BRUSH UP YOUR AC LINGO

BRUSH UP YOUR AC LINGO

Choosing the right air conditioner is easy if you have the right information. But one needs to be aware of the jargon before getting lost in them. A lowdown on terminology...

BTU The British thermal unit (Btu) is the international measurement of energy. In AC jargon, Btus measure the amount of heat an air conditioning unit can remove from the room. The Btu rating increases proportionally to the size, weight and cost of the air conditioner. Room air conditioners are generally between 5000 to 24,000 Btus. They play a very important role in cooling the room efficiently. 
EER Energy conservation and effective usage of power is a must these days. The Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER) is calculated by dividing the Btus by the number of watts that the unit is consuming. The higher the EER number the more efficient the unit will be. A higher EER also means additional cost; but often it is worth it due the big savings that it generates. 
THERMOSTAT The heat-sensing thermostats adjust the temperature of the air that is coming from the air conditioning unit. Thermostats can be both programmable and manual. Today a lot of units are available with an adjustable thermostat combined with an adjustable speed fan. This makes unit an effective one. These units often have remote control, delay timers and digital display for temperature. Good quality thermostats play a crucial role in the cooling efficiency of an air-conditioner. 
FAN It might be considered one of the most non-essential parts of an AC by many, but its one thing that helps the movement of the air. A variable speed fan combined with an adjustable thermostat make a unit very effective. Fan adjustments are of crucial importance. 
FILTER Clean air is essential for efficient operation of a unit. ACs with a range of filers are available in the market. One should always look for units which have filters that can be removed, cleaned and replaced easily. Some filters with health benefits are also available in the market these days. 
CHASSIS A fixed chassis is characteristic of a lighter weight and smaller unit that can be moved and removed easily. A slide out chassis is a must in the large and heavier models as this helps the unit slide out easily for maintenance. A strong chassis prolongs the life of an air conditioning unit.

How to use networking websites to find love

How to use networking websites to find love

Here are some pointers to make optimum use of these websites

1 MONITOR THE TIME YOU SPEND ON SITES You are not necessarily going to find love, just because you are always logged on to some social networking website all the time. In fact it’s likely to frustrate you and turn you into a social recluse. According to research, two hours a day are enough to help you network online. 

2 DON’T MOVE ONLY IN THE SAME GROUPS So you love your friends and don’t miss out on an opportunity to bond with them. But if you are just going to move in the same circles how will you get to know more people and make new acquaintance.  

3 DON’T BE TOO OBSESSED WITH PRIVACY SETTINGS The many stories about people misusing the pictures that you post online can scare anyone, but be practical before blocking the world from any kind of access to your profile.
 
4 DON’T EXPECT EVERY NEW ACQUAINTANCE TO BE A PROSPECTIVE PARTNER When you make a new friend, don’t just go asking him/her about his relationship status. You don’t want to come across as someone who is desperate to get into a relationship at any cost.  

5 THINK BEFORE YOU TYPE
The way you introduce yourself to the world is what will draw people towards your profile. Make sure you are writing stuff that’s not incorrect. Think before you type is the new think before you speak.
 
6 DON’T BE CYBER STALKER
If you are interested in a guy/girl don’t leave a hundred messages on his or her profile. That is certified stalker behaviour that most people will not appreciate or put up with.
 
7 DON’T BE CLOSED TO PEOPLE AROUND YOU Today, people log on to their social profiles from almost all places. Be it a party, a grocery store or while commuting, we can’t wait to tell the world that we are having a great time. Are you missing out on looking at people around you to find love online? Take a step back and see if you are so obsessed in finding love in the virtual world, that you aren’t giving the people in your real world an opportunity to woo you.

APP WISE Free apps for your tablet

APP WISE Free apps for your tablet Get the best use out of your new gadget with these essential add-ons Bluefire reader     Apps like iBooks and Kindle provide an integrated marketplace-reader experience for ebooks, but if all you want to do is just read your eBooks, then BlueFire Reader is a good solution. BlueFire Reader supports ePUB and PDF and allows you to read digital editions protected by the rights-management systems of various softwares. A clean interface, scalable text and night mode all work well. Pixable     This app shows you all the photos uploaded by your friends and it does a great job highlighting the ones that are really important to you. It also lets you see the photos of your friends by going into the individual albums swiping down (instead of rightleft). And you can also ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on the photos without having to log into seperate social networking apps. CloudOn     This is essentially an office suite on your tablet but with cloud storage options to boot. A good solution for on-the-go document editing, even with the condition that you need to be on a data connection. Flipboard     This is a neat little news aggregation and curator app that takes material that you like to read, such as blogs, websites, your social media news feeds, and more, and aggregates them into a sleek, magazine-like format that allows you to view the material you like in one neat package. DrawCast This is a freeware drawing app that functions as a neat digital sketchbook with a host of features such as customisable brushes, layers, colour mixing, eyedropper, and multiple levels of undo. Images can be saved into your Photo Library, and users can share images via email or social networking websites. Photoshop This app gives you a range of useful photo-editing features packed into a free app. More advanced filters, additional features, and image utilities can also be tacked on with inapp purchases, but the stock package is already a great, scaled-down version for basic editing like red-eye correction, cropping and so on. OPlayer HD Lite     This is a free media player that allows you to open a host of media file formats that the tablet normally doesn’t support (such as MKV, WMV, and AVI to name a few). OPlayer also allows you to stream media into your device through a variety of streaming protocols. Translate     You can type in or dictate short sentences from one language to another. Simply select an input language and an output language and then either type in or dictate your message. The app does its magic, presenting you with a translated text, or a short synthesised message. The software currently translates text between 64 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, and more. It can support dictated messages for 17 languages and can ‘speak’ translations from 24 languages.

