Apparently Google isn’t content being the number one place you have for your knowledge thirst. Google is working on being the number place you’d look for anything and everything, from the price of gold to currency exchange and now even flight schedules.

Typing in a flight number (with no spaces) directly into Google yields the flight status in terms of departure and arrival times. Not to mention letting you know of delays ahead of time, the flight data is pulled from flightstats.com and Google does a fine job of displaying the data directly before the query results.

Imagine for a moment you’re an ancient social activist, somewhere in Babylon or Persia, or even ancient Rome, and you’ve just uncovered a secret of money laundering among elected officials. Armed with this information and a burning desire to expose the elected official you march out to tell the world of his exploits and hopefully stand over him in the expectation of swift justice to be executed.

How would you do it?

If you like most ancient social activist (if ever there were) would go out to the streets and shout it aloud, you’d meet the judges and the kings, and you may have your story heard. However, if you were known to be a troublemaker (as most social activist are) you’d probably not be taken seriously (at best) or even executed (at worst). This was how it was in the ancient world, where money bought power and the control of information was strongly held by those with power and by extension the money.

Mission Accomplished…GWB style!

When I started this blog on my birthday, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. I didn’t have a target, I didn’t have a goal and all I wanted to do was to start a website and keep it to myself.

Over time as I learnt about the awesomeness of wordpress, and the wonderful stuff you can do on the web, I knew I had to share that or at least write about it. So I started blogging about setting up wordpress blogs or Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, dreamhost and amazon web services. If you didn’t know how much I loved wordpress, let me tell you now…I Love it a Lot !!(arms stretched wide open)

So I set about a goal to create a blog that would get a modest hit rate of 1000 hits a month, and as of yesterday I finally crossed that target and now have had 1003 hits in the past 30 days….AMAZING!

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being….

In the broad spectrum of the animal kingdom where you have the Lone Predator on one end and the Hyper-Connected Ants on the other , Humans are surprisingly much closer to the Ants than we are to that solitary Puma trolling the Jungles of Peru (although it may be a lot more interesting to be a puma). Humans are built (or even programmed) to be with other humans, to share our thoughts and emotions and to connect on a emotional level with others. It helps us build bonds and survive, but also has massive physiological effects on our bodies and mind.

In an amazing book by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler that dealt with surprising power of social networks, aptly titled Connected addressed this particular drive by humans to connect with others. The book was a best-seller and even made it to Oprahs Fall Reading Guide (which means it has to be really good if Oprahs reading it).

A good file sharing website is hard to come by ever since drop.io was bought over by Facebook. I loved drop.io and my admiration for the design of their service goes without saying…but I’ll say it anyway.

There was a huge void for a short period, where I was struggling with things like dropbox, skydrive and even hosting my own file sharing server (here). Fortunately, for the file sharers among us there emerges from the midst a file sharing website worthy of being called drop.io’s replacement. It’s name is minus.com.

I’ve decided to start a separate Tuesday posting that has nothing to do with the web or tech, I call it Techless Tuesday, and the topic of todays Techless Tuesday is something I’ve been researching for about 3 weeks now…Stress.

So what is Stress and what can we do about it.

It’s all pretty standard question but what I’ve discovered about stress really amazed me , not just about how little I knew but also how dangerous it really is. I learnt how pervasive stress can become in our lives and how if left uncheck it would invade not just our health, but our relationships with our spouses as well. Stress wasn’t some concept, stress was something real that had a real impact.

Today is the first part of a series of post I intend to do about stress and I’d thought I clear up a misconception that most people have about stress namely that the stress is all in your mind something conjured up by your thoughts, and the way to avoid stress is to ’think happy thoughts’ and ’take it easy’. Research however points in a different direction, suggesting that stress isn’t just psychological (caused by the mind) but physiological (caused by the body)

My wife trolls deal sites everyday looking for deals to save us 50% on romantic dinners or 70% off on Hotel stays or even 90% off on skydiving. Deal sites like Groupon and Mydeals are popping up everywhere these days that you’d look like a fool if you bought a meal at …regular price (gasp!) .

However, if you’re not contented with just trolling the 10 deal sites you subscribe to, you might want to start your own groupon site. Think about it, it’s an easy business model, you require limited upfront capital and you’re more or less just a middle man, you’d think anyone can do it. Well it turns out everyone can do it, and a lot or people are. Here’s 3 ways to start your deal website and be on your way to Groupon like fame (or infamy)

I recently wrote about how excited I was to use fetch.io, but that turned out to be a bit disappointing. Recently I discovered torrific, a web based torrent download web page.  It’s as good (if not better) than fetch.io. The time taken to download the torrent may not be as super fast as fetch.io, but torrific works for most torrent files and is far more reliable than fetch.io

Overall great experience, and I haven’t even mentioned the best part….it’s FREE. As in free as advice from your mother-in-law free, absolutely. I loved it, and you should try it.

The interface is simple to use, and the downloads are reliable. Premium users get to bump up their torrents but overall free accounts also get you a good dose of downloads :)

So I’ve just moved into my new place and my wife and I wanted to convert our upstairs hall into a study area for the both of us.

Problem is that I wanted a standing desk and my wife was having none of it. So a comprimise was in order…in this case we’d have 2 desk one for each, mine would be a standing desk and hers a regular sit-down one. I’m no master carpenter so our greatest hope was to hack ikea. If you’re wondering what hacking ikea means, well the ‘original’ Ikea Hackers says: