Replace the Boring Voice on your Garmin GPS with your Own

If you’ve got a Garmin GPS device, you might be fed up with the voice that gives you turn by turn directions.

Fortunately, Garmin’s Voice Studio application for Windows can change that.

Garmin Voice Studio Liberates your GPS’s Voice

With Garmin’s new Voice Studio app, you can replace the boring voice recordings on your GPS with your own.
This could be useful if you’re fed up of the British lady who delivers turn-by-turn directions by default. (After all, if you use your GPS very often, you might get so annoyed with the voice that you crash the car )

Even if you’re not fed up with the voice on your GPS device, this tool from Garmin offers a whole lot of possibilities. Replace the default voice with the voice of your loved ones, your cat, or random clippings from the radio! The possibilities are endless…

Download and usage

Just grab the application from here and install it on your Windows box.

You just have to choose a phrase from the list and click record for the application to start recording your voice (or your cat’s).

Once you’re done recording phrases, the app can transfer them right on to your Garmin GPS device. Note that there are quite a few phrases there, at least a few dozen, so it might take you a while to record them all.

 

Once it’s on your GPS, your personal voice will appear in the languages menu for you to select.

Compatible devices

This app is compatible with only some GPS models, however. (listed below):

• aera™ series
• GPSMAP® 620 & 640
• nüvi® 200-series
• nüvi 205-series
• nüvi 500-series
• nüvi 700-series
• nüvi 705-series
• nüvi 800-series
• nüvi 1200-series
• nüvi 1300-series
• nüvi 1400-series
• nüvi 1600-series
• nüvi 5000
• zūmo® 660

The only thing I can say is – be careful. You don’t want to record something so hilarious that you burst out laughing on the highway!

Google Voice Extension for Chrome

If you’re like me, you’ll do anything to skip having an extra tab open for a web application. There’s a tab for my GMail, one for Google Reader, one Wordpress, Google Voice, the list goes on!
Well, Google’s Chrome support for extensions can keep you from having a few tabs open, with the GMail checker and the Google Wave notifier.
But until now, there was nothing for Google Voice.

Click to Call with the Google Voice Chrome extension

With Google’s new extension for Google Chrome, making phone calls directly from your web browser isn’t science-fiction any longer.

Just install the extension from this website, and you’re all ready to go.

Google has listed the following as features for this new extension:

• Adds a button to the toolbar, which displays the number of unread messages in your Google Voice inbox.
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• Gives you quick access to your most recent messages with transcripts.
• Lets you initiate calls and send free text messages by just typing any number or contact name.
• Makes phone numbers on websites callable via Google Voice by just clicking on them.

What’s good about this extension is that it integrates your browser with Google Voice and saves you the trouble of having to keep an additional window or tab open for Voice.

The extension page also mentions that it might not work perfectly on Macs. Any Mac users who can tell us how it’s going?

Add or Remove “New” Menu Items from Explorer’s Context Menu

By Jyotiprakash

 

Everyone knows the “New” submenu that is positioned in Windows Explorer’s right-click context menu.

You use it to create a new folder, text file, image, spreadsheet, etc.

However, sometimes this menu can get very crowded as you install more and more applications on your computer.

ShellNewHandler lets your Customise Explorer’s “New” Context Submenu

ShellNewHandler is a small, open source, portable application for Windows computers that serves the sole purpose of customising Windows Explorer’s “New” context submenu.

ShellNewHandler provides a list of all the filetypes that can be created using the “New” submenu.

Each item on this list has a check-box that you can use to enable or disable this item from appearing in the “New” submenu.

Usually, doing such a thing would require you to hunt deep in the Windows registry and add or delete keys, something that will intimidate ordinary mortals.

Instead, ShellNewHandler gives you a simple, easy interface to handle your “New” menu items:

ShellNewHandler is an free and open source application. You can download ShellNewHandler from SourceForge.

ShellNewHandler works on any version of Windows, though the creator intended it for Windows Vista.

Visual Studio 2010

At the Visual Studio 2010 launch event, you’ll be the first to experience what’s next in Visual Studio. You’ll get a head start on tomorrow’s application breakthroughs in immersive lab. And you will enjoy all the deep learning and community interaction that DevConnections offers around the breadth of Microsoft development technologies.

 

Set your ideas free

Create what you can imagine, build on the strengths of your team, and open up new possibilities.

• New prototyping, modeling, and visual design tools enable you to create innovative applications for Windows and the Web
• Create a shared vision as a foundation for creativity with SketchFlow ,in Microsoft Expression® Studio , and Team Foundation Server
• Take advantage of new opportunities & capabilities offered by multi-core programming and cloud development tools

Simplicity through integration

A single integrated development environment that takes your skills further and adjusts to the way you work.

