filters to only display some particular ones. Each of these can be voted up or down thus filtering the waste out and keeping the most interesting forecasts at the top of the list. IMHO Memebox still needs to work on the design a little bit, especially to make it work properly in Opera (!) but it appears to be quite promising project now. Commenting and RSS feeds are already implemented.

(more…)

Tags: , ,
Categories: Online Services, The Web

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Dec 25th, 2007
  • Comments: None

Refresh yourself with power-nap sounds

You may have gone through some stressful and exhausting periods lately when arranging everything for nice and quiet x-mas time, trying to find just the right presents for your friends and family and so on. Now you probably want to rest a little bit and enjoy the days off as much as possible. You might appreciate some kind of stimulant that would help you loosen the tension and concentration accumulated in your mind and body..

NapSounds.com is a very simple website aimed at providing a good content rather than an amazing design. What you can get here for free are daily updated power-nap sounds that are able to help you enjoy a few-minute rest every day to “recharge your batteries” in a short time. Power-nap is actually a really short rest during your day which – if performed the right way – can equal up to several hours of sleep. Power-nap sound containing varied sound effects and melodies picked for this purpose is the thing that should help you enjoy your short rest the right way.

(more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Categories: Music and Video

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Dec 25th, 2007
  • Comments: 3

DIY: Easy CPU probe

We always try to lower our CPU usage as much as possible for a normal use. Still, there are situations like testing purposes when we may want our CPU to be 100% busy to test its behavior. This is usually tightly related to overclocking and probing the CPU cooling system capability along with it. Of course you can always use benchmarking applications to give your system some harsh time but it’s not necessary when you know how to increase CPU load all the way up to 100% easily in a few seconds. Note that this has only been tested on single-core computers, it prolly won’t work with multi-core CPUs.

Once when messing with command-line features a bit, I found out that a simple 1-line code can bring my CPU to 100% load in a second for as long as I want. If I really wanted to test the reliability of my CPU fan or water cooling system, I would run this tiny code for pretty long time like a few hours to make my CPU sweat a bit. Now to that simple code – bring up the Run window by pressing Win+R and start command line by putting cmd in it. Here comes that simple loop:

(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Dec 25th, 2007
  • Comments: 4

Automatically download sequentially designated files

Ever wanted to download multiple podcasts/vidcasts or similar files that are for example attached to RSS feeds without having to download each of them manually from the website? Having bought a new mp3 player, I needed to download multiple episodes of my favorite podcast (English as a Second Language) links to which I have been collecting for some time but didn’t have much free time to listen to them. It would be insane to have to follow each link to the website and then manually download the podcasts one after one, repeating this procedure several hundred times…

Actually, two situations can turn up at that moment:

1) Listing the contents of a particular website is permitted and you can simply paste the path to a download manager which should be able to manage downloading the files. Though, it’s not very common.
2) Listing the contents is prohibited and your download manager probably won’t be able to manage downloading the files. You’re not gonna download the files one at a time, are you?

(more…)

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Operating Systems, Security, The Web, Windows

  • Author: Tobey
  • Published: Dec 10th, 2007
  • Comments: None

Opera’s progress bar in detail

After installation Opera’s default settings show the progress bar which displays information about how the current page is loading in its simplest form – as a small rectangular bar that only appears when a loading process is active. This bar however is not revealing enough information for advanced users who are interested in what exactly is going on when a website refuses to load.

Let’s take a look at how we can easily change default lightweight appearance of Opera’s progress bar to a “heavy-armed” one which provides us with more information at the same time. Either right-click anywhere around the active tab in your browser (on any panel) and choose Customize from the menu or select Appearance from the Tools menu or again use a keyboard shortcut for it by pressing Shift+F12 (neat how many ways there are in Opera to achieve a simple task, ain’t it ;) ). After selecting the Toolbars tab in “Appearance” window, focus your sight on a drop-down list near …you guessed it… the Progress Bar label.

Here you can choose one of 2 options (excluding the default and Off ones), depending on your personal preferences. Selecting “Show inside address bar” option will make the progress bar appear inside of the address bar which seems a bit impractical to me because it blocks the address bar preventing you from accessing it directly. Though, someone might like it being displayed this way. I personally prefer the other “Pop-up at bottom” option which makes the progress bar appear at the bottom of your browser, just above the status bar (if enabled).

(more…)

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Browsing, opera



© 2005-2009 Ghacks.net. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - About Us