GAMING GYAAN Are videogames really to blame for violent teenagers?

GAMING GYAAN

Are videogames really to blame for violent teenagers?

    The massacre of 26 people, mostly young children, at a US school has revived the perennial debate about the impact of violent videogames on the warped minds of gunmen behind such tragedies.
    Experts are divided over whether games with names like Assassin's Creed, Thrill Kill or Manhunt — Executions are blueprints for real-life violent behaviour or harmless fantasies that allow young men
to vent testosterone.
    Some politicians have highlighted the role of violence in television, movies and videogames — including Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, after 12 people were killed in a movie theater massacre near Denver in July.
    “There might well be some direct connection between people who have some mental instability and when they go over the edge — they transport themselves, they become part of one of those video games,” he told a news channel.
    Senator Jay Rockefeller called the latest massacre a “wake-up call” for federal action. “While we don’t know if such images impacted the killer in Newtown, the issue of violent content is serious and must be addressed.
    “As parents, research confirms what we already know — these violent images have a negative impact on our children’s wellbeing,” he said, adding: “I’m pushing for that action now before we have to mourn more innocent lives lost.”
    Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed himself after massacring 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was reportedly a fan of violent videogames, including Dynasty Warriors.
    California banned the sale of violent videogames to minors, but the US Supreme Court struck down the law in June 2011, saying it violated the right to free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment of the US constitution.
    Experts and games developers
    say the evidence about such games’ impact on players is mixed.
    “I’m rather tired of this argument. I’m sure you can find a study or two to support the claim that videogames foster violence, but I’m sure you can also find studies that deny it,” said specialist and game designer Greg Costikyan, continuing, “In general, my impression is that the idea that media of any sort cause anything other than short-term and minor changes in proclivities to violent behavior has been thoroughly debunked.”
    But Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University and coauthor of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology last month, said players grow more aggressive the longer they play such games.
    But violent videogames do not by themselves create crazed killers. “Shootings like the one in Connecticut are very rare and you cannot predict them. Violent videogames increase behaviour that’s not so rare, like yelling, hitting, pushing, and being an aggressive driver,” said Bushman.
    AFP

Screen grabs from Assassin’s Creed and Manhunt — Executions

Improve your laptop’s gaming performance

Improve your laptop’s gaming performance

Portability doesn’t necessarily mean a sacrifice in output. Here’s how to tweak your machine for a better playing experience

