Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper Sets Your Wallpaper To An Image Of Earth's Sunlight/Darkness

| Date: November 02, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: earth, linux, real-time, ubuntu, wallpapers

realtime sunlight wallpaper app

Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper is an application which sets your wallpaper to an image of the Earth's sunglight/darkness - updated every 30 minutes. The wallpaper also displays clouds which are updated every 3 hours with the current weather satellite imagery.

A few days ago, version 0.3 was released which adds options to change the wallpaper style and background color. I wanted to write about Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper back when version 0.3 was released, but the application failed to start for some users (including myself). Luckily, a new version (0.3.1) has been released today which fixes this.

Here are some of the available (almost)-real-time wallpapers included in the Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper application:

Google Real-Time Search Is Now Live

| Date: December 07, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: facebook, google, internet, microblogging, myspace, real-time, social media, twitter, web

Google Real-Time Search Is Now LiveToday, Google not only announced it's real-time search going live, but also a partnership with Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time.

Google real-time search will update as things happen / are posted around the web such as tweets, news articles and so on.

Please note that this new feature is not available for everyone yet, and should be available to all in a few days. To get an idea on what Google real-time search looks like, take a look at this video:



For more info, see the official Google announcement.

Google To Integrate Twitter Search Too

| Date: October 22, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: bing, google, microsoft, real-time, twitter

Just a few hours after Twitter announced it would be integrated into Microsoft Bing search, Google also announced it will include Twitter status updates into it's search engine.


At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.


said Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience in a blog post.

Real Time Globe Wallpaper For Windows

| Date: September 22, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: real-time, software, wallpaper, windows

A lot of people loved the real-time Earth (Globe) wallpaper for Linux and probably some might have wanted to use that on Windows too. Well, there is an application for Windows which does just that. Read on!


real time globe wallpaper windows


Desktop Earth is a free, high-resolution wallpaper generator of accurate representation of the Earth. The image is based on NASA's Blue Marble Next and Earth's City Lights.

Day and night is accurately represented depending on the Sun's overhead position (which depends on both the time of day and the day of the year) and both the snow cover and the foliage changes with the seasons. Although the cloud cover only renews itself every 3 hours, you might be able to find a server faster than those built into the Desktop Earth and apply this for quicker generation. The illuminated surface of the Earth updates every minute though, so it's great for finding out where the Sun is concentrated at any given moment.

[Almost] Real-Time Google Search With An URL Hack

| Date: September 14, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: google, real-time, web

When you expand the options on a Google search result page, you can restrict the results to things like the past week, the past 24 hours, or “Recent results”. But with a little tweaking to the URL, you can change that to "past X minutes" or even "past X seconds". This can be done by changing the a parameter called QDR - perhaps standing for Query Date Range, in the URL.

By default when you click on "search options" and limit a search to the last day, the qdr appears as "d." Change that to "n" and you'll be limited to results from the last minute, to "n5" and you'll see results discovered in the last 5 minutes - or "s30" to see results from the last 30 seconds.

Here is an example with this in action:

Real-Time Search Comes to FriendFeed

| Date: July 02, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: friendfeed, real-time, search, web

friendfeed search

Social activity aggregator FriendFeed, which re-designed earlier this year to show updates from friends in real-time, has just extended that same functionality to search. Now, when you search for a given term – like “Michael Jackson” – you’ll see updates from FriendFeed users stream in real-time in your browser. Just as on your homepage, you can hit “pause” on the real-time results, which, after a few minutes of staring at items about Jackson being shared, is definitely a needed feature if you’re actually attempting to keep up with a topic. After hitting pause, FriendFeed will tell you how many items have been queued, and you can then hit play to see them and resume the live streaming updates.

[via mashable.com]

YouTube Real-Time Sharing Invitations - Comment to Get an Invitation

| Date: April 24, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: invites, real-time, web, youtube



Thanks to http://stadt-bremerhaven.de, i was invited to use the new YouTube Real-Time Sharing, a reall cool new YouTube option only available through invitations.

So i now have 25 invitations. To receive one, comment on this article by entering your youtube username.

Please note that i have to add you as a friend and you have to accept, otherwise it will not work!

Tweetmeme Also Goes Real-Time

| Date: April 23, 2009 | View Comments | Tags: microblogging, real-time, Tweetmeme, twitter

photobucketIt seems like everyone is going real-time today. After YouTube, now Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.

Seeing every tweet that has only been retweeted twice is not for the feint of heart as the stream scrolls by extremely fast, but once you filter it down to at least five retweets the stream becomes quite manageable. Tweetmeme's Founder, Nick Halstead, tells us that Tweetmeme uses the same polling technology as Friendfeed, and that the company plans to implement these real-time updates on other parts of the site as well.

Channels

In addition to these real-time streams, Tweetmeme is also focusing on providing channels about specific topics including this one for Earth Day, for example. Thanks to this, it might soon be a lot easier to filter out the noise during a big conference, for example, where it is usually impossible to keep distinguishing between high-value tweets and random invitations for lunch.

Sadly, these channels don't yet feature the new live streams, which is really a shame.

[via RRW]
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