• Complete all your coding, modeling, testing, debugging, and deployment work without leaving the Visual Studio 2010 environment
• Use existing standards and skills to target a growing number of application types including Microsoft SharePoint® and Windows^® Azure™
• Work your way through multi-monitor support, partner extensions, and a new editor.

Quality tools help ensure quality results

Powerful testing tools with proactive project management features help you build the right app the right way.

• Use the new IntelliTrace debugger to isolate the point of failure within a recorded application history.
• Stay ahead of the curve with proactive project management tools including new reports, dashboards, and planning worksheets.
• Know that you’ve built the right application the right way with manual and automated testing tools.

Apple patents hint at tablet's technology

History looks set to repeat itself tomorrow when a US firm will attempt to reinvent personal computing and encourage us to use touch-controlled "tablets" in place of keyboards and mice – or so strong rumours suggest.

But can Apple of Cupertino, California, do it more successfully than Microsoft did when it tried the same thing in 2003? Many reports are focussing on Apple taking on the book, textbook and newspaper markets with the device it is expected to unveil. Others suggest a major market will be gaming. But anyone with experience of tablet computers past – I trialled one in 2003 – will tell you that the most important thing for the firm to get right is the user interface.

The earlier tablets were fun, but the novelty wore off too quickly. Most of them were simply laptops that allowed you to twist the screen 180 degrees and fold it over the keyboard, making them heavy. And the stylus-centric touchscreen interaction just wasn't compelling enough. But a rash of patents filed by Apple suggest that going the next step beyond the iPhone's once-revolutionary touch interface may just be part of the plan for any tablet it launches.

How To Block Stealthy Malware Attacks

The spread of malicious software, also known as malware or computer viruses, is a growing problem that can lead to crashed computer systems, stolen personal information, and billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. One of the most insidious types of malware is a "rootkit," which can effectively hide the presence of other spyware or viruses from the user -- allowing third parties to steal information from your computer without your knowledge. But now researchers from North Carolina State University have devised a new way to block rootkits and prevent them from taking over your computer systems.

To give some idea of the scale of the computer malware problem, a recent Internet security threat report showed a 1,000 percent increase in the number of new malware signatures extracted from the in-the-wild malware programs found from 2006 to 2008. Of these malware programs, "rootkits are one of the stealthiest," says Dr. Xuxian Jiang, assistant professor of computer science at NC State and a co-author of the research. "Hackers can use rootkits to install and hide spyware or other programs. When you start your machine, everything seems normal but, unfortunately, you've been compromised."

Rootkits typically work by hijacking a number of "hooks," or control data, in a computer's operating system. "By taking control of these hooks, the rootkit can intercept and manipulate the computer system's data at will," Jiang says, "essentially letting the user see only what it wants the user to see." As a result, the rootkit can make itself invisible to the computer user and any antivirus software. Furthermore, the rootkit can install additional malware, such as programs designed to steal personal information, and make them invisible as well.

In order to prevent a rootkit from insinuating itself into an operating system, Jiang and the other researchers determined that all of an operating system's hooks need to be protected. "The challenging part is that an operating system may have tens of thousands of hooks -- any of which could potentially be exploited for a rootkit's purposes," Jiang says, "Worse, those hooks might be spread throughout a system. Our research leads to a new way that can protect all the hooks in an efficient way, by moving them to a centralized place and thus making them easier to manage and harder to subvert."

Jiang explains that by placing all of the hooks in one place, researchers were able to simply leverage hardware-based memory protection, which is now commonplace, to prevent hooks from being hijacked. Essentially, they were able to put hardware in place to ensure that a rootkit cannot modify any hooks without approval from the user.

Combining Six Photons Avoids Quantum Data Scrambling

In classical communications, a bit can represent one of two states - either 0 or 1. But because photons are quantum mechanical objects, they can exist in multiple states at the same time. Photons can also be combined, in a process known as entanglement, to store a bit of quantum information (i.e. a qubit).

Unlike data stored in a computer or typically sent through conventional fiber optic cables, however, qubits are extremely fragile. A kink in a cable, the properties of the cable material, or even changes in temperature can corrupt a qubit and destroy the information it carries. But now a group lead by Magnus Rådmark at Stockholm University has shown that six entangled photons can encode information that stands up to some knocking around.

Rådmark and his team proved experimentally that their six photon qubits are robust and should be able to reliably carry information over long distances. The technology to encode useful information on the qubits and subsequently read it back is still lacking, but once those problems are solved, we will be well on our way to secure, reliable, and speedy quantum communication.

