Sign up a free account at Beklo.com to have a no. of blogs there (now u can have 10 blogs) and get following cool features.

COOL FEATURES IN BEKLO BLOG HOSTING REVIEWED

The interface present inside the admin panel there is very easy for managing blogs and managing diff. items like category, link etc of the blog.

Also managing the design and look of your blog is easy and you are allowed to edit the template to suit your designs. You can edit the style, links and any thing of your blog by editing your templete there. (it has it’s own tag and also you can use html and css and this is much better than Myspace.com in this way)

Also common things like blogroll, feeds, track-backs are present in the settings in the admin panel where you can do a related set of operations. Also you can publish your podcast feeds and rss feeds via settings and also choose ping servers to ping and all free. Moblogging or mobile blogging is allowed and you can make a perfect setting for this in admin panel.

You can blog mp3s, avi videos and other things and obviously illegal content might not be allowed to be blogged about. They are providing 50 MB space for you free.

Also multiuser blogging environment can be set for any blogs there. You can create your own mailing list and also interact with other bloggers at Beklo and send/recieve messages, make buddies and message them privately. (this is uniqe feature here)

According to their site following things are allowed now in their blogs:-

• Make Upto 10 Blogs in one account
• 50 MB of space
• All file extension allowed includin mp3,avi,wav
• Podcasting is allowed
• More than 40 Cool Templates matching your Style
• Best URL given to your blog that is beklo.com/you
• Add Freinds
• Send Private Messages to Other Bloggers at Beklo
• Create Mailing List
• Multi Author Feature alowing you to add more Authors to handle your Blog
• RSS Feed Support
• Moblogging Enabled
• IP Banning
• Pinging Feature
• Trackbacks Enabled

Also you may contact Beklo’s adminstrator in case you need more features in your blog.

Triggered by motion, this table delightfully comes to life when something moves over the top of it!

Made of 100% sustainable wood and water-based finishes, our interactive tables are kind to the environment, and look great in your place!

This Coffee Table is large enough for a big room at 62″ long by 31″ wide by 18″ high and comes with either a with a nice thick glass or plastic top. A striking wood lattice underneath, spanning the side waves, forms a strong shelf for storage.

The LEDs are only activated when they see motion. As you can see in the pictures, even though the cat is on the table, only his moving tail is setting off the lights. Without motion it calms down to a very slight attractive twinkling.

The entire table pulls a total of 35 watts when it is fully active. That’s less than a single common household light bulb!

Using a network of 32 active and passive near-infrared optical sensors, it detects motion above the table and changes in ambient light. Made of fully analog circuits, the light patterns sweep outwards from your motion with perfect fades, glowing stronger the closer the movement is, rippling across a pool of 480 super-bright white LEDs. It works in full sunlight or total darkness.

Made with our good friends the Evil Mad Scientists! Choose a clear top to show off their incredible electronics, or a frosted top to make it a delightful surprise to all who sit by it.

Price: $2800 Buy Now at Becausewecan.org

The official name for it is “gesture-recognition technology,” but no self-respecting geek would call the process of poking your finger at a computer screen anything but “touchy-feely computing.”The tablet PC, which uses this kind of interface, has been around for a few unremarkable years now, as have those cash registers one sees in sports bars and some restaurants. There was a desktop computer model made by Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1983, called the HP 150, which was one of the first touch-screen machines.

Interest in the touch-screen interface has bubbled up again; Apple introduced the iPhone a couple of weeks ago, dumping the slender stylus in favour of the fleshy fingertip; in late May, Microsoft announced that in the fall it will release Surface, basically a computer masquerading as a coffee table that uses a 30-inch touch-screen. However, HP has jumped into the lead in the PC world, at least, of this revived metaphor with the TouchSmart IQ770 PC.

The TouchSmart is the product of a joint effort between HP and Microsoft, with HP creating the kind of machine that could exploit all the multimedia features of the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system, released in January. Add to that a 19-inch wide-screen monitor capable of responding to the slap and tickle required to run myriad applications, and you’ve got the smartest multimedia home theatre centre on the market.

