Vaisakhi Diyaan Lakh Lakh Vadhaiyaan!

  

 
ਵਿਸਾਖੀ visākhī  also known as Basakhi is an ancient harvest festival in the Punjab, which also marks beginning of a new solar year, and new harvest season. Baisakhi is a Sikh religious festival. It falls on the first day of the Baisakh month in the solar Nanakshahi calendar, which corresponds to April 13 in the Gregorian calendar.

The birth of the Khalsa is celebrated by Sikhs every Baisakhi Day on April 13. Baisakhi 1999 marks the 300th anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh's gift of Panth Khalsa to all Sikhs everywhere.

To mark the celebrations, devotees (Sangat), irrespective of Sikh religion, attend the Gurudwara, a Sikh place of worship. The celebrations start early as devotees, with flowers and offerings in their hands, proceed towards the gurdwara before dawn. Processions (Palaki Sahib) through towns are also common. Baisakhi is the day on which the Khalsa (The Pure Ones) was born and Sikhs were given a clear identity and a code of conduct to live by. The momentous occasion was led by the last living Sikh spiritual teacher, Guru Gobind Singh Ji, who baptized the first Sikhs using sweet nectar called Amrit. Around the world at Baisakhi time, Sikhs and individuals of Punjabi descent reflect on the values taught to them by their gurus and celebrate the birth of the Khalsa.

Raaj Karega Khalsa..Aaki rahe na koi

Par bhram sab milenge..Bache sharan jo hoye..

Pics taken with dell streak..

Winamp for Android

Winamp has just released their Winamp 1.0 client for Google Android devices, allowing users to sync their music wirelessly from their Winamp Desktop library to their Android device over their Wi-Fi network. Get your copy of the Winamp Android application for free here or through the Android Market here.
Most Android devices of version 2.2 and above can connect Winamp to the free online radio directory service SHOUTcast, which has thousands of radio stations in its directory. Users can browse these stations easily from the Winamp home screen.

Winamp has completely redesigned the home screen and “Now Playing” screens. It now supports genre browsing, search and a left/right swipe gesture to change tracks, plus it has the ability to use Google’s voice command “Listen to” to activate Winamp. The “Now Playing” screen shows album art, title track and artist information and more. The user can press and hold the song information to interact with Pandora, YouTube or the Amazon MP3 store.

A brand new feature is the ability to download free tracks using the Winamp for Android home screen. Users can stream tracks individually and if they like them they can download them instantly to their Android device for free.

Player controls remain persistent while within the Winamp application, allowing easy access to the home screen as well as track navigation.
Widgets are available for Winamp playlists or the Winamp player, giving easy access to your favourite tunes.

If the Last.fm client is installed, Winamp will support scrobbling of tracks to last.fm.
The new Winamp client now supports 12 languages and has fixed various bugs since the first release.

Let us know what you think of Winamp’s new Android app or whether you prefer another Android app to listen to music.


Source: Winamp Blog

A Quick Guide To Developing Android Apps With Google App Inventor

Ever since I first received my Dell Streak, I’ve been very curious about how people produce some of those amazing applications on and off the Android market. I’m not a programmer, but  a gifted hacker. You will be very happy to learn that Android has made it possible for anyone with even the most basic programming experience to create their very own high-quality and highly functional Android applications. The secret weapon to developing Android apps? It’s called the Google App Inventor and it’s offered at Google Labs.

Setting Up Google App Inventor

The App Inventor consists of three parts. There’s the design tool, the blocks editor, and finally configuring your phone.
The first thing you have to do is set up your phone. Go into Settings -> Applications and make sure that “Unknown sources” is selected. This allows the Blocks Editor to install itself and communicate with your phone for testing purposes.

Then, click on “Development” and make sure that you’ve enabled both “USB debugging” and “Stay awake.”

Guess what – that’s all you have to do to configure your phone to work with the programming tools.
When you first sign up to use the App Inventor, you’re going to need to install the Block Editor as one of the steps. This is a Java application that installs onto your computer, and it gives you the ability to modify the behavior of the “blocks” that you’ve created in design mode, and it communicates directly with your phone.
Once you’ve signed up and you’re in the design tool, just select “New” and name your first project. In this example, I’m going to get started on a matching game for my kids where they need to match images of cats on a 3 x 4 grid.

The design tool is set up a lot like Visual Basic and Visual C++, where the objects that you can use are on the left, and the design area, or “form” is in the center. In this case the form is the individual screen, and you can have multiple screens per app (just remember to include navigation).

Once you click and drag a component onto the screen, it shows up on the right side of the design app under Components. Under “Properties” you can view and modify the initial display properties of that component.

Now below I’ve basically created a screen with a 3×4 table (you can find this under “Screen Arrangement“) and then I added 12 buttons with individual cat images for each “image” property of the buttons.

Once you start using the Blocks editor, all of these design properties can be modified. As you can see below, I defined the image of button 1 as a blank image (which I loaded in design mode as a grey image called “Image1″).

As you can see, everything is visual – there’s no coding here. Under “My Blocks” I chose the “Screen1″ component and dragged the “Initialize” event to the center program area. You need to tell an event what to do when it takes place, so I dragged the Button1.Image property into the box, and then told it to make that property use “Image1″.
After about an hour of playing around – I finished programming the initialization of all of the buttons when my app first loads, as well as what to do when the user clicks on the first button.

As you can see, even an application like a matching game can require that you carefully consider every possibility. You can program for all possibilities by defining and programming component events. The example above can get complicated, so if you’re just getting started, stick with something simple like the example Google provides when you first sign up. You can graduate from there when you’re comfortable with the programming and testing process.
As you can see in the left navbar in the design tool, you have access to just about everything your Android can do – sensors, contact list, video players and much more.

So – here’s my work of art, programmed, tested and then finally installed onto my phone in about an hour. I still need to program the rest of the buttons as well.

Needless to say, the fact that I could even get anything to run on my phone with about an hour’s worth of effort is impressive. I thought it would be nearly impossible.
So, sign up to become a developer and try out the Google App Developer yourself. You may be surprised, you may find yourself creating some of the coolest applications imaginable. All it takes is a little bit of patience and some time to play around with the development tools.

How To Print From Your Phone With Gmail For Mobile & Google Cloud Print

Have you ever had a situation where you needed to print something and you couldn’t find a way to get it done? Printing can be hard sometimes, especially if your printer is broken, out of ink/paper, or just giving you fits. Or sometimes, you just run out of time, like when you’re running late for work in the morning. It would be nice to have a quick, easy way to print from, say, your phone while on the way to your office.
Google has just made this possible with Gmail for Mobile and Google Cloud Print. It allows printing from any device, OS, or browser without the need to install drivers, and it’s a life saver. In this article, I’ll show you how to set this up so you can take advantage of this easy-to-use print service.

What Is Google Cloud Print?

Google Cloud Print makes printing more intuitive, accessible and useful, by allowing you to print to your printers from Google Cloud Print enabled apps on any computer or smart phone.

By ‘enabled apps’, they mean Google Chrome. In order to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print, you will need to install the latest beta version of Google Chrome on a computer that’s connected to a printer. If you’re already using a version of Google Chrome and you’re not sure if it’s the right one, don’t worry. Just proceed with the next steps and if you run into a problem you’ll know you need to update.

How Can I Start Using This Print Service?

To get started, the first thing you need to do is connect your printer to Google Cloud Print. Right now this step requires that you have a Windows PC (XP, Vista, or 7), but Linux and Mac support are supposedly coming soon.

To connect your local printers with Google Cloud Print, you need to enable the connector in Chrome. In order to do this, open up your Chrome browser, click on the wrench icon in the upper right-hand corner, and select Options.

Next, visit the Under the Hood tab and scroll to the bottom where it says ‘Google Cloud Print’. Click Sign in to Google Cloud Print and a dialog will appear asking you to sign in to your Google Account. Once you sign in, Google Cloud Print will be enabled.

After signing in, you will see a confirmation page which asks you to print a test page (if you like) or click OK to continue.