Exotic Symmetry Seen in Ultracold Electrons

An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University, report in a recent article in Science how they spotted the symmetry, termed E8, in the patterns formed by the magnetic spins in crystals of the material cobalt niobate, cooled to near absolute zero and subject to a powerful applied magnetic field.

The material contains cobalt atoms arranged in long chains and each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet that can point either 'up' or 'down'.

When a magnetic field is applied at right angles to the aligned spin directions, the spins can 'quantum tunnel' between the 'up' and 'down' orientations. At a precise value of the applied field these fluctuations 'melt' the ferromagnetic order of the material resulting in a 'quantum critical' state.

'You might expect to see random fluctuations of the spins at this critical point but what we uncovered was a remarkable structure in the resonances of the magnetic spins indicating a perfectly harmonious state,' said Radu Coldea from Oxford University's Department of Physics who led the team.

As the critical state was approached the researchers observed that the chain of atoms behaved like a 'magnetic guitar string'.

Radu added: 'The tension comes from the interaction between spins causing them to magnetically resonate. We found a series of resonant modes. Close to the critical field the two lowest resonant frequencies approached closely the golden ratio 1.618…, a characteristic signature of the predicted E8 symmetry.'

He is convinced that this is no coincidence and it reflects a subtle form of order present in the quantum system.

The resonant states seen experimentally in cobalt niobate may be our first glimpse of complex symmetries that can occur in the quantum world. "The results suggest that similar 'hidden' symmetries may also govern the physics of other materials near quantum critical points where electrons organize themselves according to quantum rules for strong interactions,' Radu told us.

The research was supported by EPSRC and Radu aims to use a new EPSRC grant to explore the physics of materials near quantum criticality.

'Universal' Programmable Two-Qubit Quantum Processor

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the first "universal" programmable quantum information processor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics -- the rules governing the submicroscopic world -- using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically could solve some important problems that are intractable today.

The NIST processor stores binary information (1s and 0s) in two beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms), which are held in an electromagnetic trap and manipulated with ultraviolet lasers. Two magnesium ions in the trap help cool the beryllium ions.

NIST scientists can manipulate the states of each beryllium qubit, including placing the ions in a "superposition" of both 1 and 0 values at the same time, a significant potential advantage of information processing in the quantum world. Scientists also can "entangle" the two qubits, a quantum phenomenon that links the pair's properties even when the ions are physically separated.

With these capabilities, the NIST team performed 160 different processing routines on the two qubits. Although there are an infinite number of possible two-qubit programs, this set of 160 is large and diverse enough to fairly represent them, Hanneke says, making the processor "universal." Key to the experimental design was use of a random number generator to select the particular routines that would be executed, so all possible programs had an equal chance of selection. This approach was chosen to avoid bias in testing the processor, in the event that some programs ran better or produced more accurate outputs than others.

Ions are among several promising types of qubits for a quantum computer. If they can be built, quantum computers have many possible applications such as breaking today's most widely used encryption codes, such as those that protect electronic financial transactions. In addition to its possible use as a module of a quantum computer, the new processor might be used as a miniature simulator for interactions in any quantum system that employs two energy levels, such as the two-level ion qubit systems that represent energy levels as 0s and 1s. Large quantum simulators could, for example, help explain the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity, the transmission of electricity with zero resistance at temperatures that may be practical for efficient storage and distribution of electric power.

The new paper is the same NIST research group's third major paper published this year based on data from experiments with trapped ions. They previously demonstrated sustained quantum information processing and entanglement in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. NIST quantum computing research contributes to advances in national priority areas, such as information security, as well as NIST mission work in precision measurement and atomic clocks.

In the latest NIST experiments reported in Nature Physics, each program consisted of 31 logic operations, 15 of which were varied in the programming process. A logic operation is a rule specifying a particular manipulation of one or two qubits. In traditional computers, these operations are written into software code and performed by hardware.

The programs did not perform easily described mathematical calculations. Rather, they involved various single-qubit "rotations" and two-qubit entanglements. As an example of a rotation, if a qubit is envisioned as a dot on a sphere at the north pole for 0, at the south pole for 1, or on the equator for a balanced superposition of 0 and 1, the dot might be rotated to a different point on the sphere, perhaps from the northern to the southern hemisphere, making it more of a 1 than a 0.

Each program operated accurately an average of 79 percent of the time across 900 runs, each run lasting about 37 milliseconds. To evaluate the processor and the quality of its operation, NIST scientists compared the measured outputs of the programs to idealized, theoretical results. They also performed extra measurements on 11 of the 160 programs, to more fully reconstruct how they ran and double-check the outputs.