Not only can you poke at commands on the screen, use the mouse or the included remote-control device to operate it, but also you can even chatter at it, via Vista’s voice recognition software and HP’s built-in microphone. Talk about communication. You can even poke at it with a stick, although for that, HP would prefer you to use its plastic stylus, which looks like a cartoon of a blunt pencil.

The TouchSmart’s monitor is mounted on a stand that is actually part of the computer, and under the angle of the monitor stand is a space for an HP photo printer.

The TouchSmart is not a powerhouse computer; it can’t crunch very large numbers, edit professional videos or play the more extreme computer games. But then the TouchSmart is designed more for convenience and ease of use: Its performance is only average compared with similarly priced systems, but well enough suited to a market HP says favours tech-savvy mothers and their student children.

One drawback to the sleek design is that the TouchSmart is built in a box only slightly larger than a hefty laptop, and people who like to tinker with their computers will be frustrated. It’s not an issue now, but might be in two or three years’ time, when technological advances will start demanding upgrades.

The TouchSmart screen works well as a navigation tool, though it’s not something you’d want to use too much sitting at your desk – try to play solitaire on it using a finger, and it’s surprising how soon your arm gets sore waving it around like that.

Some people will prefer to use a mouse (the TouchSmart’s included basic wireless laser mouse is very responsive), while others will find themselves more comfortable stroking and petting the screen, depending on tastes and applications. (Finger-painting, anyone? This computer just cries out for Corel Painter.) The keyboard is a little disappointing, however, reflecting the smaller role it plays on a touch-screen machine. It’s small – too small, in fact, with the keys being cramped together – and the arrow keys are not sufficiently distinguished from the others; they’re too close to the numerical keypad, so you can find yourself typing a long string of zeroes if you’re not careful.

But there is one thing that’s cool about the keyboard – there’s a slot under the computer into which the keyboard slips completely when not in use.

The computer market certainly hasn’t indicated it will be wild for touch-sensitive screens – it has been very cool to the tablet PC – so it’s far too soon to predict the popularity of the HP TouchSmart.

But the TouchSmart is handsome, acts as a conversation piece and has obviously been designed with a great deal of thought and consideration to detail. HP’s clear intention is to move it from a desk and put it in a kitchen, a living room or an entertainment room, a move computer makers have been trying to make for years. And if there is a machine that can do it, the TouchSmart is it.

Certainly Apple and Microsoft, with their gesture-recognition devices, are also betting that touchy-feely computing will help them do that too.

Via: TheGlobeAndMail.com

So how can we get multi-touch gestures into the windowing system?

We don’t need gesture support in X. Gestures depend a lot on the context. A gesture in one context can mean something different in a different context. And the only thing that knows the context is the application. This is very similar to a button press. Pressing a mouse button can mean a zillion different things, depending where and when it happens. That’s why all X does is relay the button press to a client application, which then does the right thing.

What we really need is a way to convey events from a touch device to a client application. MPX now has a new type of events: BlobEvents. These events specify a bounding box, a hotspot and a bitmap specifying the contents of the bounding box. The device driver generates these events and passes them to X. X relays them to the correct client.

A BlobEvent has a device-id and a field to specify a subdevice. The device-id should map to the user. Each user represents one device. The subdevice is the body-part the user is using. If your device is smart enough, it can specify that the blob was generated by User 1, middle-finger right hand.

The BlobEvent bitmap can have multiple formats. 1 bit per pixel, 8 bits, 32 bits per coordinate, whatever your device can think up. Just remember: the client has to know how to read the data.

Windowing system benefits

Now all that could be seen as just another way of transporting touch events. Right. But remember, it’s in the windowing system. That means we know exactly what application is where on the screen and thus we know which application to send the event to. So we can run two or more touch-applications at the same time and it’ll just work.

The other thing about BlobEvents is that MPX can automatically emulate a core pointer event for each BlobEvent. And an X Input pointer event. This is where things start getting interesting. Using BlobEvents you can have your multi-touch photo-sorting-lava-lamp application running on the same screen as your standard GNOME, KDE, etc. applications and use them all at the same time.

To your multi-touch driver all this doesn’t matter. It sends blob events, the server takes care of the rest. You’re guaranteed to be able to interact with any X application. X doesn’t care about the hardware. You can use your DiamondTouch, your FTIR table or – if you can afford one – your MS Surface table.

