You have a child? Let's become a great dad!

If you have a child and you are a man, obviously you are a dad! I'm not sure about how would some people might think but as a proud father of my daughter, I really want to be a great dad. Zen Habits, as a father of 6 kids, has written down 12 tips to be a great dad.

How to be a Great Dad - 12 Awesome Tips

1 Put their interests first,
2 Protect them. As a dad,
3 Spend your spare time with them.
4 Give them hugs.
5 Play with them.
6 Do the “mom” stuff.
7 Read to them.
8 Stand by mom.
9 Teach them self-esteem.
10 Teach them about finances.
11 Be good to yourself.
12 Be good to the mom.

I'm up for gadgets but these are strange even to my standards

I'm always looking for new astonishing gadgets that are developed all over the world. I'm very open minded and acceptable when I find the new gadgets with new concepts. However, the Top 20 Strangest Gadgets and Accessories shows some really weird gadgets even to me! The "1. Synthetic Human Skin Laptop Bags" really freaked me out which you can see why in the attached image on the right...

Here are all 20 listings. For pictures and descriptions, please visit techeblog site for further information.

1. Synthetic Human Skin Laptop Bags
2. Shower Belt
3. Knife Block Shaped Like Human Head
4. BriefSafe
5. RSStroom Reader
6. Touch Rubik’s Cube
7. SatuGO - Bouncing Digital Camera
8. The Head Bath Cap
9. The Sauce Dispensing Chopsticks
10. Radio Toaster
11. Rat Race Clock
12. Headlight LCD Combo
13. Wood LED Clock
14. The Mini Desk
15. Gas Powered Blender
16. Cup Noodle Stove
17. The Baller Cheating Pen
18. Talking Japanese Watches
19. Portable Cardboard Speakers
20. The Talking Lips

Want to improve your presentations? Here's how!

For most engineers, presentation usually comes as a horror since naturally most of us are not used to speaking in public (of-course there are few exceptions). If you are one of us common engineers and needed to set-up a tutorials or presentations, ririanproject.com have excellent guidance which is posted by their guest note from Scott Young.

5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations.

Those five hacks are as follows:

Hack #1: Rephrase Questions
Hack #2: Pause, Don’t Trip
Hack #3: Write Out the Tricky Parts
Hack #4: Watch Your Apologies
Hack #5: Don’t Distract With Powerpoint

Bored again? Check out 118 "You Know You're in College When..."

These "You Know You're in College When..." statements reminds me of my university years! Although, not all of them but there are so many of them I can relate to and lot more of which I can see that happens during those years! I have listed first 10 listing for your viewing pleasure!

1. High school started before 8am, but now anything before noon is considered "early".

2. You have more beer than food in your fridge.

3. Weekends start on Thursday.

4. 6am is when you go to sleep, not when you wake up.

5. You know many different ways to cook ramen noodles or macaroni and cheese.

6. The health center gives out free condoms, and people take them… just in case.

7. Instead of falling asleep in class, you stay in bed.

8. You know how late McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Qdoba, etc. are open.

9. You think it’s the weekend on a Wednesday and you don’t know what month it is.

10. You can't remember the last time you washed your car.

Microsoft + Yahoo???

Apparently Microsoft is hoping to join with Yahoo in order to overcome Google's dominance in internet related businesses success that Google have shown. According to forbe Microsoft is lagging behind both Google as well as Yahoo by large margin. The formal negotiation of $50 billion dollar have been initiated.

Microsoft has asked Yahoo! to enter formal negotiations for a proposed acquisition worth about $50 billion. Something along the lines of “all your search are belong to us” or “you will be assimilated, resistance is futile” comes to mind regarding this possibility.

However, according to WSJ from gizmodo have reported that Yahoo have turned down the Microsoft's offer due to lack of MS vibe!

According to the WSJ, it looks like Yahoo is going to turn down Microsoft yet again. They claim that Yahoo just wasn't feeling the MS vibe.
...
And thanks to the reader, only known to us as "Dean", for envisioning what the possible merger could of looked like down the road. Mmmm, pie.– Ben Longo

Amazing body hack from Lifehacker!

Gina did it again. She have listed out Top 10 Body Hacks on her lifehacker site. Here are the listings of 10 body hacks!

* 1. Hold your breath longer
* 2. Cure warts with duct tape
* 3. Stop brain freeze with your tongue
* 4. Scratch your leg to make it to the loo
* 5. Power use your ears
* 6. Free your mind under a high ceiling
* 7. Think while you sleep
* 8. Cure hiccups with water
* 9. Whistle with two fingers
* 10. Tell if someone's lying

Tired of dying laptop batteries? Here's how to prevent it.

After the technological booms and cost reductions, nowadays most people owns their own laptops either for work or for home usage. However, most people are not familiar with how the batteries in the laptop is being used and because of that same reason, they do not know how to improve the battery life. Timothy Captain from LaptopMag.com has excellent illustration of 5 tips that can save your laptop. Take a look at his article Five Tips For Better Notebook Battery Life and "Find out how to get the absolute longest endurance possible."

How to avoid speeding tickets

If you are a driver, you would be dreaded to receive a speeding tickets. When you get one, you end up with fine and on top of that, you end up with insurance premium increase and lot more! With small investments in preparation before your trip and taking little bit of caution, you can always avoid this costly mistakes. At least for your preparation part, check out this Bear Trap site for information on where the cops might be hiding in the corner!

Scripting in Unix/Linux to make you life easier

If you are a dedicated engineer or in programming, you probably are familiar with unix or linux operating systems. However, not all of you know how to use all the tools to make your life easier.

One of the most useful scripting that I have learned in my career is perl scripting. If you are interested, follow the resource links and learn what it is all about! You can get perl tools if you don't already have one from perl.com. The Perl tutorials are provided by perldoc.perl.org with excellent references.

Another useful tool is Shell/Bash programming. You can refer to shell scripting resources and Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

Again, if you are stuck or out of ideas or need example syntax, you can alway goto Google code search and search for how other people have implemented their codes.

In case, some people who are interested but only have MS-Windows systems. You can take a look at cygwin for unix environmental setting without having to change your operating system. Take a look at Introduction to Cygwin for more details.

Let's remove files in your hdd once and for all!

Most people are not aware the delete button on your operating system does not in fact delete the file content itself but it removes the pointer to that content within the hard drive space. Therefore, unless it is overwritten by some other file or some other contents, it will stay there for a long time. This is basically what data recovery service provides. They try to recover the un-overwritten content in your hard drive to recover what once was "deleted." This can pose problem if you have sensitive data within the computer that you are using. If you need to throw away your old computer, you better clean out your hdd content, otherwise, someone else can get hold of your personal data!

Robin Harris have excellent article on How to REALLY erase a hard drive

Amazing world of new species!

World definitely is full of amazing things. Who would have imagined that there could be an animal looks like Pikachu from Pokemon! Alas, it is actually called octopuses of the genus Grimpoteuthis. The comparison of both is shown from boston.com site. This octopus species apparently is one of many amazing looking species that is living in a deep sea! If there can be such a diverse species types, imagine what we can find from outer space! I cannot wait until we discover the true aliens that we are dreaming about. I bet you that it won't be anything like the gray black eyed aliens that we are familiar with from many sci-fi books. Any comments? Thoughts?

Joost unlimited!

If you haven't heard, joost is now offering unlimited invitations to the current beta users. Previously, they were only limited to the hand-full of beta users and anyone who wanted to join had to receive limited invitations from current joost beta testers just like that of gmail during it's initial test phase. As of today, joost have removed limitation to amount of invitation that can be given out by current beta testers.

It is like YouTube but with more legal television contents as well as better resolution. According to Joost:

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

I am fortunate enough to get myself an invitation and have been very pleased with quality of the television that I can see. If you would like to join and require an invitation, please leave me a comment with your email address. I'll send you an invitation as soon as I can.

Joost unlimited! ==REMOVED==

Due to technical difficulties, this post could not add comments. Thus, I'm removing this post and re-creating the new one. Please repost your comments in my new post since I have lost the once that were posted here.

Put better use of your USB drive

If you are somehow related to working with computer one way or another, there is a real good chance that you own USB drive no matter what their size is. Most people just store some files on the USB drive and not being able to explore the full potential of it's use. Did you know that you can have portable application that you can run off from your USB drive which does not require installation to your desktop or laptop? Did you know you can have fully functional OS or browse the net or check your emails or have recovery application all stored in one USB drive (provided that it has enough memory size)?

If you are interested, pcstats have excellent Beginners Guides: Essential USB Memory Drive Projects & Tips.

Encryption, Firefox browser, word processing, arcade games and yes even an operating system can be run off your USB hard drive... if you know how! - Version 1.0.0

Also, lifehacker has her LH Top 10: USB thumb drive tricks.

Hugh housing price decline in US

According to CNN Home sales: Worst drop in 18 years. There were many speculations whether housing bubble will burst anytime soon and here is one of the indication that we might be at reflection point of the price fall.

Sales pace much lower than forecasts, prices show year-over-year drop for eighth straight month.

By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer