alvi's Blog

Every now and then, there comes a gadget that is simply worth drooling over. The Optimus Maximus keyboard is one of those gadgets that is a simple Must-Have, if it was a little cheaper i.e. What is so special about the keyboard you say? Just imagine, a keyboard that is customizable to the very limits! Yes it lets you customize each and every key of the very special 113 Keys it boasts!

Customizable Keys and Layout

Yep, Each key is a stand-alone display that shows the function currently assigned to it. The Optimus Maximus integrates a standalone LED in each of its 113 keys. Each LED has a size of 10.1 x 10.1 mm and offers a resolution of 48 x 48 pixels.

According to Art Lebedev, the keys can not only display images, but videos with frame rates of up to 10 fps as well. Up to 65,536 colors are supported, which can be seen on viewing angles of up to 160 degrees. Image and video layouts are stored on a SD flash memory card, which can be inserted on the back of the keyboard.

Read on for more stunning pictures and specifications

Specifications

Optimus’s customizable layout allows convenient use of any language—Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, Quenya, hiragana, etc.—as well as of any other character sets: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes, math functions and so on to infinity.

System requirements

• PC with installed OS Windows XP or Vista, with a USB 1.1 (or better 2.0) port; Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher.
• 20 MB of free space on hard drive.
• 256 MB of RAM

The service life of displays and their ribbon cables has been enhanced by making the screens embedded in the keytops motionless—it’s only the transparent caps that are pressed.

Every button on the keyboard (or, more precisely, a module with a moving cap, a microchip and a display) is easy to remove in order to clean or replace.

Configurator software allows for programming every button to reproduce a sequence of symbols and editing the image separately for each layout.

Price

A Whopping $462 (approx 371 Euro)

Hmm, come to think of it, wouldn’t be bad if I got one for a gift

Presenting to you the Nokia Morph Phone Concept. This phone is like no other concept phone considering the technology its based on and its ever-green color.

The basic ideology behind the Nokia Morph is the use of nanotechnology based flexible materials, transparent electronics and self-cleaning surfaces. These new materials should enable Nokia to make a cell phone which is flexible, easy to use and can be folded into any shape.

Much like what we saw in Nokia 888, the Nokia Morph will be able to transform in any shape ranging from a circular bracelet mode to a landscape mode.

According to UnwiredView, the Nokia Morph concept was developed by Nokia research center in cooperation with Cambridge University and is on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Have you ever experienced an error like the one below while trying to delete a file or folder?

Such errors usually show up when a file or folder has been locked by another program. In this case all read, write and execute access to the file or folder is blocked and you are not able to perform any operations such a copy/page or delete.

This error has many other forms such as:

• Cannot delete file: Access is denied.
• There has been a sharing violation.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use

One way to get rid of these errors is to perform a Windows reboot which will kill all processes but in case if the program is a virus that is blocking access to a file or folder, even a Windows reboot won’t help so in such times we make use of a utility called Unlocker.

Unlocker was designed to be a very useful Windows Explorer extension allowing users with a simple right-click on a file or folder to easily get rid of error message such as error deleting file or folder, cannot delete folder: it’s being used by another person or program.

The application is very easy to use. Here is how to use it:

1. Simply right click the folder or file and select Unlocker
2. If the folder or file is locked, a window listing of lockers will appear
3. Simply click Unlock All and you are done!

Unlocker

High quality videos and YouTube videos are usually considered two separate entities. YouTube is notorious for its low-quality videos, even then it is the world’s most popular video streaming and video sharing website. Probably the reason for the low-quality videos on YouTube is its architecture. First the uploaded videos are converted to flash and then their FLV files are streamed through players which produces the resulting low quality video effect.

Google OS recently discovered a trick that indicates that Google might be secretly working on improving the quality of some YouTube videos.

The trick is to append &fmt=18 at the end of URL of the YouTube video you are watching. This will make YouTube download a high-quality video version of that particular video. The high quality video version will of course be bigger in size and therefore will take more time to load. It shall be encoded at 480×360 with an MP4 format. This trick will not work on all videos but for some it works like a charm.

Example:

Lets say you have a YouTube video with the following URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQXo4gd12I

Now to watch a high quality version of the same YouTube, you will use the link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQXo4gd12I&fmt=18

You will definitely feel the difference. You can also use a Greasemonkey script to search high quality versions of YouTube videos for you.