Your options pane in the Under the Hood tab should now have two new options, Disable Google Cloud Print and Manage Print Settings…
Now that you’re all set up, you can print from your cell phone. Just head to Gmail on your iPhone or Android browser, select the email you want to print, and choose Print from the drop-down menu in the top right corner to use it. You can print email attachments, like PDF’s or Doc’s, by clicking the Print link that appears next to them.

Conclusion

Google only recently announced that they were rolling out this feature in US English, so if you don’t see it right away they advise you to check back. There is also a Google Cloud Print help center that you can check out if you’re curious as to what exactly Google Cloud Print is or how you can connect to it. The page offers many resources, including help articles, basic information, and troubleshooting techniques in case you run into any number of various problems you may encounter while trying to print, or set up printing, on multiple printers.
I think this is a really useful workaround for trying to print something on the fly. If you enable this on a printer at your office or at home, you can effectively print something important from your phone and have it waiting for you when you get there. If you’re in a rush for time, this should certainly help.
What do you think of Google Cloud Print? Will you be printing from your phone?

How To Disable Or Fake Your Location In Firefox, Internet Explorer & Chrome

Modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer now include “geolocation” services based in the browser. What this does is attempt to locate you based on your IP, wi-fi or network location. It is used for several reasons, including adding a location to your tweets or Facebook updates, or to locate you on a map. You might want to hide or fake this location IP due to privacy concerns, and it isn’t too terribly hard to do so.

What Is Geolocation?

Geolocation is a technology that locates your position on the planet and ties it into your web browser (or other application). A couple of services work to provide location services in your web browser. One is a Google service that looks at your IP and connected network information and matches it up to known locations, Microsoft runs another similar service. Apple uses the internal service CoreLocation to locate you across a variety of services. Geolocation has a lot of useful applications, but it also has some serious privacy implications.

Turning Off Geolocation

Turning off the location features in either browser is fairly easy. When you are first given the chance to allow or deny location in Firefox, you can disable it right from that menu. If you have already allowed it, go to the configuration settings by typing about:config in your browser window. Find the setting geo.enabled and double click it to set it to “false.”

In Google Chrome, the settings are in -> Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Location:

Set the option “Do not allow any site to track my physical location” to disable geolocation in Chrome.
In Internet Explorer 9 you can also disable location services. Go into Internet options -> Privacy. Select “Never allow websites to track your physical location.”

Faking Your Location

The easiest browser to fake your location in is Firefox. In fact, there is a browser extension that does just that called Geolocater (sic).
Download and install Geolocater and restart your browser. To configure it, you must go into the “Tools” menu, so right click at the top of your browser and enable the file menu to gain access to configuration.

When you launch it, you must add a new location and include the name to save it. Search or browse to the location you wish to set, enter the name in the box on the right, and then click the button that looks like a kite with a check mark to save it.

Next time you go to a website that has geolocation enabled, you will be able to change which location you want to send to them and then “Share” to fake your location.
There is another alternative that works both in Firefox and Chrome, but you will need to do some editing of files to make it happen.
The way these geolocation services work is by requesting a file from Google which then responds with your location in JSON format. To fake this in Firefox, you can create a file on your computer with this text:
{"location":{"latitude":48.861426,2.338929,"longitude":2.338929, "accuracy":20.0}}
You can find this location by locating it in Google Maps or any other maps program that supports Latitude and Longitude. Google maps generates a link that looks like the following:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=48.861426,2.338929&spn=0.011237,0.027874&z=16
In this case the first number is the latitude and the second the longitude.
You can place this in a plain text file on your computer, then update the Firefox setting in about:config named geo.wifi.uri to the location on your computer. In Windows, it will look something like this:
file:///C:/Users/Username/Documents/location.txt

Make sure if there are any spaces in the directory to replace them with %20 for proper encoding. Restart Firefox and your location will show the updated information.

Location Is Disabled – But You Can Still Be Tracked

Even though location services have been disabled or faked, a great deal of information about where you are located is sent just by using the Internet. Your IP address can narrow your location down to your country and maybe even the city you are located in. Just be aware that unless you use a VPN, your location can still be tracked based on that information.

Do you have any other tricks to hide or fake your location IP?  Do you know how to disable or fake your location in other browsers such as Safari and Opera? Please share!