THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

Imagine the conventional email greetings that we send out this part of the year. This new year consider replacing the text by greetings in your own voice using your computer and a standard PC mic and a free software combo of Audacity and an mp3 converter . It is pretty simple and can be done without much of a pain.Record your greetings in your own voice and export the recording to mp3 format using the software combo mentioned before. Attach and send it by email. Some mail services, such as Gmail even sense that the attachment is an audio mp3 file and directly offer to play it. I see good potential here to surprise faraway friends whom we may not call, but still may want to wish them in our own voice. Sorry, no voice-merge here! For Installation help on Audacity here . Fellow blogger Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration has written a very useful post on voice recording using such software and I recommend all readers to spend a minute on very tips provided by Amit.

Of late I have come across professionals who want to add slideshow onto their blogs or business websites. Zoho provides an interesting feature which allows you to embed slideshow onto your website or blog in just a few steps. If you use your desktop to make slides, Zoho Show works fairly well. However, it also allows you to create presentations from scratch using its own online interface, as well as embed them to your blog or website such as one shown below. Steps to embed a ppt onto a blog like this are very simple. A. Signup for Zoho Show . B. Upload your slides or create your presentation online C. Once done, click on 'action', you would see a menu bar like shown below D. Once you have clicked on and see the some code, copy it completely. E. If you want to add to a blog like this, do write your blog in the text editor and then click on the Edit Html button above. Paste the Zoho code at the place where you want your slideshow to appear.Publish and your are up. It may appear...

Today is the anniversary of 2004 Tsunami that devastated the lives of people across many on the coastlines of Asia. As news about a possible Tsunami in the Phillipines trickles in, here's a good site to refer to. It is the US Geological Survey site's Eathquake Center (recently redone, but how recently not sure). You may like to check out.The home site is very informative and worth spending a few minutes.It's here . Technorati: Tsunami

Google today announced that its popular blog platform Blogger is moved out of Beta. It is been called as New Blogger. Of late, Google has been rapidly migrating blogs on Blogger to Blogger Beta, which is now been called as 'New Blogger'. The 'New Blogger' has some nice features but the migration for many users like me have not been without trouble. The timezone was reset and in case of my Hindi blog , the language was changed back to English. But nevertheless, some nice features . I suppose the feeds location changes too, though for few days Google would redirect your readers to the new feed location.Next few days would be worth the watch in blogosphere.Pour in your reactions.

A Computerworld story recounts how NEC desktops, atleast two two of them, set themselves ablaze in Japan this Oct and Nov.While this is something to be concerned about, the story does not mention the environment in which these desktops were being used, and whether any user action was responsible for this. Thankfully, NEC is not a major name in Desktop business. Look at the cheek, they have quickly mentioned that the faulty components were not made by NEC, but outsourced!

Google seems heading deep in space with its tieup with Nasa .Google will be able to make previously unavailable pitcures from Nasa's library to its consumers and Nasa would be able to leverage GOOG's huge computing facilities and expertise in this area. Nasa will provide high quality pictures of Moon and Mars, as well as that of the international space station.Sounds like a win-win for the space enthusiasts.

In 1982 Time rated PC is the person of the year. That was the hardware bit in the computing business getting recognized. Things have indeed moved forward and the focus is now on the net and PC is on the sidelines, enabling things as they happen.The focus is on content. Web enthusiasts have been using newer platforms(are they really new indeed?) such as blogs, mashups etc self expression and have felt good about it. Now Time magazine has announced that the Person of the Year 2006 is 'You', crediting the users for enriching web with their content and for having great influence on vox-populi. This is mainstream recognition that Web 2.0 has arrived. This should also silence critics who have often spoken of Web 2.0 as a geeks' hype. BTW, here's an interesting wiki on Time's Person of the Year here.