Pongal is an important festival in India, with prayers to the Sun God on this occasion. Pongal is one of such highly revered festivals celebrated in Tamil Nadu to mark the harvesting of crops by farmers. The house is cleaned, and all maintenance jobs are done before this festival. Held in the middle of January, it is the time when the people get ready to thank God, Earth and their Cattle for the wonderful harvest and celebrate the occasion with joyous festivities and rituals. During the four-day festival, different varieties of Rangoli are drawn in front of the houses early in the morning. In North India, it is known as Sankaranthi.

Diwali - The Delight

Every year, the festive season of Diwali comes back with all the excitement and merriment. Times may have undergone a sea change but customs and traditions remain the same.

It is difficult to state that, since when the festival of Dipavali has been celebrating in its present form. In India, the economy is based on agriculture, this festival was believed to be started as the celebration of 'rituparva' thousands of years ago. By this time the harvest of crops were complete. As a result the people had not to worry about food for the rest of year. This joys of their reflected ion the illumination of countless lamps. In due course of time, numerous historical incidents got connected with this festival. There are many tales in the Puranas related with this festival.

With the evolution of the lifestyle, there has been certain change in the way people celebrate Diwali, as more and more technology has been included, but the zeal and the spirit of celebration remains the same. Earthen lamps may have been replaced with stunning electric illuminations, dress code may have changed, but the custom and tradition of performing puja has been carried very well through generations.

People wake up at the crack of dawn to conduct the customary pujas. Dressed in brilliant silks and glittering gold jewelry families gather and light crackers to usher in the great evening. After a session of bursting crackers, its time to visit friends and relatives. Armed with sweets and savories people meet their near and dear ones. Even today, Diwali is such a wonderful festival, a time of giving and sharing, a time to catch up with people, in other words its time to catch up with the little joys that we keep overlooking for the remaining part of the year.

Music therapy

Music can heal you, when you are in stress,

Symbol of Love

Life Property

Every person needs property to live, a residence in a calm and easily accesible location is a gift to any person.

Siemens Mobile

New things

Life means learning new things in day to day life.

Stuff

Own stuff - Praba

Own house - India

Own location - World

Pet care

Pets are also like children, we should care them as child.

Peace

World

The Place to work

An office is a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organisation with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the term office may refer to business-related tasks.

In legal writing, a company or organization has offices in any place that it has an official presence, even if that presence consists of, for example, a storage silo rather than an office. An office is an architectural and design phenomenon and a social phenomenon, whether it is a tiny office such as a bench in the corner of a "Mom and Pop shop" of extremely small size (see Small Office/Home Office) through entire floors of buildings up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one company. In modern terms an office usually refers to the location where white-collar workers are employed during the day.

Laptop

When it comes to mobility, computers come in the form of laptop/notebook

Laptop (also notebook computer or notebook), is a small mobile computer, which usually weighs 2.2-18 pounds (1-6 kilograms), depending on size, materials, and other factors. While the terms laptop and notebook are often used interchangeably, "laptop" is the older term, introduced in 1981 with the Gavilan SC. "Notebook computer" is a later coinage, which was used to differentiate smaller devices such as those of the NEC UltraLite and Compaq LTE series in 1989, which were, in contrast to previous laptops, the approximate size of an A4 or letter size paper sheet.[1] The terms are imprecise: due to heat and other issues, many laptops are inappropriate for use on one's lap, and most notebooks are not the size of typical letter or A4 paper notebook. Although some older portable computers, such as the Macintosh Portable and certain Zenith TurbosPort models, were sometimes described as "laptops", their size and weight were too great for this category.

As of 2007, most manufacturers use the term "notebook" (or some variant thereof) for what most end-users call a "laptop". Laptops usually run on a single main battery or from an external AC/DC adapter which can charge the battery while also supplying power to the computer itself. Many computers also have a 3volt cell to run the clock and other processes in the event of a power failure. As personal computers, laptops are capable of the same tasks as a desktop computer, although they are typically less powerful for the same price. They contain components that are similar to their desktop counterparts and perform the same functions, but are miniaturized and optimized for mobile use and efficient power consumption.

Laptops usually have liquid crystal displays and most of them use different memory modules for their random access memory (RAM), for instance, SO-DIMM in lieu of the larger DIMMs. In addition to a built-in keyboard, they may utilize a touchpad (also known as a trackpad) or a pointing stick for input, though an external keyboard or mouse can usually be attached.

The Internal view of a laptop.

Travel

Travel is part of life.

Tiny Generator Would Make Electricity While You Walk

Are you tired of keeping track of all those little chargers for your phone, your music player and your other little electronic gadgets? Professor Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology may have the answer. Wang has created a tiny nanogenerator that produces a continuous flow of electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from its surroundings. It can produce energy from ultrasonic waves, mechanical movement or even blood flow. Wang stated: "This is a major step toward a portable, adaptable and cost-effective technology for powering nanoscale devices.

There has been a lot of interest in making nanodevices, but we have tended not to think about how to power them. Our nanogenerator allows us to harvest or recycle energy from many sources to power these devices."

The prototype nanogenerator is made up of tiny wires that are free to flex just slightly. When moved by mechanical energy, they flex and make contact with a collection plate. The wires have piezoelectric qualities, meaning that they provide a tiny voltage when mechanical stress is applied. By capturing the output of large numbers of nanowires in motion, the prototype nanogenerator produces a miniscule direct current output.

Wang and his group believe that the nanowires could produce as much as 4 watts per cubic centimeter. "If you had a device like this in your shoes when you walked, you would be able to generate your own small current to power small electronics," Wang noted. "Anything that makes the nanowires move within the generator can be used for generating power. Very little force is required to move them."

Science fiction fans are always looking for ways to enable the creation of their own favorite devices. For example, the stillsuit from Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune made use of the body's own mechanical energy to provide power for the suit, which captured perspiration and other body moisture and processed it for reuse. It's basically a micro-sandwich; a high-efficiency filter and heat-exchange system. The skin-contact layer is porous.

Perspiration passes through it, having cooled the body. Motions of the body, especially breathing, and [heel-powered pumps] provide the pumping force. With a ... suit in good working order, you won't lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day...

Mystery Source of Urban Pollution Revealed

A crucial but unknown source of molecules linked with smog has long eluded scientists trying to uncover the origins of air pollution in cities. Now researchers find the grime that builds up on windows, buildings, roads and other urban surfaces might be this mystery source.

The findings could help improve bad-air predictions and strategies to fight smog.

While grime outside cities is often just natural dirt, grime in cities is "a soup of thousands of chemical compounds," explained University of Toronto atmospheric chemist James Donaldson. These come from auto and factory emissions, dust and salt on roads, kitchen smoke, flame retardants and a menagerie of other sources.

Donaldson's environmental chemist colleague Miriam Diamond analyzed urban grime for nitrogen oxides. These molecules are emitted when gasoline and other fossil fuels burn, and combine with other pollutants known as volatile organic compounds to form smog.

Donaldson and his collaborators found nitrogen compounds disappear from grime at rates that cannot simply be explained by obvious losses, such has getting washed away by the rain. In experiments, their results suggested that shining light on the grime made "inactive" nitrogen oxides that normally stayed put transform into "active" forms that got released into the atmosphere.

Sunlight that illuminates urban grime could activate the same reactions, as is detailed in the June 15 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Computers

Computers

A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions. Computers take numerous physical forms. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers.

Today, computers can be made small enough to fit into a wrist watch and be powered from a watch battery. Society has come to recognize personal computers and their portable equivalent, the laptop computer, as icons of the information age; they are what most people think of as "a computer". However, the most common form of computer in use today is by far the embedded computer.

