Bluetooth watch

Heard about this watch which has Bluetooth in it. Sometime in 2007, Sony Ericsson launched its new Bluetooth watch, called MW-150. It has now 3 versions of the same; the classic as well as the business and music versions.

Some benefits of the watch:

• It connects to your phone via Bluetooth and displays caller information. You can use it to answer or reject calls probably while you are driving
• You can use your Bluetooth Watch as a music remote control when your phone is on the other side of the room or if you’re using it to listen via your home speakers. View tracks, adjust the volume, change the tune or switch your music off, all from your watch and without getting out of your chair
• The watch gives a vibrating signal when your phone goes out of range

Read more here.

Credit Card VANs

This was the question I was asked on Aadvark. This was the explanation I found on Citi Banks website.

By using Virtual Account Numbers, you get peace of mind knowing that your actual credit card number is never revealed to merchants, so it can’t be stolen from their files. Plus, each number can only be used with a single merchant, so it will be void if someone tries to use it elsewhere.

How does it work?

With this service, you never have to give out your real credit card number when shopping online. Instead, a substitute credit card number is generated to take the place of your real account number. Every purchase you make with Virtual Account Numbers will appear on your card statement, just like any other transaction. It’s the safe way to shop online.

How to use?

Step 1

First, you’ll need to log into your credit card account online. Most credit card companies put their virtual account number option in their “Tools” or “Services” menu.

Step 2

Click on the “Tools” menu and click on the link to “Generate a Virtual Account Number.”

Step 3

Most companies offer two options. Users may download a program that runs from their computers and is stored for later use or they may use the browser option, which runs directly from the credit card website.

Step 4

Choose whichever option suits your needs, then run the program following the instructions on the website. You may need to disable pop-up blockers to see the account number.

Step 5

The next window will display a virtual account number, an expiration date and the CVV (Card Verification Value) for use online. Write this information down.

Step 6

Now go shopping! When you are ready to checkout, enter the virtual card number at checkout instead of your actual account number. Be sure to use the expiration date and CVV assigned to the virtual number.

Step 7
If you are finished with the account number, you can log back into your credit card account and delete it. If not, check the expiration date provided and keep shopping!

Source: eHow

Longest exposure photograph

The adjacent picture is one of the longest exposure photographs. And the exposure was for 15,552,000 seconds or 6months!!

Photographer Justin Quinnell strapped the camera to a telephone pole overlooking the Gorge, where it was left between December 19, 2007 and June 21, 2008–the Winter and Summer solstices. This dream-like picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge taken during half a year.

The image was captured on a pin-hole camera made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture and a single sheet of photographic paper.

Solargraph’ shows six months of the sun’s luminescent trails and its subtle change of course caused by the earth’s movement in orbit. The lowest arc being the first day of exposure on the Winter solstice, while the top curves were captured mid-Summer.

(Dotted lines of light are the result of overcast days when the sun struggled to penetrate the cloud.)

Common faults of the human mind

Stumbled upon this page which talks about the 10 most common mistakes of the human mind. Was intriguing to see  so many of these happen every day to all of us.

For example, reactance is defined as the urge to do exactly the opposite of what you are told to do. Found mostly in teenagers, but then I could think of so many situations where I would argue with my manager over a certain way to do things, not because I don’t agree with him, but because I don’t like being told what to do!

Again, self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. An example given is the following:

“Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Because a recession is 2 quarters of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decline, you cannot know you are in a recession until you are at least 6 months into one. Unfortunately, at the first sign of decreasing GDP, the media reports a possible recession, people panic and start a chain of events that actually cause a recession.”

Types of Cheeses

Everytime I go to an Italian restaurant, I find the menu card full of different varieties of cheese. Mozarella, Chhedar, cottage cheese, parmesan and what not. This post is to figure out the differences between these and if possible, the usage.

Mozzarella: Favored for its mild, milky taste this type of cheese is more of a cooking cheese than a cheese board cheese due to its good binding properties, moist texture, and ability to melt. It absorbs the flavors and juices of the ingredients surrounding it and is perfectly designed for cooking. Mozzarella is also low in fat, therefore, it is ideal to use even when dieting. Mozzarella is the perfect cheese for Italian dishes or melted over tomatoes and garlic bread.
Cheddar: Cheddar can have a diverse selection of tastes that range from mild too sharp. This is dependent upon the age of the cheese. Mild Cheddar is perfect for sandwiches because it has a mellow balance of flavors. Sharp Cheddar is great for cooking because its flavor is released when heated and it shreds well. Sharp cheddar goes well in salads and sandwiches. It is a favorite for deli, and snack trays.

Brick: It is a mild, but also pungent, sweet tasting cheese. It is a semi-soft cheese that slices well without crumbling. Brick has a reddish-brown rind and its inside is yellow-white in color with many small holes. Brick is delicious with fruits and vegetables. It also goes well on sandwiches and snack trays.

Cottage Cheese: It is an adaptable source of protein for table use, snacks, salads, and in baking. The flavor goes well with fresh vegetables or condiments, such as peppers, olives, or pimientos, as well as with fruits, such as pineapple, peaches, or berries. Low-fat cottage cheese can be used to replace higher-fat-content cream cheese in desserts such as cheesecake and Danish pastry, and it’s good in savory baked dishes such as lasagna. Found in salad bars, it stands alone or goes well with fruit or as a side dish.

Parmesan: This is a hard, grainy textured cheese varying in shape and size. It’s used mainly as a grating cheese on many different types of foods and is a good cooking cheese because it does not form threads as it melts. Parmesan cheese will keep for years when it’s whole and will continue improving with age. A perfect topper for pizza and Italian dishes.

Read this for more

Chatroulette

Heard about chatrooms, heard about social networking but this is an interesting concept. Chatroulette (chat-roulette) is a website that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day. One month later there were 50,000. The site has been featured in The New York Times,^[2] New York magazine, and on Good Morning America, Newsnight in the United Kingdom, Tosh.0, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Chatroulette was even parodied in the South Park season 14 episode “You Have 0 Friends”. In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users, approximately 33% of them from the United States and 5% from Germany.

My office website blocks chatroulette as Adult/Sexually explicit content. And there are reasons for it. Any website like this would be massively abused for spreading pornographic content. Approximately 1 in 10 of feeds from Chatroulette were either users exhibiting themselves in the nude or masturbating.

A video introduction to chatroulette could be found here.

The Sun

Found this beautiful pic of the Sun on the web. This one’s recently captured by SDO (Solar Dynamics Laboratory).

SDO: The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission to be launched for NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) Program, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

SDO’s goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems by determining

• how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured
• how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.

Some more interesting pics and videos here

Teaser rates

ICICI Bank cut home loan rates by bringing back its old teaser home loan rate product till the end of the month (read news).

Wanted to find out what teaser rates mean.

Investopedia says:

“An initial rate on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). This rate will typically be below the going market rate, and is used by lenders to entice borrowers to choose ARMs over traditional mortgages. The teaser rate will be in effect for only a few months, at which point the rate will gradually climb until it reaches the full indexed rate, which will be a static margin rate plus the floating rate index to which the mortgage is tied.”

In most cases, a teaser rate will be quite attractive to the prospective customer. The rate is usually less than the current market rate for comparable services, which helps to grab the attention of consumers. Along with the introductory rate, the provider also quotes the rate structure that will be in place once the short-term teaser rate expires. Unfortunately, many consumers tend to overlook this data until the expiration takes place, and find themselves saddled with a rate that is above current market standards.

New Coke

“New Coke” is the unofficial name of the reformulation introduced in 1985 by The Coca-Cola Company to replace the original formula of its flagship soft drink, Coca-Cola (a.k.a. Coke). Properly speaking, New Coke had no separate name of its own, but was simply known as “the new taste of Coca-Cola” until 1992 when it was renamed Coca-Cola II.

The American public’s reaction to the change was poor, and the new cola was a major marketing failure. The subsequent reintroduction of Coke’s original formula, re-branded as “Coca-Cola Classic”, resulted in a significant gain in sales, leading to speculation that the introduction of the New Coke formula was just a marketing ploy.

The Coca Cola Company claims it was “arguably the biggest risk in consumer goods history”. Read more about “Coke Lore” here.

Pale Blue Dot

“Pale Blue Dot” is the name given to this 1990 photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1 when its vantage point reached the edge of the Solar System, a distance of roughly 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres).

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

More stories about the discovery can be found here.

A video from the same book is below.