Akshay Jain

I use Gtalk and I simply love it because of its simplicity. There is a very clean interface without any disturbing elements. The windows open fast and overall its a pleasant experience to use Gtalk.

Now, the feature that I miss the most in Gtalk is that of being invisible to your friends as you can do in Yahoo/MSN easily. But Gtalk simply does not have this feature of being “idle”.

There is a nice little trick to bypass this restriction in Gtalk. A nice and handy program which completely fits into Gtalk interface and is completely invisible. The name is GAlwaysIdle

This can be used to change your status message as you want.

There is one more trick to achieve the almost same effect but that is not from the desktop application of Gtalk. It is by using the Google Gadget‘

Enjoy!

We all have seen those cool emails which contain images of celebrities by as text. They look really cool and I just wanted to post a little script which will let you achieve the exact same effect on any image that you want.

This is technically called a “ASCII Generator” or “ASCII Art”

Here is the page where you can test this out: ASCII ART

A little example to demonstrate its capabilities:

To copy this image, simply select the text in the image and you are ready to create those funky looking emails/forum signatures or anything else.

Enjoy!

This is a sequel to the earlier post that I had made yesterday regarding the “ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ” that was the top result in Google Trends yesterday.

Today, there is one more weird result among the top 10 results. The result is “how to poop at work”. Now my question is: What happened today that people are searching for this particular search term. Google News search for this shows nothing of significance, which makes me suspicious regarding what is exactly wrong with Google Trends.

Here is the official word from Google that Los Angeles Times blog has received.

The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.

Now, this is an interesting thing, because Google is infact denying that there was any tampering with hte Google Trends webpage per say. It implies to some extent that Google is accepting that there “WERE” those many searches being done for the “Swastika” symbol and the “F*** you google” which leads credence to my hypothesis that there is some mass-bot or attack under way because I can in no way think that all Americans will suddenly wake up one day and search for a (卐)? (Ya this is the Swastika symbol which everyone was searching. If it had been the word, “Swastika” then I would have probably accepted it but the symbol? No WAY!

Now, coming to this latest “how to poop at work” search, I fail to understand why are people searching for it.

Last time I got loads of comments that it was “EbaumsWorld” behind this. (This seems to be some online forum) But I fail to believe that any single forum however large it might be has the potential to gain the first spot in Google.

Let’s see how this goes.