Embedded computers are small, simple devices that are often used to control other devices—for example, they may be found in machines ranging from fighter aircraft to industrial robots, digital cameras, and even children's toys. The ability to store and execute programs makes computers extremely versatile and distinguishes them from calculators.

The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: Any computer with a certain minimum capability is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. Therefore, computers with capability and complexity ranging from that of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer are all able to perform the same computational tasks as long as time and storage capacity are not considerations.

Latest Nokia

How about a five meg camera, a computer and sat nav all fitting snuggly in your front pocket?

That’s what you’ll get with the Nokia N95. The latest Nokia phone, this is being pitched by the company as the all-in-one multimedia phone, and we have to admit on paper it looks pretty impressive. Unlike other phones the Nokia N95 has a two way slide to allow you to switch from one mode to the other.

The new Nokia smartphone comes with a 2.6 inch QVGA 16 million colour display, and a 5 megapixel camera that apparently according to the company will also be able to shoot DVD-like footage. As well as that the N95 comes with a built-in satellite navigation system and each device will come with maps for over 100 countries – which means an awful lot of worry-free travel. The Nokia N95 smartphone will also have HSDPA and support EDGE, WLAN and WCDMA networks and come with a microSD card slot for additional memory.

Mobiles

Mobile Phones provide several uses.
1. Talk
2. SMS, MMS
3. Browse

Music and life

Music - a medicine to life.

Music is an art form that involves what are sometimes organised sounds and silence, although in some forms of 20th century aleatoric, and indeed improvisational music, as well as most Eastern traditions such as Gamelou, this is not the case. It is expressed in terms of pitch (which includes melody and harmony), rhythm (which includes tempo and meter), and the quality of sound (which includes timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture). Music may also involve generative forms in time through the construction of patterns and combinations of natural stimuli, principally sound.

Music may be used for artistic or aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, ceremonial or religious purposes and by many composers purly as an academic instrument for study. The definition of what constitutes music varies according to culture and social context, with varied interpretations of the term being accepted under sub-genres of the art. Within "the arts", music can be classified as a performing art, a fine art, or an auditory art form.

Romantic and 20th Century music

In the Romantic period, music became more expressive and emotional, expanding to encompass literature, art, and philosophy. The late 19th century saw a dramatic expansion in the size of the orchestra, and in the role of concerts as part of urban society. Later Romantic composers created complex and often much longer musical works.

The 20th Century saw a revolution in music listening as the radio gained popularity worldwide and new media and technologies were developed to record, capture, reproduce and distribute music. 20th Century music brought a new freedom and wide experimentation with new musical styles and forms that challenged the accepted rules of music of earlier periods.

Music in the West

In the West, much of the history of music that is taught deals with the Western civilization's art music. The history of music in other cultures ("world music" or the field of "ethnomusicology") is also taught in Western universities. This includes the documented classical traditions of Asian countries outside the influence of western Europe, as well as the folk or indigenous music of various other cultures. Popular styles of music varied widely from culture to culture, and from period to period. Different cultures emphasised different instruments, or techniques, or uses for music.

Music has been used not only for entertainment, for ceremonies, and for practical and artistic communication, but also for propaganda in totalitarian countries. There is a host of music classifications, many of which are caught up in the argument over the definition of music. Among the largest of these is the division between classical music (or "art" music), and popular music (or commercial music - including rock and roll, country music, and pop music). Some genres don't fit neatly into one of these "big two" classifications, (such as folk music, world music, or jazz music). As world cultures have come into greater contact, their indigenous musical styles have often merged into new styles. For example, the United States bluegrass style contains elements from Anglo-Irish, Scottish, Irish, German and African instrumental and vocal traditions, which were able to fuse in the United States' multi-ethnic society. Genres of music are determined as much by tradition and presentation as by the actual music. While most classical music is acoustic and meant to be performed by individuals or groups, many works described as "classical" include samples or tape, or are mechanical. Some works, like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, are claimed by both jazz and classical music. Many current music festivals celebrate a particular musical genre.