Oh. And by the way. You can use a standard mouse and keyboard on the same box as you use the touchscreen. After all, everything is just a device.

This is the last big change. I’ll now focus on getting MPX stable enough to put it upstream.

Peter’s Blog Link

The Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX) is a modification of the X Server. A standard X Server only provides one mouse cursor (pointer) and one keyboard focus, regardless of the number of input devices connected. MPX provides the user with multiple mouse cursors and multiple keyboard foci. Multicursor applications have been developed in the past but MPX is the first implementation of a multicursor windowing system (or a multicursor X server).MPX devices are independent. Each cursor is a true system cursor and different pointers can operate in multiple applications simultaneously. This allows for two-handed interaction and/or collaboration on a single display. MPX is compatible to legacy applications such as the GIMP, the Firefox web browser and numerous other applications. Keyboards provide multiple keyboard foci. So you can actually type into several applications at once. Both mice and keyboards can be hot-plugged.MPX is significantly different to solutions like cpnmouse, SDGToolkit, MIDDesktop and other toolkits or applications. It is fairly easy under most operating systems to write an application or toolkit to support multiple input devices. It is trickier to support the same for legacy applications. Supporting new and legacy applications at the same time is hard.

MPX changes the windowing system, the environment for all graphical applications. This way, legacy applications are supported and provided with extra features. New applications can use the multi-pointer facilities and thus create novel interaction methods at the same time. That is why we think that the windowing system is the correct place to support multiple input devices.

Via: ehomeupgrade

Sean Alexander posted that Silvelright is now on Microsoft.com promoting the very cool new product Microsoft Surface. Last time Silverlight was used was to promote the Xbox 360 Elite just after Mix in April.It is worth pointing this out for a couple of reasons:

1. It shows how Silverlight can be used to deliver media in a branded advertising scenario and promote a product/service like Surface

2. More importantly, as a reassurance to the many designers and developers that are out there considering using Silverlight for production projects. I had one guy email me after last weeks MSDN Roadshow and he wanted help ‘selling’ Silverlight to his boss for use with a client. Having examples of one of the highest traffics sites on the web using Silverlight is a good thing to show and also indicates that customers with Silverlight installed is growing well (as indicated by Sean’s post with the spikes in downloads of the plug-in).

Check out Silverlight on Microsoft.com (this may only be on the EN-US site)

(The UK one points to something very important but very personal which I had the honour of developing a few weeks ago which was to help the police in their quest to find a little British girl, Madeleine McCann.)

Source:Mark J

Currently the name SurfacePuzzles.com, a great name for puzzle games for Ms Surface is at auction with 2 days 9 hours left for the auction to end. The current highest bid is already $500!

theSurface.com sold at sedo.com for $2000 and an unconfirmed report of GamingSurface.com selling at an auction conducted by Sedo for more than $3000, Somebody Plz confirm this…
Surface.tv sold for a whopping $27000 just a day before or so behind the official launch of Microsoft Surface at WallStreet Journal’s “All things digital conference” on 30-may-07.

After searching through the sedo database for Surface related names, here i come up with some great names that are standing out of the crowd at the moment..SurfaceParts.com at sedo Auction(ends Jun/27/07 10:06 PM CEST), SurfaceAccessories.com, SurfaceEssentials.com, SurfaceGames.com, SurfaceUpgrades.com, SurfaceUpdates.com, SurfaceDownloads.com, & SurfaceRepair.net

It Seems that the internet is going to boom with many Surface related sites full of resources even before the Product is available to the Market

microsoft surface

“Along with specialized headphones keyboards and mouse, one of the most important things that a hardcore PC gamer needs is a gaming surface or a mouse pad. Danish gaming gear maker SteelSeries has now unveiled the SX, a new professional gaming mousepad made of fiber polished aluminum featuring an anodized oxide surface treatment.

Every SX mousepad is individually fiber polished and anodized, prior to being manually treated with a new exceptional liquid silicone coating, developed particularly for this surface. It comes with the SteelSeries Glide MS and the SteelSeries Silicone Glide, a specially designed saturated cloth, to further enhance glide and reduce friction.”

More at GameGuru

Related:Microsoft, DirecTV Partner for New Pro-Gaming Series

microsoft surface