    Laptops built specifically for gaming are almost never as powerful as desktop computers built for this purpose in mind. You can stuff a lot of extra hardware into a desktop as well as cooling systems and so on, and weight will not be a consideration. It’s a different question altogether for gaming laptops. It is very difficult to upgrade them and the best ones anyways are pretty heavy, not to mention being pricey. If you’re spending that much money, you might as well try to get the best out of what you have with the tools at your disposal.
Driver updates You can’t do much with the drivers that are shipped with laptops, save for some downloads that the manufacturer might release now and then. And even in this case, the upgrades might not really be relevant to your gaming experience.
    What is relevant, however, are the drivers for your video card, which can add some juice to the frame rate and refresh rate of the visual experience. This is quite important if you like playing fastpaced games like first-person shooters. For example, if you have a laptop that works on Intel, as a majority of commerciallyavailable laptops in India come shipped with, the manufacturer website has a section on the website that leads you through a diagnostic tool for what kind of processor you have. When you find out this data, you can then visit your dealer and shop around for an upgrade.
    As for ‘unofficially’ using hacked drivers, the same can coax out some enhanced and increased performance from the hardware.
Size and type of hard drive While the size of a hard drive is not really critical for when shopping for a regular-use laptop (because you can always store extra data on external hard drives and USB memory pods), you will need a larger-than-usual hard drive for a gaming laptop. Games take up a lot of space and so does saving the settings and progress of the game, each time you end a session. Solid State Drives are a bit more pricey, but you get none of the above-mentioned problems. And the good thing is that as flash hard drives get more common, their price will drop as well.
Overclocking You can try to modify the core clock as well as the memory clock of your laptop. Without getting into too much detail, the former is the speed of the actual processing cores on the GPU, while the memory clock is the speed of the memory used to buffer video data. There is a limit to how much you can speed these up — go overboard and your system circuits will get fried, because laptops don’t have the kind of cooling capacity that desktops have. If it came at 2.9 Ghz, you can probably overclock it to 3.2 or 3.4 Ghz without too much of an issue and without changing voltage too much. Go to your BIOS, find out what values cause you to have 2.9 Ghz, and alter them to change your frequency to whatever you want, keeping in mind that if your processor isn’t ‘unlocked’, then changing your frequencies will also change the speed your RAM runs at. Again, overclocking laptops is not normally recommended, do so at your own risk.
Screen settings The screen refresh rate is the number of refreshes your monitor does per second. Your monitor usually updates the screen 60 times per second, making it impossible to see more than 60 frames per second. Gaming laptops are sometimes limited by the volume and quality of their video memory. The memory available to a video card is important, because it acts as the highway between your GPU and your display. If it’s out of room, a traffic jam forms, and your frame-rates start to dip. And lastly, it goes without saying that laptops come with a lot of unnecessary software that can be uninstalled or deactivated. All of this, coupled with a desire to experiment, will only lead to a better gaming experience.
    reagan.rasquinha@timesgroup.com 

Piranha beats T Rex in bite force

Piranha beats T Rex in bite force

WASHINGTON Outsized jaw muscles allow the black piranha to exert bite force equivalent to 30 times its bodyweight, a feat unmatched in the natural world, according to results of a finger-risking study.
Other animals like the great white shark, the hyena and the alligator can deliver more forceful bites, but their crunching power becomes much less impressive when viewed in relation to their overall size and weight, it said.
In fact, relative to their size, piranhas outperform even prehistoric monsters like Tyrannosaurus rex and the whale-chomping megalodon, a massive shark that preceded the great white, said the study.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the research saw scientists catch 15 black piranhasinBrazil’sAmazonRiverbasinandrisktheir digitsbyteasingacustomisedforcegaugebetween their serrated jaws.
    Thefish,rangingfromabouteightto15inches in length, “readily performed multiple defensive bites” on the gadget, wrote the team from the United States, Egypt and Brazil.
    The measured bite force of the black piranha, at 320 newton (N), was nearly three times greater than that exerted by an American alligator of comparative size, said the study. One newton is the force required to move a kilogramme of mass at one metre per second squared.
    How does the tiny fish do it? It has jaw muscles of an “extraordinary” size and a highly modified jaw-closing lever, said the team. In fact, the muscle complex makes more than two per cent of the black piranha’s total body mass. AFP

NOT ALL GAMERS ARE LOSERS IN SOCIAL LIFE

NOT ALL GAMERS ARE LOSERS IN SOCIAL LIFE

Not all video game junkies are destined for lives filled with failing relationships and dwindling friendships. A lot depends on the role of the game-playing activity in the gamer’s life, researchers from the American Penn State university have found.
    “There’s a common stereotype that if you play video games, then you are a loner,” a researcher said, “But it may have more to do with how a person is involved in gaming that determines how their social support is affected.”
    In a study of people who played multi-player, firstperson shooter games, like the Call of Duty and Halo, gamers who organised their lives around gaming activities tended to experience a negative effect on their friendships and relationships.
    On the other hand, the researchers found that gamers who primarily played the game as a way to reinforce social bonds said they experienced higher levels of social ties and support. Behavioural indicators like the amount of time and money spent on games were not related to the gamers’ success in maintaining their social ties.
    “Players may actually be doing something positive when gaming becomes a way for games to connect with friends who they otherwise may not be able to spend time with, especially friends who they are not near geographically,” the researcher said.
    Multi-player, first-person shooter games allow video game players to compete online by themselves against other players around the world, or they can team with other players in a variety of combat scenarios, the study noted.
    The researchers, who relied on a scale that experts use to assess a person's involvement in leisure activities, said that the other factors of the scale, such as, deriving pleasure and self-identity from video-gaming, did not significantly affect social ties.
    To collect information for the study, the researchers surveyed the gamers who were waiting in line for a late night release of a new version of the video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, at two central Pennsylvania video game stores. Gamers who attend these new release gatherings tend to be both behaviourally and psychologically committed to the activity, the study observed.
    The researchers measured what role social bonding played in their gaming by asking them to what extent they agreed with statements such as, “Most of my friends are in some way associated with video gaming” and “I enjoy discussing video gaming with my friends.”