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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

web design Favitt Gives You A Customized Search Engine, Which Google, Yahoo and Bing Can’t

By Chris Peterson

From http://www.smashingapps.com/

Nowadays, Search is the basic mechanism which drives the Internet space. If you surf the internet quite often, you really can’t live without using a search engine. People use search engine in a variety of ways, from searching images, videos, texts, products and so on.

A Search engine like Google, Ask and Yahoo lets you quickly find relevant information, blogs and websites. You can use them to find information on any subject or product, just go to a search engine’s home page, type some text in the search box and hit the return key to get a list of webpages which may contain the information you are looking for.

But what if you need to use multiple search engines? What if you need to search videos in YouTube, search music in Last.fm , search books in Amazon simultaneously? You have to open multiple browser windows or tabs and open all these websites one by one. This can be tiring and confusing as well and for novice Internet users, this is not the most easy interface to deal with.

It would be far more convenient if we can use a single search engine to search multiple sites at once. And above all, the user should be able to do some customizations so that he can choose the features he likes and removes the stuff he doesn’t.

The folks at Faviit have come up with just what you have been looking for ages – a customized search experience so that you can choose the features yourselves.

Faviit – Search Multiple Search Engines From One Page

Faviit lets you perform the same search on multiple search engines from a single page, thus saving you from the frustration of opening multiple browser tabs and typing the same words again and again. When you go to the Faviit.com homepage, you will see the following interface:

image002

Don’t fall for the background image, you can always change it later on.

To perform a search, just enter the keywords in the search box and hit the Search button. You will immediately see the search results load with results from different websites which include Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon etc. Here is how a search result page looks:

image003

You see those links in the sidebar, just click a site’s name and Favitt will perform a search in that site and show you the results in the same page. Great!

For example, I searched for “iPad” and the Google search result page was shown (see the above screenshot). Then I thought “Ok, now I want to see some videos of the iPad”. Hence I clicked the YouTube link in the sidebar and here is what I got:

Screen shot 2010-05-02 at 6.22.25 PM

You can already feel the difference, don’t you? The video thumbnails are shown in the same page and clicking a link takes you to the video page straight away.

Quite similarly, you can search in news sources ( e.g Google News ) and micro blogging sites like Twitter, Digg or Q and A engines like Yahoo Answers. The interface works quite the same way, each search result being shown on your Faviit home page.

As you might have noticed, the search box consists of five tabs by default but you can always add other sites to the tab list. To search on other sources, simply click the “+” button placed at the right corner of the search box as shown below:

image007

Next, type the words in the search box and click on a search engine to see the results. Another feature which Favitt offers is real time search results. When you do a search and if there are any images, Tweets, YouTube videos or news articles related to the searched keyword – it will appear at the bottom of the search results page.

Found an interesting search result ? Use the share buttons placed at the bottom of search results to share a link with your friends at Facebook, Twitter or other social sites.

Signing up for a Free account with Favitt

Signing up for a free Favitt account has it’s own advantages. First, you can add your favorite sites as bookmarks and these bookmarks appear in the home page for quick browsing.

For example: I am a Facebook addict and when I get some free time, I visit my Facebook profile to see what my friends are up to. Favitt is my homepage and I have got Facebook and other social sites bookmarked as shown below:

image009

So I can access all the sites in one click and do not have to worry about browser bookmarks or manually type the address in the browser address bar.

Another advantage is that you get a personalized page such as http://favitt.com/bob, so just type that address from any computer and you get a personalized engine to start kick start surfing, that too on a customized environment. Signing up is pretty easy and you need just an email address to get it done.

The third advantage that Favitt offers is “backgrounds”. Yes, you can choose a custom background for your customized Favitt homepage. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have boring backgrounds – just a white screen and a text box. Bing shows some images but you don’t have control over the images and they are changed in random order.

With Favitt, you can either upload an image from your computer or grab an image from a publicly accessible web URL. Then you can use that image as the background of your Favitt homepage.

Here is an example:

image011

Choosing a custom background gives a feeling of “being home” when you are surfing from a friends computer or an Internet café. Further, you can adjust the position of the search box and move it to any of the four corners.

The impressive thing regarding the images is that you can upload multiple images from your computer and Favitt will rotate them on a daily basis.

Conclusion

It turns out, Favitt gives you a customized environment for search and it’s a better way to search and surf popular sources like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and the like.

Yes there are advertisements in the search result pages but all the search engines have ads in their SERP’s. From Google to Yahoo, from Digg to Yahoo Answers – no one is an exception. But the advertisements at Favitt are far way from the search results and do not appear obtrusive.

The site is completely free to use so why not try it at least once ?

How the iPod Took the World by Storm [INFOGRAPHIC]

In the late ’90s and early aughts, MP3 players were known, well, as MP3 players. However, when Apple launched the iPod on October 21, 2001, it was such a huge success that it only took a couple of years for most people to simply start using the name “iPod” whenever they referred to an MP3 player.

Apple had sold 125,000 iPods by the end of 2001; it sold a flabbergasting 225 million by 2010. Coupled with the music management/online music store one-two punch that was iTunes, the iPod turned out to be one of the most successful gadgets of all time.

In the amazing infographic below, you can see the rise of the iPod and iTunes and how they’ve affected our lives over the last nine years. It’s true: The rest of the MP3 market never stood a chance.


The iPod Revolution
[Source: Online MBA for MashableMashableMashable.com]
[via: Online MBA for Mashable.com]

Meet All Fifty Contestants for Miss USA 2010 [Pics]



Click here for the Full Gallery: http://photos.tmz.com/

photos.tmz.com *****

Teacher Fired Over Student Beating Video

First on FOX

DAMALI KEITHDAMALI KEITH Reporter
From: http://www.myfoxhouston.com/

HOUSTON - It's a story you saw First on FOX: A charter school has fired one of its teachers -- accused of beating up a student on video.

A classmate captured the entire incident on their cell phone.



The teacher in question, identified by school officials as Sherri Davis, was officially terminated on Monday night.

“Now that officials at Jamie’s House Charter School have been able to review the video on Fox News, we are horrified at the actions of the teacher,” principal David Jones said in a statement.

The video, shared with FOX 26 News by a parent, shows a sixth grade student being kicked and pummeled. The student's parent says the video is now in the hands of Harris County Sheriff's investigators. She says the teacher attacked 13-year-old Isaiah Johnson at the north Harris County charter school in late April.

"I'm horrified. I just can't believe something like that would happen to my child," Alesha Johnson told FOX 26 News.

The attack goes on for nearly a minute. Isaiah Johnson said it felt much longer.

"I was on the wall like this trying to get away from her and she started hitting me, banging my head to the wall and kicking me," Isaiah said.

"He's had a knot on his head for a week. He had a black eye, bruises on his cheek," Alesha added.

Other children in the class were watching and videotaping the attack. You can even hear some laughing.

The alleged incident happened just after TAKS testing two weeks ago.

Isaiah Johnson said it all started as he and other classmates watched and laughed as a mentally challenged girl danced.

That's when he says the teacher attacked the 13-year-old. Isaiah said he was beaten by the teacher, with other teachers looking on, right there in the classroom.

"The teachers piled up and they were looking over each others shoulders just watching," Isaiah said.

David Jones, the principal of the school, released a statement later in the day.

"There is no excuse for a teacher to behave in this way with a child," Jones said. "Although we had already removed the teacher from the classroom and put her on administrative duty, we now plan to terminate the teacher and make an apology to the student and his mother."

Jones said the school will be investigating whether other teachers saw the incident and did not report it.

Alesha Johnson has taken the tape and filed criminal charges with the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

Jamie's House Charter School is a Texas Accredited Charter School. It opened in 1999 and is currently in good standing.

---------------------------------

Read the statement regarding the beating video from principal David Jones --

http://www.myfoxhouston.com/dpp/news/local/100510-principal%3A-no-excuse-for-teacher%27s-actions

Check The Quality Of Pirate Media With The All New VCDQ

Written by enigmax
From: http://torrentfreak.com/

There are many thousands of videos on the Internet and while it’s possible to just go blindly to any one of dozens of torrent sites and search for movies or TV shows, there is no guarantee that the quality will be good. For the last decade that information has been available from VCDQuality.com and shortly the site will be relaunching with a new owner, a full makeover and fresh support for BitTorrent users.

vcdqMost readers will be familiar with The Scene, the ‘place’ where most pirate movies, music, TV shows, software and games first hit cyberspace. Although members of this intensively private community would prefer to maintain their privacy, it is from their servers that media leaks out to the wider Internet community. According to the MPAA, The Scene sits at the top of the “Piracy Pyramid”.

Although The Scene has its own unique set of quality-control standards, this doesn’t necessarily mean that their output is always of a high quality. Although the most serious offenders will be ‘nuked’ (Scene talk for “something is wrong, don’t bother with this release”) in the case of movies, for example, Scene rules allow CAM releases which may be virtually unwatchable.

Furthermore, a release receiving a ‘nuke’ doesn’t necessarily mean that its unwatchable, it might just mean that it has breached any one of The Scene’s often bewildering and sometimes downright archaic in-house rules.

Of course, none of this would matter to ‘outsiders’ if Scene releases stayed locked away as intended for the use of the few, but they don’t. So wouldn’t it be great if there was a central source, a database of releases where the average Internet user could go for information on what’s hot and what’s not in the world of piracy?

Some might be surprised to learn that VCDQuality.com has been providing such a service for almost a decade. Founded in 2001, VCDQ quickly became the best place for the average non-Scener to find out quickly if a new movie had hit the Internet yet and in what quality. If it had, it would appear pretty quickly at the top of the list on the main page.

Along with the name of the release, the format of the source is indicated – DVDRIP, CAM, DVD Screener, R5 (Region 5) for example. This information is supported by links to screenshots of the release in question, its NFO (a small descriptive text file distributed by the Scene group responsible), the name of the release group and a link to the movie on IMDb.

Perhaps the most useful link moves off to the comment section. Here those that have actually downloaded and watched a particular release discuss what they have seen, specifically whether the video and sound of the release are up to scratch and worth the effort of finding and downloading.

Unfortunately, due to the site’s policy of shunning most advertising, it has lacked investment in recent times. A hard drive disaster last year caused quite a lot of pain and 8 weeks ago their server died altogether. It was time for a new beginning.

With the assistance of a new owner, behind the scenes the site has been receiving its first proper update in a decade. If all is going to plan, as you read this article or in the coming hours the new VCDQ will be launching with a fresh new look and a host of new features.

Along with a rock-solid server and hosting, the site will be expanding its databases. While traditionally VCDQ has reported only on Scene releases, with the rise of BitTorrent release groups, P2P releases will be reported on too

“We’ve decided to add P2P sources due to the rise of Torrent sites in recent years,” Admin Neversoft told TorrentFreak. “While the scene still produces more releases and better quality we cannot ignore the fact that your average Torrent user doesn’t care about group affiliations or rules, they just want the best quality available.”

Scene purists (and there are a lot of those reading and resident at VCDQ) will be pleased to learn that P2P releases can be filtered out from the site, but the rise of P2P and BitTorrent in particular as a force to be reckoned with can’t be denied.

“By ignoring P2P we would be ignoring a large percentage of what people are downloading out there,” Neversoft explains. “This was a difficult decision for us, we’ve always shunned the P2P scene and to a certain extent derided it but as they say… ‘If you can’t beat em, join ‘em’ and we think we can provide the same excellent service for P2P releases as well. Having said that, it will be select releases – we’re not about to become a dumping ground for every reencode out there.”

In addition the site will add movie/TV HD formats, PC, Xbox360 and Wii sections and will improve its databases with information from multiple sources. Importantly, the site will update quicker to provide news on the latest releases, faster.

That news will be delivered in a number of ways. From the nicely presented release pages, fully customizable RSS feeds, Twitter updates, improved forum and staff blogs, the new VCDQ already looks very promising indeed. Neversoft told TorrentFreak that there’s even more to come.

“In time we’ll be improving the rating/review system as well and we’re still tweaking and will be for some time but we’re going live because the site already seriously out-performs the old VCDQ so it seems silly to just keep tweaking in beta when we already have something better’ that we can deploy now,” he explains.

Moving forward, Neversoft hopes that VCDQuality can become the iMDB of the warez scene while also providing useful services to BitTorrent and Usenet sites. While user comments on torrent sites are useful for determining if a torrent is ‘fake’ or not, often the quality of the release is a neglected topic of conversation, a gap that Neversoft feels VCDQ can fill.

“What’s the point of Torrent and NZB sites having the odd comment on releases on their site when they can link to a whole smorgasbord of comments, reviews and screenshots free of charge?”

Continuing on the P2P/BitTorrent theme, VCDQ will also allow users to submit P2P release information. So, if anyone believes the site has missed an important P2P release, all they have to do is collate the NFO along with samples if they have them and submit them to the moderation team for consideration.

All in all, this is a very welcome update to a much-valued resource. Furthermore, unlike other sources that have tried to replicate the VCDQuality experience but with tacked on download links, VCDQ remains entirely legal and as such can look forward to a stable and promising future.

The new site (blue theme, as opposed to the old red) should be available within a couple of hours at the usual URL.

Who Knew A Merry Go Round Could Be So Dangerous?

youtube.com A merry go round + a motorcycle = hilarity

33 Pictures Caught at the Exact Right Moment


Zoom, click, flash - and with that, through luck or skill of the photographer, sometimes an image is captured at just the right second. Here are 33 pictures caught at the perfect moment.

What is This Instrument in a New Trent Reznor Song?

What is This Instrument in a New Trent Reznor Song?

Posted by Sean_Yeaton

It’s the Dewanatron Swarmatron, of course!

So, Trent Reznor is back with his first musical alms since Nine Inch Nails. The project, named after British industrial noise band, How to Destroy Angels, is a collaboration with his wife, former West Indian Girl frontwoman Mariqueen Maandig.

What we’ve heard so far is really cool, and I for one am really excited about the Dewanatron Swarmatron getting some love in this video. The mysterious synth – though perhaps not as mysterious as this one – was created to produce eight tones tuned approximately to one note, each tone slightly different in pitch to produce a complex and natural choral effect.

Best of all, it’s played with a single taffy-like controller that moves the pitch center up or down.

The Swarmatron was developed by Sculptors, electronic musicians, inventors and cousins, Brian and Leon Dewan. The Dewan’s have a whole fleet of homespun electronic instruments that you should definitely check out, here

You can buy it here: http://bigcitymusic.com/product.asp?cat=new&pid=1000896

Damien Walters 2010 Parkour And Free Running


April 30, 2010http://www.equipowarez.com Parkour and Free Running Damian Walters in 2010