Monday, April 30, 2007
You've got gadget mail
For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage -- a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.
Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world's content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world's most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.
To make yours, choose the gadget template you'd like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends' email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.
Today we're also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we're making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click "Select theme" to pick a theme for your own page.
Scarlett Johansson
Born: 22 November 1984
Where: New York City, New York, USA
Awards: Won 1 BAFTA, Nominated for 2 Golden Globes
Height: 5' 4"
Johansson was born in New York City. Her father, Karsten Johansson, is a Danish-born architect, and her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was a screenwriter and director. Her mother, Melanie Sloan, a producer, comes from a Jewish American family from the Bronx. Johansson's parents met in Denmark, where her mother lived with Johansson's maternal grandmother, Dorothy, a former bookkeeper and schoolteacher. Johansson has an older sister, Vanessa, who is also an actress; an older brother, Adrian; a twin brother, Hunter, also an actor; and a half-brother from her father's re-marriage, Christian.
Johansson grew up in a household with "little money". She began her theater training by attending and graduating from Professional Children's School in Manhattan in 2002.
Filmography: Often a young actress will deliver a performance so strong, so mature she is feted as the Next Big Thing. But the description is usually used more in hope than expectation. We all know that many years and many films can pass before she'll live up to her early promise, if indeed she ever does. Early 2004, though, saw the arrival of a young talent who seemed near fully-formed, despite being still in her teens.
Applele Technology Market
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Japanese Actress / Model Momoko Komachi
Momoko Komachi was born on 16 January 1987 in Kagoshima prefecture, Japan. Can't find much info on Momokl except that this stunning 160cm Japanese beauty is an actress and a bikini model.
More info anyone?
First Habitable Planet
Astronomers find first habitable planet outside solar system
The first habitable planet similar in size and conditions to Earth has been located in a distant solar system, once again raising the possibility of life on other planets, scientists said on Wednesday.
The as-yet unnamed planet is only about one-and-a-half times the size of Earth and five times more massive, a team of European astronomers announced at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.
"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between zero and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid," said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory. "Models predict that the planet should be either rocky like our Earth or covered with oceans."
The planet is located around a star known as the Gliese 581, about 20.5 light years from Earth's solar system and one of the 100 closest stars to the Sun. Though the planet is much closer to its star than earth is to the Sun, conditions are similar because the Gliese 581, known as a red dwarf, is smaller and colder. One year lasts only 13 days on the planet.
"Red dwarfs are ideal targets for the search for such planets because they emit less light, and the habitable zone is thus much closer to them than it is around the Sun," said Xavier Bonfils of Lisbon University.
More than 200 so-called exoplanets - planets outside of the Sun's solar system - have been discovered in the past 12 years since the first one was found. Most are massive bowls of gas similar to Jupiter.
The same team of astronauts discovered another planet around the same red dwarf two years ago - a Neptune-sized planet about 15 times as massive as Earth. An extensive analysis of the latest find is to be revealed in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France said the newfound planet could inhabit life and will definitely be a target of future space missions to find extra-terrestrial beings.
"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," he said. "On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Accupressure
So, keep walking...