Face recognition to login to your PC- Banana screen

Even though face recognition is not as popular as other biometric means of security such as fingerprint recognition, it still is a powerful and easy to use way to increase your security. Banana screen lets you harness the facial recognition to login to your PC without typing in your password.

Being used to a biometric fingerprint scanner on both my work and home laptops, I was disappointed when I started using my ASUS netbook. I had to think of an alternate way to login without typing in passwords. Searching online gave me results on only one application, Banana screen from Banana Security. But even lifehacker’s links weren’t alive since Banana security’s website had nothing on it, let alone a download link. After a bit more googling, I found a link to a Banana screen download at Softpedia.

Banana screen requires that you enter the windows password before the first time you use it. After installation, you create a profile of yourself called a model. The Model is a webcam capture of your face which allows you to login. I would have liked BS to completely replace the windows login screen, but BS only creates an alternate windows lock screen (Alt + L). Every time it fails to recognize (the first few times, since it needs to adapt the model to different lighting environments) you’d have to enter your password to login. And it updates the model. It learns!!

One tip would be to set the camera timeout to a low value on the settings. That way the camera doesn’t stay on for long. To login, press shift to activate the camera, and lo, access granted!! If you enjoyed the application, leave a comment..

The New Google mobile application for symbian

The new google mobile app for symbian brings the google desktop to the mobile phone. Well, almost. It still does not index the contents of your mobile phone, but its a step in the right direction.

The mobile application which starts up at the tap of the backspace key, allows you to load the google search page interface which is linked to the gmail mobile and google maps app, google news, picasa page and few other google services. It still does not include reader in its list which is surprising considering that google reader is one of the finest aggregators out there.
The application is something like a google services control center on your symbian mobile. A bit of android in your symbian?
Read more of the new release on the official google mobile blog or download the application here

SDK vs IDE

What's SDK? A software development kit (SDK) is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform. And in many cases includes the IDE for the development What's an IDE? An integrated development environment (IDE) also known as integrated design environment or integrated debugging environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of a: 1. Source code editor 2. Compiler and/or interpreter 3. Build automation tools 4. Debugger An IDE is actually used to write and test programs. Eg.: Microsoft Visual Studio, Turbo C++ professional An SDK adds functionality, lets you include the sample code, documentation. Eg.: Eclipse SDK(it comes with the IDE)   Therefore, SDK > IDE! Hmmm...whatever...

Stopping Google Chrome from identifying you

Gmail, getting bloated?

Google themes now..before that we had google labs which brought into gmail a plethora of features mostly useless..first it was gmail, then it became gmail with chat, then support for new smileys..now it chat with video support.. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="652" caption="All because Gmail became too fat!"]

Bumptop - Physics on your desktop

I got a taste for Bumptop after my friend Vijay recommended Ted. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. But, videos of all the presentations at the event are available for free viewing. And the content on Ted is quite remarkably polished and innovations presented at TED are nothing short of praiseworthy.  Bumptop is the dream child of Anand Agarawala and was created at the University of Toronto. Currently the project is in private beta and is available for download only on an invite basis and I was lucky enough to get an invite. Here is the video from TED. The Beta version does almost most of what is shown in the video and is quite smooth and polished for beta version. You get a 3d room interface where you put your desktop icons and then you can just grow and shrink those icons using shortcut keys. The shortcuts are very easy learn and the interface is quite intuitive. But, I really think that touch interfaces would be the right arena to utilise bumptop to their fullest potential. The project makes complete use of the mouse and allows you to organize files on your desktop in best possible manner. Bumptop is actually a boon for people who tend to have a lot of files on their desktop and need to organize (or disorganize) them. The ability to stack documents, form grids/groups, view images by shuffling through them and allowing you hang priority docs on the walls, combined with the real life physics engine makes Bumptop a shining example of what true Innovation we can bring about even with the current technology. The collision detection system is really great and you would appreciate the way icons/others dangle when you hang them on the wall. Bumptop shows that innovation need not always be about new technology, it can be about using existing technology to do new things in newer ways. However, I did find that it ran faster on my slow XP machine with just 1GB of RAM than on my Vista machine with loads and loads of RAM + a Graphics card (Yeah, maybe I should turn anti aliasing off) Many of my friends asked me to give them an invite to Bumptop, but its not possible for a user to invite others and the only way to get Bumptop is to sign up for their invite at their site.  While I was waiting for the invite to come by, I did realize the existence of certain clones of Bumptop. One of them was Real Desktop. Real Desktop is quite a good product but the free version is extremely limited in what it offers and once you get an invite to Bumptop, you'll not go back to Real Desktop (even if you had paid for it). And before I forget! Here is what my desktop looks like now   [caption id="attachment_232" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="My bumptop interface"]

Multiple instances of Google talk and Firefox

Firefox and Google talk are two apps which I cannot really manage without...but then what do you do if you share your PC with someone else? Maybe someone else at home. Each of us have our own collection of bookmarks, addons and of course logins. So you would need to get Firefox and Gtalk to run multiple instances. The secret to running them is to use Firefox's in built profile manager. We need to invoke the profile manager by changing the shortcut path on your desktop. Ideally, the target looks like this "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" Change it to

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager.

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"  -no-remote -profilemanager

"C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex