I was, maybe too late in getting the opportunity to experience the new Facebook through my account.

Meanwhile Facebook users like me, who still haven’t got the link for new Facebook in their account, can simply log on thorough http://new.Facebook.com to experience it.

Facebook announced the launch of new Facebook on 21^st July 2008 only, but the new feature was rolled out in phases to users. I got the link to try out the new Facebook in my account today and so thought of giving it a through review.

The link appeared like this and when I clicked on it, I was taken to the new Facebook home.

Surely this time, the whole focus of the developer team at Facebook was to redesign the homepage and profile page, which many users (like me) feel, was too much cluttered with many application boxes. The home page has changed from three columns to two columns, with all other things on the homepage remaining pretty much the same.

But the main work from the ground level has been done on the profile page, which is still 3 columns…one column only for ads. The prominent features I noticed on the profile page are:

1. Firstly, I was first wondering on how to change the profile pic now, as the link to change it was nowhere. But don’t worry when you hover your mouse over your profile pic, you get an option in the upper right corner, to change your pic.
2. If you are getting too much confused by the new features, there is a help. All the new features have yellow highlights on them, on which you can click and learn what are they, and how to use them.
3. The most user-friendly approach is the introduction of tabbed style menu on the profile page.
4. Now you can also click under your pic and write a small tagline.
5. The update bar is introduced in place of “what are you doing”. It has been given prominent place in the profile. The update status bar looks more like Twitter update bar saying “what are you doing”.
6. Now the users have ability to preview third party applications before installing them.
7. And most importantly, the whole clutter of the third party application boxes is cleared from the profile page now and given a separate “boxes” tab and page.

And last but not the least as the best trick in the hat of a social networking firm, it is upto users themselves, to continue using the new interface or stick to the old one. They can revert back anytime by clicking “back to the old facebook”.

Techunknown Rating: Changes are most often for a good. On the Facebook, it will be for better. The integration of story updates as feeds is surely a broad social advantage for the users. Making itself more appealing and simple, Facebook can be sure that it will get huge fan following from every part of cyberspace, because it has no boundaries.

Feeling helpless that you cannot download free software for your iTouch/iPhone, just because you don’t have an iTunes account at iTunes store? Most of the users cannot do all this because iTunes require essentially a credit card for sign up.
But You can now do it all by creating a free iTunes account.

Here are the steps you can follow to create a Free iTunes account without a Credit Card:

1. open iTunes and click on iTunes store from left panel.
2. At the bottom page select My store as “United States”, the first option.
3. When the page reloads completely, on the right hand side under Quick Links select “Redeem”.
4. Now goto this site http://www.tunecore.com/freealbum . You will get a free Redeem code from there.
5. Paste the Redeem code you got into the Redeem screen of iTunes. When you press “Redeem”, you will be asked to provide your Apple/AOL id. But in the bottom right of same window there will be an option to create new account.Click it.
6. Now in the new window Enter your details and in the Payment options select None.
   Note: While entering details you should note that you are being signed up as an United States citizen so you should provide your details according to that only .
   In the name and address area, fill out anything as your wish. But the city, state, pin code and telephone nos. should be correct. I simply googled about all these details (remember google is one of the best tools of a wanna-be hacker). You can fill out these sample details:
   CITY: CAROL CITY
   STATE: FLORIDA
   ZIP CODE: either 33055 or 33056
   PHONE: there are two separated boxes. The first one is area code. Fill 305. After that you have to fill phone no. Type any 7 random numbers.
7. Select the none option and click continue, and it’s done.

That’s how you hack your way into a totally FREE iTunes account without a Credit Card !

But Hurry Up as the FREE Redeem Coupon codes are being given away till 30th September only.

source: http://theappledaily.com/2008/08/04/create-free-itunes-account-without-credit-card/

One really interesting, simple project any geek-next-door can carry out, that looks really cool. I found this How-To on instructables.

All you need for it is:

5 3.5″ floppy disks (which are of no use to you now), drill, 5 4mm drill bits, zip ties to tie the floppy disks together and scissors.

Simply you have to drill the holes in the floppy drives and tag them with zip ties.

The advantage of this floppy pen holder is it is has very large capacity, is much more stable so it doesn’t flip over even if you place heavy stationary in it.

The full instructables is here

Another search rival to Google cropped up, this time maybe a bigger one, CUIL.
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It claims itself as the biggest search engine on the planet.

Cuil’s hype is understandable given its claim of indexing 120 billion web pages compared to approx 40  billion by Google.

Some quick facts about it:

1. Most popularly being pronounced as COOL.

2. Cuil is an old irish word for knowledge.

3. Its robot web-crawler is named Twiceler.

4. Cuil’s two main goals as pointed out clearly in the about section of the search engine is: One-how to index the whole internet, not just a part of it and Second-how to analyze and sort out its pages to get relevant pages.

5. Main features of its search are Drilldowns, Roll-over definitions, tabs and navigation suggestions.

6. The main people in its foundation are TOM COSTELLO, who has earlier worked mostly in IBM
And Anna Patterson, who was a key person in the technical line of google adsense and google search index.
Both of them happen to be spouse.

But on the performance front the search engine failed miserably.
The news of its failure is floating all over internet. It can’t even produce relevant results for common words and queries. In that way it can’t even challenge rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is still a distant dream.
If you want to test it, just type its name in Google.com and Cuil.com simultaneously and see the difference. Holes like this in the search engine can put it into grave forever.
Right now, Google still rocks.

The only thing that went into its favor was large investment, which enabled it to build reliable cluster of servers. Most of the new start-ups are launched with lots of pomp, but crash (die) as soon as the initial users and traffic increase. Atleast cuil was able to survive that phase and did reasonably well.

I was thinking from many days to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress (The CMS used in this blog), but wasn’t able to do it, maybe because of the fear of database crash or something.

Allhailmike was again and again asking me to do it, as he pointed out, the new ver WP 2.6 is more streamlined, search engine friendly and more stable. So, after all the tweaking last night, i thought to give it a try.

I downloaded the latest version from the official website http://wordpress.org/ and uploaded it to a separate directory, inside the main root directory where i had installed my old installation of WP 2..3.1.

Then i headed to the documentaion part, to help me out smoothly with the process. I must say even the short documentation (they even have step-by-step spoon feeding) was clear and sufficient enough to do all the things safely and successfully. The documentation is at http://codex.wordpress.org/

So here goes the step-by-step instructions (in short):

1. First extract the contents of the new version in a separate folder and upload it to the main directory (root directory where wordpress is instaslled). Uploading through FTP is a better choice.

2. Now delete your wp-admin and wp-includes folder, from the older installation.

3. Copy the new WordPress files to your server, overwriting old files in the root.
NOTE The wp-content folder requires special handling, as do the plugins and themes folders. You must copy over the contents of these folders, not the entire folder. Copying the entire folder overwrites all your customizations and added content.
Also take care to preserve the content of the wp-config.php file in the root directory. This file contains current settings for your existing installation, e.g. database sign-in information.
Compare your existing file with the new installation file which is named wp-config-sample.php. Either transfer your settings to the sample-file and rename it to wp-config.php or copy the new statemens from the sample file into yor current file.

4. That’s it.Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code.

Everything done correctly, itself calls for a coffee break.

Techunknown is alive again…

It died abruptly soon  after being born in feb 3 2008 (the day i registered and started it), because of lack of interest, support and time.

But never mind, we are back again with a bang.
Now we have got what always lacked here; web 2.0, new clean theme, clutter free navigation, user friendliness, new posts…and all. You name it, and we got it

So here is the new team:

1. Me Anurag Upadhaya aka INFERNO (the lead developer)

2. and this time accompanied with Pushkar bhatt aka ALLHAILMIKE (man behind gadget posts, his web http://geekgyan.com ).

Wish us luck.

I need a fresh cup of coffee or lemon tea, to woke up and keep myself awake in the morning. But how about and idea for a software Caffeine to keep your PC awake all the time?

Computers also go to sleep, as we all know, when they fire up a screensaver or simply turn off the display.
But Caffeine can help it keep awake by simulating a keystroke every 59 seconds.

Well that’s the default value (59 secs), which can be changed to any x-secs from the program. To prevent problems with running applications, the software simulates a shift-up, shift-down keystroke in Windows 98 and shift-down keystroke in Win XP and 2000.

The program resides as a cup of coffee in your system tray, is very helpful and small in size, just 11 kb.

The Adsense team at Google have decided to retire their Referrals program. I got a mail from the adsense team yesterday.

According to them, they retired  it to move onto their other projects which are on the way.

AT&T will roll out the new iPhone in the US market on July 11, 8 AM.

The company confirmed the price of the phone may vary from $199(8 GB)  to $299(16 GB).

So, the wait is now over. GO GRAB IT !

While browsing i found a simple site, but which is worth lots of appreciation because of the research it has done on interactive interface.

I was browsing http://dontclick.it . And the last click i did with my mouse was on the homepage of the site. Believe me no clicks after that to browse a whole website. And the whole site structure and interface is quite interesting and appealing.

You must be wondering how is that possible? The navigation on the website works just by hovering your mouse over menus or links of the pages you want to view and it comes up with a nice animation or rollover.

And as the website says, the research on the interactive interface is not a joke. It records the mouse gestures and movements of every user that logs on the website.
If by chance you click anywhere on the website by mistake or knowingly, it displays and error screen and asks you “was that an accidental click or knowingly?”.
It contains whole statistics of how many people visiting the site still missed the conventional mouse clicking or not.
It even displays a spiky cover for your mouse if you are too much obsessed with clicking the mouse.

Hope to see more of such websites soon.